Symphony No. 3, Scottish

Felix Mendelssohn sketched the opening of his Scottish Symphony following his trip to the British Isles when he was just 20. He returned to it over a decade later, in 1841. He led the first performance on March 3, 1842, with Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, and it was published the following year. Georg Henschel conducted the first BSO performance in January 1883. Charles Munch led the first Tanglewood performance with the BSO on August 5, 1960.

It was in 1829 that Mendelssohn made his first visit to England, the country where he became more appreciated, more adored, than in any other. He conducted his Symphony No. 1 with the London Philharmonic, played Weber’s Konzertstück and Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with that orchestra (creating a sensation because he did it from memory), gave a piano recital, and capped his stay with a benefit concert for Silesian flood victims. In mid-July he was ready for a vacation, and so, with Karl Klingemann, a friend from Berlin now posted in London as Secretary to the Hanoverian Legation, he set out for Scotland. He was both a diligent and a gifted letter writer, as was Klingemann, which means we have a remarkably complete picture of their journey to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Inverness, Loch Lomond, and the Hebrides islands of Iona, Mull, and Staffa. On August 7, after his visit to Staffa and Fingal’s Cave, he jotted down the opening of his Hebrides Overture. A week before, on July 30, he had written home, jotting down for himself on that occasion sixteen bars of music—the opening, still in preliminary form, of what would become his Scottish Symphony.

But it was years before either of his musical mementos from Scotland reached final form. The Hebrides Overture went through three stages, to be completed only in June 1832. Mendelssohn did not even return to his plan for what he called, in correspondence and conversation, his “Scotch Symphony”—a title that appears nowhere on the score—until 1841, the score and parts being published in February 1843 (making it, despite the number, actually the last of Mendelssohn’s symphonies to be completed). Before that, in 1842, on his seventh visit to England, he had made two new friends, enthusiastic and competent performers of his songs and chamber music, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and Her Majesty graciously consented to accept the dedication of the Scottish Symphony.

Aside from similarities among the movements of melodic shape, character, and so on, Mendelssohn was also concerned with the idea of connection in another sense: the score is prefaced by a note asking that the movements not be separated by the customary pauses. The introduction begins solemnly. The hymnlike opening gives way to an impassioned recitation for the violins, and it is from this passage that the rest of the introductory Andante takes its cue. The music subsides into silence, and after a moment the Allegro begins, its “agitato” quality set into higher relief by the pianissimo that Mendelssohn maintains through twenty-one measures. Though the Scottish is very much a pianissimo symphony, the scoring tends to be dense and dark in a manner we are much inclined to interpret as Northern and peaty.

The scherzo emerges with buzzing sixteenth-notes and distant horn calls (on all sorts of instruments). The flavor of the tunes is distinctly Scots. The Adagio cantabile alternates a sentiment-drenched melody with stern episodes of march character. The fiercely energetic fourth movement—Allegro guerriero and Finale maestoso—again seems very Scots indeed, and every bit as macho and athletic as Mendelssohn’s “guerriero” promises. Near the end he invents yet another of his magical pianissimos, this time to emerge into a noble song, scored in surprisingly dark and muted hues for such a peroration. Robert Schumann caught the cousinage of this hymn to the one that begins the symphony and remarked: “We consider it most poetic; it is like an evening corresponding to a lovely morning.”

MICHAEL STEINBERG

Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and works for chorus and orchestra.