ABSTRACT
Mendelssohn is today generally not highly esteemed as a composer of pi-- ano music, yet the piano played a central role in his career. Some twentyfive years separate his earliest preserved efforts for the instrument (circa 1820) from what were perhaps his final piano works, the Lieder ohne Worte op. 102 nos. 3 and 5, composed in December 1845, less than two years before his death.1 All told, the piano repertory comprises some 150 com-- positions. Of these, Mendelssohn released about seventy in seventeen op-- era; roughly twenty-five other works appeared posthumously during the nineteenth century in eleven additional opera.2
