These volumes present approximately 430 letters and documents written to Beethoven (1770–1827) as well as those written by others (relatives, students, and secretaries) on his behalf. Along with over 70 of Beethoven’s own letters discovered since Emily Anderson’s three-volume Letters of Beethoven, these documents provide new insights into the composer’s personal life. They illuminate his dealings with publishers, other musicians, poets, patrons, relatives, friends, and a wide variety of acquaintances. The documents provide important details about the composition of many works, Beethoven’s performance practices, his criticisms of other composers and performers, and his role in the Napoleonic era. Gleaned from more than one hundred publications and collected from autograph sources in libraries and archives in Europe and the United States, these materials have never before appeared between two covers. At least sixty of the letters have never previously been published. Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence vastly enlarges accessibility to Beethoven’s busy life and the music he made. All documents are translated into English and annotated with identifications of persons and works.

Goethe and Zelter spent a staggering thirty-three years corresponding. Zelter's position as director of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin and Goethe's location in Weimar resulted in a wide-ranging correspondence. Goethe's letters offer a chronicle of his musical development, from the time of his journey to Italy to the final months of his life, while Zelter's letters retrace his path from stonemason to Professor of Music in Berlin. The 891 letters that passed between these artists provide an important musical record of the music performed in public concerts in Berlin and in the private and semi-public soirées of the Weimar court. The legacy contains a wide spectrum of letters, casual and thoughtfully composed, spontaneous and written for publication, rich with the details of Goethe's and Zelter's musical lives.

An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor. Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant.