March
3, 1842—Conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performance of his own
work, Felix Mendelssohn premiered
what would turn out to be his last symphony, 12 years after a trip to Scotland
that inspired it.
The
20-year-old composer’s visit to the British Isles was a creatively fertile
period for him. He was also eagerly anticipating what he would find—he was
coming, he told his traveling companion, “with a rake for folk songs, an ear
for the lovely, fragrant countryside, and a heart for the bare legs of the
natives”—and he received thousands of visual and aural impressions that found
their way into Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Opus 56—the “Scottish Symphony”—as well as his Hebride Overture.
Most
notable was his visit to the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, which he
recounted in a letter home:
“In
the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and
loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the
door: up this way they came and found Rizzio in that dark corner, where they
pulled him out, and three rooms off there is a dark corner, where they murdered
him. The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at
that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything round is
broken and mouldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found
today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.”
The
musical notes that Mendelssohn jotted down right after this visit found its way
into the andante opening of the Scottish
Symphony. Still, it would be over a decade before Mendessohn could bear
down enough to finish this composition.
Three
months after the Leipzig performance, Mendelssohn dedicated his composition to
Queen Victoria of Great Britain and consort Prince Albert, who had sung his
songs when he visited them.
The
composer’s habit of naming his compositions after a motif or setting, while
imparting a handle by which to recall the work, also inadvertently inspired an
amusing anecdote. Robert Schumann, mistakenly
believing that he had just heard the composer’s Italian Symphony, wrote that the symphony was "so beautiful as
to compensate for a hearer who has never been to Italy."
As it happens, the Italian Symphony was spotlighted in one of the most delightful
films of the past 50 years, the 1979 coming-of-age comedy Breaking Away. The memory of it made me wonder if the Scottish Symphony had also been featured
on the big screen. The answer is yes, in, appropriately, enough, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While that
1935 Warner Brothers film features more prominently Mendelssohn’s incidental
music for the Shakespeare comedy, the final movement of the symphony is also used, with lyrics by an anonymous writer,
adapted by Erich Maria Korngold; and sung by James Cagney and five other stars
in the movie.
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