Reconstruction of the experience of compiling the audio anthology “Mendelssohn: Geistliche Chorwerke”

Statement of the problem. Sacred choral music by F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is one of the most valuable assets of the Romantic art. Despite this, most of the composer’s work remained unrecognized in the world for a long time. The first modern catalog of composer’s creativity appeared only in 2009. In this regard, many aspects of Mendelssohn’s choral music still remain unexplored. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the experience of compiling the audio anthology “Mendelssohn: Geistliche Chorwerke”, which was released by Kammerchor Stuttgart, Germany, under the direction of F. Bernius (2022). The specificity of the chosen topic required an application of interdisciplinary, comparative and system-structural approaches to the subject of the research, as well as chronological and source research methods of analysing the material. The scientific novelty of the research is connected with: 1) the subject of the research (the album “Mendelssohn: Geistliche Chorwerke”) 2) investigation and using of the terms “audio-anthology” and “back-catalogue”. Research results and conclusion. The album “Mendelssohn: Geistliche Chorwerke” can be classified as audio-anthology due to its totality – the edition contains the main part of sacred choral music by F. Mendelssohn. Thanks to the analysis of the back-catalog, it was found out that the album was prepared in the process of long-term (more than 20 years) work of the performers on Mendelssohn’s compositions. The conclusion states that the album “Mendelssohn: Geistliche Chorwerke” is the newest and comprehensive edition of Mendelssohn’s sacred choral music. It can be a basis for further creative and scientific projects.