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A widely travelled cosmopolitan, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy is a fixed star on the horizon of the 19th-century musical world. Not only did he exchange ideas with numerous important personalities of Europe's cultural scene, but provided crucial impulses as a versatile musician and influential intellectual. Sketches from his journeys and his correspondences give an impression of the diverse nature of Mendelssohn's Europe. With compositions and arrangements for string orchestra by Mendelssohn's contemporaries Hector Berlioz, Gaetano Donizetti, Niels W. Gade, and Robert Volkmann, as well as a mature work by the young Mendelssohn himself, Peter Bruns and the Mendelssohn Kammerorchester offer a panorama of the nineteenth century's compositional diversity. They give insight into the sound world that would have been familiar to Mendelssohn, the cosmopolitan.