"Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall, and such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."" "Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a fresh account of this musical giant, based upon research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, saccharine works, Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works. He also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness of his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and prolific composer, his avocation as a painter and draughtsman, and his remarkable, polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time."--Jacket.