Based on the conviction that all material authored by its composer belongs to the musical work as such and therefore needs to be published, this volume collects all surviving drafts that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy made for his magnum opus, the oratorio Elijah op. 70. It not only incorporates preliminary studies and sketches that by no means always take a direct route to a specific version of the work, but also those passages that were eliminated from already completed texts and that are of special analytical interest. Due to Mendelssohn's way of working and the particular circumstances of source transmission at the end of his life a considerable number of later discarded movements as well as revised versions have come down to us. All these sources provide us with detailed information both about the composer's work method and about the genesis of the composition in question.

The volume prepared by the editor-in-chief of the Mendelssohn complete edition contains all known autograph sources with annotation referring to the genesis of Elijah, as well as other surviving, as yet unspecified related material. The wealth of documents, compiled and arranged in an exemplary fashion and presented in an unconventional scholarly format, is reproduced in all its complexity while at the same time enabling users in a highly illustrative way to trace details of Mendelssohn's modus operandi. The edition of sketches and drafts, revised and discarded settings of Elijah hereby constitutes a remarkable example of a creative approach to the object of research that nevertheless strictly adheres to the historical facts.