In the compass of the present pamphlet it is impossible to give more
than a cursory survey of Mendelssohn’s happy but extraordinarily crowded
life. He was only slightly less prolific a composer than such masters as
Bach, Mozart or Schubert, even if he did not reach the altitude of their
supreme heights. But irrespective of the quality of much of his output,
the sheer mass of it is astounding, the more so when we consider the
extent of his travels and the unceasing continuity of his professional
and social activities, which immensely exceeded anything of the kind in
the career of Schubert or Bach. In these few pages it has not been
feasible to mention more than a handful of his more familiar
compositions which happen, incidentally, to rank among his best. The
reader will find here neither a detailed record of Mendelssohn’s endless
comings and goings nor any originality of approach or appraisal in the
necessarily casual comments on a few works. If the booklet encourages
him to listen with perhaps a fresh interest to certain long familiar
scores, now that a full century has passed since the composer’s death,
its object will have been achieved.