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Modern opinions

Appreciation of Mendelssohn's work has developed since the mid-20th century, together with the publication of a number of biographies placing his achievements in context. Mercer-Taylor comments on the irony that "this broad-based reevaluation of Mendelssohn's music is made possible, in part, by a general disintegration of the idea of a musical canon", an idea which Mendelssohn "as a conductor, pianist and scholar" had done so much to establish. The critic H. L. Mencken concluded that, if Mendelssohn indeed missed true greatness, he missed it "by a hair".

Charles Rosen, in a chapter on Mendelssohn in his 1995 book The Romantic Generation, both praised and criticized the composer. He called him "the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known", whose command at age 16 surpassed that of Mozart or Chopin at 19, the possessor at an early age of a "control of large-scale structure unsurpassed by any composer of his generation", and a "genius" with a "profound" comprehension of Beethoven. Rosen believed that in the composer's later years, without losing his craft or genius, he "renounced... his daring"; but he called Mendelssohn's relatively late Violin Concerto in E minor "the most successful synthesis of the Classical concerto tradition and the Romantic virtuoso form". Rosen considered the "Fugue in E minor" (later included in Mendelssohn's Op. 35 for piano) a "masterpiece"; but in the same paragraph called Mendelssohn "the inventor of religious kitsch in music". Nevertheless, he pointed out how the dramatic power of "the juncture of religion and music" in Mendelssohn's oratorios is reflected throughout the music of the next fifty years in the operas of Meyerbeer and Giuseppe Verdi and in Wagner's Parsifal.

A large portion of Mendelssohn's 750 works still remained unpublished in the 1960s, but most of them are now available. A scholarly edition of Mendelssohn's complete works and correspondence is in preparation but is expected to take many years to complete, and will be in excess of 150 volumes. This includes a modern and fully researched catalogue of his works, the Mendelssohn-Werkverzeichnis (MWV). Mendelssohn's oeuvre has been explored more deeply. Recordings of virtually all of Mendelssohn's published works are now available, and his works are frequently heard in the concert hall and on broadcasts. R. Larry Todd noted in 2007, in the context of the impending bicentenary of Mendelssohn's birth, "the intensifying revival of the composer's music over the past few decades", and that "his image has been largely rehabilitated, as musicians and scholars have returned to this paradoxically familiar but unfamiliar European classical composer, and have begun viewing him from new perspectives."