Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Performance: September 27, 2013 (details here) 

Overture- “The Hebrides” (“Fingal’s Cave”), opus 26

Symphony no. 3 in A minor, “Scottish”, opus 56

In 1829, the twenty year-old Felix Mendelssohn was already a major international figure. As a teenager his precocity had far exceeded even that of Mozart.  He had already completed a collection of works that were staggering in their originality and maturity, including the First Symphony, written when he was just 15, the Octet for Strings, completed at age 16 and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, finished a year later. Early in 1829, his twentieth year, he famously revived the music of J. S. Bach, organizing and conducting a history-changing performance of the St Matthew Passion in Berlin- the first time the complete work had been heard since Bach’s death over sixty years earlier.

That summer, Mendelssohn made the first of many trips to the United Kingdom, conducting a performance of his First Symphony with the London Philharmonic Society, and performing extensively as a solo pianist (his performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto was the first time London audiences had seen a pianist perform it by memory). After such a busy and successful year, Mendelssohn stayed on in the UK for some sightseeing and relaxation. He made his way to Edinburgh, a city he quickly came to love:

“Everything here looks so stern and robust, half enveloped in a haze of smoke or fog. Many Highlanders came in costume from church victoriously leading their sweethearts in their Sunday attire and casting magnificent and important looks over the world; with long, red beards, tartan plaids, bonnets and feathers and naked knees and their bagpipes in their hands, they passed along by the half-ruined gray castle on the meadow where Mary Stuart lived in splendour.”

After another day of sightseeing at Holyrood Chapel on the 30^th of July, 1829, we wrote this famous letter:

“In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Mary lived and loved. A little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door. This is the staircase the murderers ascended, and, finding Rizzio [Mary‟s Italian advisor and, probably, lover, whom the Scots mistrusted] .. drew him out; about three chambers away is a small corner where they killed him. The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at the broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of England. Everything around is broken and moldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish symphony.”

Later that day, he sketched out sixteen measures of music that were to become the introductory melody of the Third Symphony.  The work he began that evening would take a further thirteen years to reach its final form.

Meanwhile, just a week later Mendelssohn made his way north to Fingal’s Cave, where there followed another short sketch. Soon after, work began in earnest on what now known as the “Hebrides” Overture. Mendelssohn originally called the piece “The Lonely Island,” adopting the title we know now when he revised the work in 1832. The “Hebrides” is more of a tone-poem than an “overture” in the traditional sense. Rather than preparing the listener for a performance of an opera or play, it paints a vivid musical portrait of the remote cave, the stormy seas that surround it and the tone poet’s sense of loneliness and solitude.

Mendelssohn’s Scottish overture was complete, but what of the symphony he had begun a week earlier? By 1831, it seemed as if inspiration was fading, Mendelssohn reporting to a friend that he could not “find his way back into the Scottish fog mood,” and the idea receded farther and farther from the forefront of his mind. A decade passed before he returned to work on his A minor symphony, a decade in which he completed his three other symphonies, two piano concertos and four string quartets.

Finally, in 1841, he began work in earnest on the A minor “Scottish Symphony,” returning to that sketch made in 1829. By September he had completed the first two movements and was hard at work on the Adagio. Mendelssohn completed the work on the 20^th of January, 1842, and conducted the first performance at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig on the 3rd of March. The work was rapturously received, but Mendelssohn had concerns about the piece, and made major and radical revisions before the second performance just two weeks later, on 17 March in Berlin. In June, he conducted the work in London. The success of this performance emboldened Mendelssohn to ask Queen Victoria’s permission to dedicate the work to her. Permission was duly granted, and Mendelssohn became her favourite composer for life.

Although the work had been a success in each of these early performances, Mendelssohn made one final round of major cuts and revisions before the work was published by Breitkopf in the fall of 1842.

The final version of this work was published as his “Third Symphony,” but it was actually the last of his five symphonies, and many consider it his greatest. It is in many ways the most serious in tone, and his most sophisticated in construction, with the whole symphony evolving organically from the possibilities of that sixteen bar sketch written in 1829. Critics and musicians have argued at length about just how “Scottish” the work is: although Mendelssohn regularly referred to the A minor Symphony as his “Scottish,” he conspicuously omitted any reference to Scotland from the publish score. Some have found numerous references to Scottish folk themes in the score (there is a famous instance of the so-called “Scottish snap” rhythm in the Scherzo), but Mendelssohn himself was no fan of folk music. “No national music for me!” he proclaimed. “Infamous, vulgar, out-of-tune trash…. It is distracting and has given me a toothache already,” he wrote. Even before his visit in 1829, Mendelssohn had hoped that the trip would inspire a Scottish piece or two “since I greatly love the sea from the mainland and even want to use it in a symphony with Scottish bagpipes.” After his visit, however, his enthusiasm for the pipes had decidedly waned, writing that “Scottish bagpipes, Swiss cow-horns, Welsh harps, all playing the Huntsmen’s Chorus with hideously improvised variations then their beautiful singing in the hall, altogether their music is beyond conception.”

What did make its way into the score was a deeply felt impression of the mystery and darkness of that visit to Holyrood; “”It is in pictures, ruins and natural surroundings that I find the most music.”

Mendelssohn specified in the first edition of the score that the four movements of the piece, all of which are thematically interconnected, must be played without pause. The prevailing mood of the first movement is dark indeed, from the slow opening in which the divided violas state the “Holyrood” theme into the main Allegro, which begins broodingly and then becomes decidedly stormy and violent. Mendelssohn placed the Scherzo second in this symphony, rather than in the traditional spot before the Finale. It is in this movement that one is most likely to find hints of folk music. Unlike most scherzos and minuets, it’s in duple rather than triple meter, and is in sonata-allegro form rather than structured as a dance. This helps make the movement feel more like a hopeful answer to the tragedies of the first movement, rather than a mere diversion. The Adagio which follows it is one of Mendelssohn’s greatest creations, and certainly one of the great symphonic slow movements. Although written in A major, the overall mood is deeply serious and often tragic, with a climactic central funeral march perhaps harkening back to the example of the Marcia funebre of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Mendelssohn had originally labelled the final Allegro vicacissimo as Allegro guerriero and it is decidedly warlike in character.