The question for Mendelssohn, as for all prodigies, was "What next?" He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes, at the age of thirty-eight.
In the years that followed, he lived mainly in Paris, where, while he went on writing, he also swiftly drank himself to death.
He went on writing hard-edged, hyper-percussive, ferociously expressive works for another twenty years, often causing as much consternation in Iceland as he had in Nazi Berlin.
But he went on writing operas for theaters in Germany, where he was far more popular than any other composer of his time.
But even while he lamented his fate, and continued to angle for Medici favor, he went on writing, almost feverishly, and in a variety of forms.
Still, he went on writing, answering the inner necessity to which Stravinsky alluded, and as the years went by he seemed to strip away all artifice to reveal a warm and vital musical self.
O'Hara's talent didn't evolve, exactly — for a while he went on writing sketches, doing finger exercises, so to speak — but suddenly it found its proper scope.
He went on writing that the song is an extraordinary tribute to her father Mathew Knowles, stating that Knowles "embraces the man that has helped take the kind of artistic leap that Dangerously in Love represents".
As if to calm alarmists, he adds that of course he will go on writing about Holmes and his "rather stupid friend Watson".
Reportedly, he has gone on writing — there are tales of a room-sized safe filled with manuscripts — but he hasn't published anything in forty years.
But then he just went on writing these fantastic songs for me.
