Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book combines the traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer's life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Mendelssohn is exemplary in taking pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. During Mendelssohn's lifetime, his stage works played a central role in shaping his reputation. The result is an interdisciplinary approach that intersects with subjects such as biography and culture, issues of historicism, German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, and philosophy and science. Benedict Taylor's hermeneutic analysis draws on Freud's psychological notion of trauma as a way to understand the deeper psychological undertow below the lyrical surface of the quartet.