Mary Allerton-North

Mendelssohn - The Caged Spirit Mary Allerton-North

Although much has been written about Felix Mendelssohn over the past 150 years, biographers have tended to regurgitate earlier narratives, which have incorporated myths, misrepresentations and even falsehoods about his family. Thus, the word 'unique' can be truthfully applied to Mendelssohn - The Caged Spirit. Not only is this the first Mendelssohn biography to be written by a woman psychotherapist (rather than from the usual male musicologist's standpoint), but Mary Allerton-North does not take statements hitherto 'set in stone' at face value. She challenges such inaccuracies for the first time, analysing what actually happened in the Mendelssohn chronicle, with regard to both his musical and his personal life. Mendelssohn was in many ways complex and in many ways very simple. He was complex because of his family background: he was born into a wealthy German Jewish family at the beginning of the 19th century and by the age of seven was playing the piano, painting, writing poetry, speaking several languages and starring as a precocious athlete. He helped revive Bach's music in Europe, he knew Goethe and although the poet was seventy and Mendelssohn only twelve when they met, they became friends.