R. Larry Todd is Arts & Sciences Professor of Music and former chair of the Music Department at Duke University. Among his books are Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford Univ. Press), named best biography of 2003 by the Association of American Publishers, and described in the New York Review of Books as “likely to be the standard biography for a long time to come.” A German translation, which appeared in 2008 from Reclam/Carus Verlag as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Sein Leben, seine Musik, was awarded a Deutscher Musikeditionspreis.

He is a former fellow of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Humanities Center. His biography of Fanny Hensel, titled Fanny Hensel, the Other Mendelssohn (Oxford Univ. Press), was awarded the Nicholas Slonimsky Prize from ASCAP in New York. He serves as general editor of the Master Musician Series for Oxford University Press and the Routledge Studies in Musical Genres.  A graduate of Yale University, where he received his Ph.D., he studied piano at the Yale School of Music and with the late Lilian Kallir. His current projects include a recording with Nancy Green of Mendelssohn’s complete cello works.