Jacob’s biography of Mendelssohn, rather than proceeding forth in mere factual detail, is a wonderful portrait of prose which depicts the story of Mendelssohn and his compositional works. The language and analysis is thorough and at times erudite but never in excess and never with pretension. The portrait that is painted by the author has a deeply personal feel, and with occasion borders on psychological, while never deigning to wonder in to the terminology of psychoanalysis. As for the compositional works, all major pieces are represented with a thorough lay analysis that leaves the reader with a good mechanism for evaluating the pieces from a performance.

There are two areas of the book that may potentially prevent fully realizing its potential for delivering its portrait. The fist is the fact that there is a somewhat heavy use of musical notation used to present or expound on ideas. As someone with no formal musical training, I had the feeling when reading the book that there was another layer of depth that was inaccessible to me. The other was the lack of translation of many phrases, titles, song lyrics, etc. within the work. The majority of these are German, though some French passages were treated in a likewise manner. Along with this, German names were always presented in original form, for example Mathilde rather than a possibly more appropriate English transliteration such as Matilda. Keeping a German dictionary or Google translations close by during reading is advised.

These provisos aside, anyone with an interest in Mendelssohn or composer biographies in general would be well advised to add this work to their library. ( )