Series 4 - Felix Mendelssohn research

This series contains the author’s research for her two published books on Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). She travelled extensively to the USA and Europe to study the many letters the composer wrote in his lifetime, and eventually began writing a biography on his works and personal life, exploring his faith, inspirations, and his views on music (both his own and others’). Martens dedicated research to Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel (1805-1847), an accomplished musician in her own right who was very close to Felix, and also put significant energy into investigating Delphine von Schauroth (1813-1887), a brilliant pianist previously almost entirely unknown to scholars, and a woman whom Mendelssohn admired greatly. Martens’ second book on Mendelssohn questioned the exact nature of his somewhat mysterious relationship with the famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820-1887), and the possible tension between their artistic relationship and his established marriage. The textual records consist of handwritten and typed notes, photocopies of outside sources used for research, transcriptions of letters (both by Martens and from previously published collections), some sheet music, some photocopies of autograph letters, a copy of Martens’ second book Passion vs. Duty, and a copy of Martens’ published essay Mendelssohn’s Faith and Works. Because the research was a continuous process over a period of many years, it is often not possible to assign a specific date to each file. Therefore the records, unless bearing a date somewhere, are labelled with the period of time between the author’s first research trip in 1980 and the publication of her second and last book in 2012. The electronic records consist of a large collection of Word and WordPerfect files containing more of the author’s transcriptions of letters, research notes, and short writings by the author on various parts of her research; they are stored on the archive server in the author’s original arrangement system. Also included in this series are reels of microfilm containing copies of autograph letters and sheet music.