When Felix Mendelssohn died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight in 1847, he was mourned throughout Europe as one of the greatest composers and conductors of his generation. His accomplishments, after all, were nothing short of astonishing. By the time he turned twenty-one, he had already composed his Octet and the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, two mainstays of the musical repertory even today. He had also brought back to life Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, a work that had lain dormant for more than a hundred years. In the remaining seventeen years of his life, he would go on to compose such canonic masterpieces as the "Scottish" and "Italian" Symphonies, the Violin Concerto in E minor, and the oratorios St. Paul and Elijah.

Posterity has not been kind to Mendelssohn, however. He died just before the Revolutions of 1848-49, and, in the wake of those turbulent years, his music struck listeners grappling with the more adventurous idioms of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner as overly conservative. The fact that Mendelssohn was a musical favorite of crowned heads of state across Europe--Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, and Friedrich August II of Saxony--did not help his cause in the musical politics of post-revolutionary Europe. Richard Wagner's biting commentary, tinged with anti-Semitism, helped perpetuate the image of the composer's output as somehow lightweight, maudlin, and not sufficiently "serious."

The Nazis banned Mendelssohn's music on the grounds of his Jewish heritage and sought to minimize his significance in the history of music altogether. Even the composer's advocates, attempting to rehabilitate his reputation after World War II, tended to take an overly apologetic approach, presenting him as a "gentle genius" or "gentleman composer" swimming against the tide of revolutionary romanticism.

Larry Todd's impressive new book--named best biography of 2003 by the Association of American Publishers--provides a much-needed re-evaluation of Mendelssohn within the composer's own time and on his own terms. In this first study of its kind in more than forty years, Todd, professor and chair of the music department at Duke, draws a finely nuanced portrait of an individual far more complex than that put forward by either proponents or detractors.

True to its subtitle, this biography is very much a "life in music." Todd traces Mendelssohn's life through his work as a composer, conductor, pianist, organist, teacher, and editor of music. Every major composition receives a brief yet insightful discussion, and shorter vignettes round out the picture of the composer's oeuvre in all its variety. With the exception of opera, Mendelssohn composed in virtually every genre of his time, and all indications suggest that at the end of his life he was well on his way to completing his first mature opera.

Of particular interest here is Mendelssohn's relationship to the music of the past. In an age when originality was prized above virtually all other musical qualities, Mendelssohn went out of his way to immerse himself in the music of such past masters as Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. But he was never cowed by tradition. At the age of ten, he discovered a series of parallel fifths in J.S. Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, a passage of "forbidden" voice-leading (moving individual chord voices smoothly from one to the next), that had escaped the notice of even his esteemed teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter. Three years later, Mendelssohn wrote a string symphony whose finale is openly modeled on the last movement of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, a tour-de-force of invertible counterpoint. As Todd points out, the goal of studying these earlier works was "not a lifeless re-enactment of an earlier age but a revitalization of modern music through exemplary historical models."

Todd also gives considerable attention to the composer's sister Fanny (1805-47), a talented composer in her own right. Her relationship with Felix was close and complicated. Not until the age of forty did she summon the courage to publish her own music, protesting even then that she was no femme libre and clearly uncomfortable at the idea of drawing attention to herself in a profession overwhelmingly dominated by men. Felix welcomed her into the composer's "guild" and offered this benediction: "May you taste only the sweets and none of the bitterness of authorship; may the public pelt you with roses, and never with sand; and may the printer's ink never draw black lines upon your soul."

Like all good biographies, Todd's Mendelssohn is also a history of its subject's era. Indeed, virtually every major composer and performer of the time enters into the story at one point or another: Chopin, Berlioz, Robert and Clara Schumann, Wagner, Rossini, Paganini, Moscheles, Spontini, Spohr, and Cherubini. Yet Mendelssohn's interests were by no means solely musical. We also meet in this biography such diverse figures as Hegel and Ranke (Mendelssohn heard both of them lecture in Berlin in the 1820s), the elderly Goethe (who was charmed by the youth's musical gifts), Alexander von Humboldt, Heine, Dickens, and Hans Christian Andersen.

The geographic scope of Mendelssohn's life was just as broad. Born in Hamburg, he was raised in Berlin and settled at various times in Leipzig, Frankfurt, D¸sseldorf, and Berlin again. His travels took him on extended visits to Rome, Paris, Switzerland, England, and Scotland, where he was inspired to the write the Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave. He declined an invitation to conduct the newly established New York Philharmonic Society in 1844, but he accepted an astonishing number of invitations elsewhere, often donating the proceeds to charity.

And, like all good biographies, this one tells its story engagingly. Mendelssohn becomes three-dimensional in these pages: We see him drinking too much champagne after an evening of part-song singing, yawning an "obbligato accompaniment" to Hummel's improvisations on the piano, playing billiards with Schumann, and flirting with the renowned soprano Jenny Lind. Todd draws from a rich variety of sources, many of them unpublished letters, but this biography wears its learning lightly--much like Mendelssohn's music itself.