It is never quite easy for the publisher to write about ‘his’ composer because the composer is ‘his’ in a very special and complex way. Abraham Mendelssohn once said in a letter to his family that he was but a dash between his famous father, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn who profoundly influenced liberal thinking in the second half of the 18th century, and his better known and equally famous son Felix. But Abraham Mendelssohn was the founder of the family fortune which enabled his son to devote himself entirely to his hobbies and to make his house the focal point of musical and artistic life in Berlin and Leipzig.