There has been a tendency in recent years to view Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s organ playing and composition for the organ as an almost exclusive product of his musical education in the ‘Bach tradition’. Why this is the case is a topic for another study, but in this essay Johannes Geffert considers some aspects of performance in Mendelssohn’s time and, in order to address what appears to be a growing orthodoxy, attempts a different reading of some well-known facts.

This article originally appeared in the RCO Journal of 2009.

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