The volume contains 46 previously unknown songs by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: settings of poems by Scott/Storck, Matthisson, Hölty, Heine, Gellert, and others are waiting to be discovered! From the 'Lied zum Geburtstag meines guten Vaters', a joint composition with his sister Fanny and one of Mendelssohn's first surviving compositions, to works from his period of study with Carl Friedrich Zelter, the songs span his entire period of compositional activity. Popular texts such as 'Ich denke dein' by Friedrich von Matthisson (set by composers including Schubert, Beethoven, Weber, and Wolf), 'Erinnerung' by Heinrich Heine (set by Schumann, Cornelius, Franz, and others) are now available in Mendelssohn's settings. Also included is his only song cycle 'Vier Lieder' of 1830. These four songs are linked by motifs in a dramatic narrative structure. To mark the composer's 200th anniversary in 2009, the editor Eugene Asti, Professor at the Guildhall School of Music in London, presents a substantial repertoire of songs in a critical-practical edition. The wide range of forms and colours contained in this collection challenges the accepted view of Mendelssohn's mostly strophic song settings being comparatively straightforward stylistically.
