This Day in Classical Music History (Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony Premieres)

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.

This Day in Music History (Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Premieres)

October 14, 1843—Perhaps the most famous incidental music ever composed, the score for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Felix Mendelssohn, premiered in Potsdam.

I’m afraid at least some of my readers—particularly younger ones or those who, like, totally dislike classical music, you know?—might not recognize this composition. But trust me—you know it, the way the words “William Tell Overture” might draw a blank but “The Theme From ‘The Lone Ranger’” makes you sit up.

So here’s a clue: the most memorable section of Mendelssohn’s masterpiece invariably produces more dread and sheer horror in males than even the unmasking of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, or the beady red eyes of Dracula sizing up a cut on poor clueless Renfield.

Yes, I’m talking about “The Wedding March”—which, if you must know, in the full work, constitutes an intermezzo between Acts IV and V, celebrating the triple wedding of Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia, and Theseus and Hippolyta.

As Leon Botstein noted earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, classical music has never really been the kind of favorite with audiences that myth would have it. It’s depended crucially on patronage. In earlier days, that did not derive from Wall Street fatcats or endless PBS fundraising pitches, but rather from rulers. If the ruler were a megalomaniac, for instance, like England’s King Henry VIII, he’d mistake being a man born in the Renaissance for being a Renaissance man, and he’d fancy himself a composer and musician and his subjects would have to bow and scrape and agree.

German composers and musicians of the 19th century were luckier. Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, for example, when he wasn’t his castle Neuschwanstein (the one imitated by Disney), bankrolled Richard Wagner (he of the preposterously Brobdingnagian Ring cycle that spawned sopranos who were supposed to embody the hottest women this side of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and maybe even Angelina Jolie, but who instead looked like they could manhandle The New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor in his prime).

Mendelssohn was a little luckier in having Frederick William IV of Prussia, who had his imperial, conservative bent, to be sure, but who had also had a fine aesthetic streak and kept his head (and life) for longer than Looney Ludwig. He played a key role in the career of Mendelssohn, not only by commissioning this piece in 1842 but also in inviting him to compose incidental music for Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Racine’s Athalie. (Incidentally, when Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, the oldest child of Britain’s Queen Victoria, decided to get married to Frederick’s nephew, also named Frederick, she used “Wedding March,” establishing the tune’s current popularity as a bridal recessional theme.)

Frederick’s wide-ranging aesthetic tastes were not unlike those of the composer himself. In an earlier post, I mentioned how Mozart came from an entire family of the musically gifted. The Mendelssohn family’s cultural tastes were probably even broader than the Mozart family’s:

* Moses Mendelssohn, Felix’s grandfather, was a great Enlightenment philosopher and scholar.
* Abraham Mendelssohn, a Berlin banker, wanted the best of everything for his family, even going so far as to hire a private orchestra so his young son could hear his own music as he composed it.
* Sister Fanny was also an adept musician, and another sister, Rebecca, read Homer in the original Greek—quite a feat for a 19th-century girl.

In short, think the Royal Tenenbaums, or J.D. Salinger's Glass Family (a lot more alike than you might suspect at first), with all the precocity but minus the epic neuroses.

It was natural that young Felix, with his love for reading and theater, would be drawn to A Midsummer Night’s Dream—especially when August Wilhelm Shlegel (whose brother married Felix’s aunt—boy, is this getting complicated!) translated the play with the help of Ludwig Tieck. Mendelssohn composed the overture at age 17, and its premiere marked his first public appearance.

Sixteen years later, Frederick William provided Mendelssohn with the opportunity to expand his work. The composer did so—and now brides the world over know the result.