Building a Library
From stormy scenes to lively dances, Terry Williams gazes northwards as he names the best recordings of a Romantic symphonic masterwork
Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, ‘Scottish’
The work
Felix Mendelssohn-bartholdy arrived in England for the first time in the summer of 1829. Professional duties completed, he next set out to discover Scotland.
His travels included a twilight visit to Holyrood Palace, one-time home of Mary Queen of Scots, and a squally passage by steamer to the tiny Hebridean isle of Staffa – off the coast of Iona – and its legendary Fingal’s Cave. When he re-crossed the English Channel, he took with him an outline sketch for the first version of his Hebrides Overture and the germ of an idea for what he referred to as his ‘Scotch’ Symphony. (It was customary in the 19th century to refer to anything Scottish as ‘Scotch’, though neither title appears on the frontispiece of Mendelssohn’s score.)
Perhaps the only disappointment of his Scottish holiday was an impromptu call on a very bad-tempered Walter
Scott, whose novels were much revered at the time. However, it was the gloomy atmosphere of the chapel of Holyrood that most impressed the 20-year-old composer. He immediately wrote home: ‘Everything there is ruined, decayed and open to the clear sky. I believe that I have found there today the beginning of my Scotch Symphony.’
Its first 16 bars were sketched out on the spot in the dusk of that July evening. But then, all went quiet for 12 years. His grand tour of Europe over 1829-1831 kept Mendelssohn busy and his visit to sunny Italy dismissed all prospect of his reliving his Scottish experience. In the meantime, Mendelssohn had, moreover, composed his ‘Reformation’ and ‘Italian’ Symphonies, two piano concertos, several quartets, the oratorio St Paul and much more. He had also become music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and had married. Nonetheless, the Symphony was composed in time for his seventh visit to England in 1842, where he was ceremonially received by two eminent admirers, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, both accomplished musicians.
The symphony was dedicated to Her Majesty and given its official premiere two weeks later at the Leipzig Opera.
So, what exactly had the most famous German musician of the day bequeathed his royal friend?
The ‘Scottish’ Third Symphony is in classical four-movement form and (despite the numbering) was the last of Mendelssohn’s five symphonies to be completed. In order to stress its thematic integrity, the composer asks for each movement to follow the other without pause. As promised, the expansive introduction evokes the funereal ambience of Holyrood Palace Chapel at dusk – it’s worth remembering that Mendelssohn was also a talented watercolourist who
Mendelssohn was a talented watercolourist who knew a good deal about shade and tone
knew a good deal about shade and tone, and nowhere is that more fully realised than here. The Allegro section of the movement, marked Animato, has its fair share of Sturm und Drang. The scoring is dark, conjuring up images of wind-swept northern landscapes. In the storm sequence, Mendelssohn seems to be re-imagining his historic trip to Fingal’s Cave, before a reminder of the symphony’s opening bars brings the first movement to a close.
Mendelssohn places the Scherzo movement second in the order of things, as in his Reformation Symphony, composed 10 years earlier. With its slight resemblance to the popular Scottish ballad Charlie is my Darling, this is Mendelssohn at his mercurial best. In 1829, he had maintained that he hated all folksongs and anything remotely ‘folksy’. Neither, apparently, could he stand the sound of the bagpipes. Even so, this bustling movement has the unbuttoned mood of a wild Scottish ceilidh. Had there been a softening of the heart? Scottish or not, it displays Mendelssohn’s mastery of the orchestral scherzo.
The following Adagio, more or less a funeral march, alternates between melancholy and heroic resolve, almost a precursor of the slow movement of his friend Robert Schumann’s Second Symphony. This is where the instinctively Classical Mendelssohn seems to find his Romantic soul; nothing he wrote is quite like it in depth of feeling.
The original marking for the Finale, meanwhile, was Allegro guerriero (‘warlike’) but Mendelssohn then modified it. Is this a gathering of the clans limbering up for battle? There is certainly something rather martial about it; more likely, however, it is simply as the score eventually instructed: Allegro vivacissimo (‘very fast and lively’). Mendelssohn had some doubts about the movement’s coda and even consulted the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s leader as to its suitability; is the Symphony’s triumphant epilogue a stroke of genius, or merely a crowd pleaser? Just when we think Mendelssohn’s Scottish journey is at an end and the mists have settled over the loch, the orchestra wrongfoots us by launching into a rollicking ‘Here comes the galloping major’ theme, sending this very Scottish symphony to an unexpected but rousing conclusion.
Now turn the page to discover the best recordings of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3