This is an accomplished essay in the relatively young branch of musicology known as “reception history,” which concerns a musician's reputation rather than his or her music. Mendelssohn's reputation resembles that of many successful composers: it declined soon after his death and reached a low point about a century after his birth. Some artists’ reputations never recover; others, like Mendelssohn's, enjoy a subsequent revival of interest and a return to favor.

The particular factor in this case is Mendelssohn's relationship with English musical life. He was received with open arms by the English public, starting in 1829 with the first of his ten visits to Britain. The prolonged love affair extended for several decades beyond his early death in 1847, but it began to wane in the late Victorian era, when Mendelssohn was not only demoted in stature as a composer but was accused by several critics of being a harmful influence on English music. More recently, his music has been upwardly revalued, and his supposedly negative legacy has been challenged or has simply faded from view.

There is nothing new or surprising about this story in itself, but Colin Eatock has retold it in rich and colorful detail. He has drawn on the vast repositories of information about Victorian musical life that have been opened up in recent years, using them to provide a full record of English performances of Mendelssohn's music. He has drawn on the massive Margaret Deneke Collection of Mendelssohn papers acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1973 and on the work of current Mendelssohn scholars led by R. Larry Todd, especially to show the composer's own reaction to English society and to his experiences there.

Eatock shows clearly how Mendelssohn's extraordinary success with the Victorians was due to many factors besides a happy compatibility of musical taste and moral values. Among them were his personal charm, his standing as a gentleman, and his assiduous cultivation of influential people from Queen Victoria downward. (I would add another element: the composer's impeccably respectable sex life, in contrast with the reputations of contemporaries such as Bellini, Berlioz, Chopin, and Liszt.) Eatock shrewdly suggests that the early Victorian public's rejection of Wagner and Liszt, in contrast to its adoration of Mendelssohn, owed as much to these composers’ failure to establish a network of supporters as to the radicalism of their musical styles. In discussing the anti-Mendelssohn reaction of the fin de siècle, Eatock again looks beyond matters of musical taste, pointing to the growth of nationalism and anti-Semitism as well as the inevitable passing of the composer's personal friends and supporters. The author is at his best in describing and assessing the complex fabric of Mendelssohn's relationship with English opinion. He writes clearly and convincingly, and his conclusions are well supported.

“The time has come,” says the preface, “for a fresh assessment of Mendelssohn's role in England's musical culture” (xi). This statement is recapitulated in the last sentence of the book, and it clearly sums up Eatock's view of what he has attempted and achieved. How far has he actually realized this goal? Among the most negative views of Mendelssohn's influence, quoted in the preface, was George Bernard Shaw's denunciation of Mendelssohn's “kid glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality and his despicable oratorio mongering” (London Music in 1888–1889 [London, 1937], 89) and J. A. Fuller Maitland's statement that Mendelssohn's music tended to stifle originality in British composers (quoted on 147). Eatock calls these views “jaundiced” (150), but the only way to appraise them is by analysis, criticism, and discussion of the music of Victorian composers. For instance, William Sterndale Bennett was perhaps the most distinguished English composer of Mendelssohn's generation and one of his close friends and protégés. Eatock gives Bennett considerable attention for this reason but does not deal with the frequently repeated assertion that he was an imitator of Mendelssohn. Again, every writer on Victorian church music has had to discuss the allegedly baneful effects of “Mendelssohnianism,” but Eatock does not tackle the subject. Nor does he mention Arthur Sullivan, the most successful English composer of the next generation. Sullivan's music and its durability in English life must surely tell us something about Mendelssohn's influence, whether positive or negative.

In the end, music itself matters more than past opinions of it. The time has indeed come for a fresh assessment of Mendelssohn's role in English musical culture. It will not be achieved by reception history alone.