Mendelssohn, Jakob Ludwig Felix

Mendelssohn, Jakob Ludwig Felix (1809-47), German composer.

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was the son of a rich Jewish banker.

His mother taught him the piano and he played at a concert at the age of nine.

He started writing music a year later and at seventeen wrote an overture to William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Today this overture is one of his best known works.

He founded a music school at Leipzig and did much of his later work there. But he traveled a great deal. He made ten visits to Britain and fell ill and died soon after the last.

His Hebrides or Fingal's Cave was written after a tour in Scotland. He wrote a great deal of music. Some of it is not often performed today but much of it remains very popular.

See Peter Mercer-Taylor The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn