Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) was a German Romantic composer, pianist and conductor. Born in Hamburg into a distinguished intellectual and artistic family — his grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn — he showed prodigious gifts from earliest childhood, composing his String Octet at sixteen and the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream at seventeen. He studied in Berlin and made his first visit to England in 1829, the first of ten visits to a country that came to adore him.

His incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — the overture composed in 1826, the remaining numbers added for a Potsdam production in 1843 — is among the most magically evocative of all orchestral works. Its famous Wedding March has accompanied bridal processions for nearly two centuries, and the Scherzo and Nocturne are equally beloved. Frederick Ashton used selections from this music for The Dream (1964), his one-act distillation of the play, which has become one of the jewels of the Royal Ballet's repertoire. The score's blend of fairy lightness and romantic warmth ideally matched Ashton's choreographic sensibility.

Mendelssohn's other major works include the Violin Concerto in E minor (1844), the oratorio Elijah (1846), four symphonies, the 'Italian' and 'Scottish' among them, and the six string quartets. He died suddenly in Leipzig aged 38, barely six months after his beloved sister Fanny.