Born in 1809, Felix Mendelssohn was a German composer, pianist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Born into a wealthy banking family, the grandson of the great German Jewish Enlightenment philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, Felix showed an early aptitude for music. Fortunately, he had parents willing to let him become a musician, and he received the finest training.

Mendelssohn began writing masterpieces around the age of 15 which include the Harmoniemusik for band, the Octet, and the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. With these three pieces, he became one of the most important early Romantic composers. Mendelssohn's music blended Romantic sentiment and fantasy with a Mozartean economy, clarity, and poise. He became associated with a strand of composers that included Robert Schumann and reached its peak with Johannes Brahms. His exposure to Bach led to a fondness for learned counterpoint as well as to his conducting the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 – an immensely influential performance that took Bach out of the exclusive hands of specialists and into a more general public consciousness. He began to perform throughout Europe as a conductor and as a pianist to great success. In 1829, he made his first trip to England where his composing and playing found a rapturous audience.

Mendelssohn found work in Düsseldorf in 1833 and became director of music for the city. His oversight of sacred music led to performances of large choral works by Handel and Haydn and to an interest in trying an oratorio himself. The result, St. Paul , proved immensely popular and established Mendelssohn firmly in the forefront of contemporary composers. Although less popular today, it is still considered a milestone in the development of the genre.

However, friction in Düsseldorf prompted Mendelssohn to look for other employment. The 1840s found him splitting his time between Berlin and, more importantly, Leipzig. Through his directorship of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and his establishment of a conservatory, he quickly made Leipzig one of the major European musical centers, one which exerted significant influence throughout Europe and even the United States up to the early years of the Twentieth Century. He also continued to conduct, compose, and tour. Sadly, the amount of overwork as well as the death of his beloved sister Fanny led to a series of strokes and finally death at the age of 38.

Yet by the 1880s, his reputation, after such inflation, began to sink. Wagner singled out Mendelssohn as an icon for decadence in his notorious essay 'On Jewishness in Music.' In the Thirties the Nazis systematically tried to erase the composer from German music. The fact that Mendelssohn was baptized Protestant and that the family had converted in the 1820s, taking the name Mendelssohn-Barthold', made no difference, of course.

However, in the past twenty years, the composer has begun to attract new attention. The estimate of the chamber music especially has revised the composer's reputation upward. Writers have begun to see his Elijah as an innovative and powerful fusion of oratorio and Romantic opera. Of course, certain works have long enjoyed the status of repertory staples: the octet, the Midsummer Night's Dream music, The Hebrides, Calm Seas and Prosperous Voyage, Ruy Blas and other overtures, Elijah, the 'Italian' and 'Scottish' symphonies.