The composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47) enraptured the royal courts and concert halls of Europe before dying at 38, shattered by the sudden death of his beloved sister and musical soul mate, Fanny Hensel. His grandfather, Moses, a peddler from Dessau, a city between Berlin and Leipzig, became a renowned Jewish philosopher. But Moses's son, Abraham, a wealthy Hamburg banker, converted the family to Lutheranism, adding a new family name, Bartholdy. Young Felix, who later declined the addition, studied the piano, composing comic operas by age 11 and two of his most enduring works, the String Octet in E flat and ''Overture for a Midsummer Night's Dream,'' in his mid-teens. Darkly handsome, with sensitive features and a sweet nature, he charmed Goethe, captivated young Queen Victoria and romanced Jenny Lind (along with some other women not his wife, Cécile). He popularized George Frideric Handel and revived a dormant Johann Sebastian Bach; led the renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig; wrote (and rewrote) the symphonies known as the ''Reformation,'' ''Scottish'' and ''Italian''; completed the incidental music to ''A Midsummer Night's Dream,'' with its famous wedding march; wrote chamber music and songs; composed the oratorios ''St. Paul'' and ''Elijah''; and painted and drew some 300 pictures. While Mendelssohn himself published only 72 works with opus numbers and another 31 minor, unnumbered pieces, his compositions actually total more than 770, according to Stephen Somary, who has devoted many years to the Mendelssohn Project, whose goal is to win Mendelssohn a firmer place in the standard canon. In the view of many scholars, Mendelssohn was victimized by history. A neo-classical Romantic, Mendelssohn fell afoul of other Romantics like Franz Liszt and Wagner, whose judgments were clouded by anti-Semitism. Wagner, five years Mendelssohn's junior and consumed by jealousy, denounced Mendelssohn, after his death, as a bourgeois, a mere note-spinner and maker of drawing room music. Since Mendelssohn’s bicentenary in 2009, some of the composer’s works have been performed for the first time.