Elise Polko, Reminiscences of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: A Social and Artistic Biography
Translated by Lady Wallace, (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1869) Mudd Library

In the decades after his death in 1847, Mendelssohn became the subject of many books, some of them written by his friends and musical collaborators. Among these was Elise Polko’s admiring but unreliable account, Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1868), shown here in English translation. Polko (1823–1899, née Elise Vogel), was a singer who performed with Mendelssohn in the 1840s, before beginning a second career as an author.