Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56, “Scottish”
Felix Mendelssohn) (1809-1847)

[1842]

Felix Mendelssohn was one of music’s most remarkable prodigies, creating immortal compositions while still a teenager. At 20, he performed a typical rite of passage by embarking on a “grand tour” of Europe, with extended visits to the British Isles and Italy.

The first germ of musical material for a “Scottish” Symphony emerged when Mendelssohn and a friend visited Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh. Mendelssohn was struck by the gloomy, crumbling palace, especially a chapel he described in a letter home: “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.” He soon sketched the elegiac melody that would serve as the theme of the introduction, but he struggled to recapture the misty mood of Scotland when he revisited the symphony during his time in Rome.

Mendelssohn set the “Scottish” Symphony aside for over ten years, meanwhile writing two other symphonies, No. 4 (“Italian”) and No. 5 (“Reformation”). Upon completing the “Scottish” Symphony in 1842, he conducted it in Leipzig and then in London. The first published edition did not include the now ubiquitous nickname, but it did play up its dedication to the British monarch, Queen Victoria, with her name printed in a font nearly as big as the composer’s.

The “Scottish” Symphony does not depict any fixed scene or story, nor is it explicitly Scottish in its musical material. Instead, Mendelssohn allowed the aura of a romanticized Scotland to inform a taut, cohesive, and independent orchestral essay. He specified that the movements should follow each other without pauses.

A slow introduction establishes the noble and wistful mood, contrasting the fast and edgy tempo in the body of the movement. That agitated quality overflows in a late passage of swelling chromatic rises and falls, surging in sheets like a vicious squall. The material of the introduction makes a brief reprise to close the movement on a somber note.

The scherzo enters next without pause, and the clarinet reels out a playful melody, perhaps inspired by a bagpipe contest Mendelssohn heard in Scotland. The slow movement that follows is a gorgeous song without words. One theory speculates that this music is meant to evoke Scotland’s own Sir Walter Scott and his poem “The Lady of the Lake,” in which a girl sings the “Ave Maria” accompanied by a harp (rendered here by plucked strings).

The finale thunders in with a militaristic theme in a tempo Mendelssohn initially labeled as Allegro guerriero (fast and warlike). The ferocious music slinks away, and a majestic conclusion in the major key rises up to bring the symphony to a triumphant finish.

Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings