Felix Mendelssohn Felix Mendelssohn Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 1809 4 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early romantic period. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies, concertos, oratorios, piano music and chamber music. His best-known works include his Overture and incidental music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", the "Italian Symphony", the "Scottish Symphony", the overture "The Hebrides", his mature Violin Concerto, and his String Octet. His "Songs Without Words" are his most famous solo piano compositions. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes and antisemitism
Overture poem, a form devised by Franz Liszt in several works that began as dramatic overtures. The distinction between the two genres was the freedom to mould the musical form according to external programmatic requirements (Temperley 2001). The symphonic poem became the preferred form for the more "progressive" composers, such as César Franck, Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and Arnold Schoenberg, while more conservative composers like Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann and Arthur Sullivan remained faithful to the overture. In the age when the symphonic poem had already become popular, Brahms wrote his "Academic Festival Overture", Op. 80, as well