2 Tala Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

Mendelssohn spent much of his career fighting the perception that his early works — written before he was seventeen — were flukes of precocious talent rather than serious composition. The irony is that pieces like the Octet in E-flat and the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream have outlasted the critical snobbery entirely. Samoa's collector coinage program draws heavily on European cultural figures with no geographic connection to the islands, a commercial arrangement that funds the treasury while bypassing any pretense of national relevance.