Mendlessohn often gets called "the classical romanticist," by
comparison with Beethoven, "the romantic classicist."  Mendelssohn's
quite clean lines and structures plus his interesting sense of harmonic
color and (sometimes) landscape tendencies reflect a "Biedermeier"
attitude.  On this, see esp. Paul Henry Lang's famous book, still in print
and available from W. W. Norton, if not in your local civic or college
library,  _Music in Western Civilization_, "required reading" for anyone
who would understand the spirit and aesthetic of Mendelssohn.
 
        Quite often neo-baroque mixtures do not serve this music well,
though "progressive" mixture sometimes do.  Too often the first theme
in the final mov't of his Sonata 1 loses clarity of melodic line due to
mixtures AND scaling/voicing that beef up the tenor range of the manuals
too much.  Some of the best performances I've heard of that movement used
few or NO mixtures at all.
                                        Cordially,
 
                                        Karl E. Moyer
                                        Lancaster PA
 
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