It was an easy step to associate Mendelssohn with those Victorian attributes from which the new century tried to distance itself—shallowness, hypocrisy, prudishness, and all the rest. And so, by 1911, for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Donald F. Tovey felt compelled to update the reprinted, eulogizing Mendelssohn article from the tenth edition by W. S. Rockstro, a student of the composer in Leipzig during the 1840s, by noting that “Mendelssohn’s reputation, except as the composer of a few inexplicably beautiful and original orchestral pieces, has vanished”.
—Todd, R. Larry. 2003. Mendelssohn : A Life in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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