“In the deep twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved . . . . The chapel below is now roofless. Grass and ivy thrive there and at the broken altar where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and the clear heavens pour in. I think I have found there the beginning 

of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony.”

Felix Mendelssohn wrote this in a letter to his family. He and a friend had been traveling through Europe in the summer of 1829—as young men of privilege were then expected to spend their time—and upon seeing the Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Scotland, twenty-year-old Mendelssohn was enchanted by the scene. Amid the mossy ruins of the nave, the composer found the first theme to his next symphony. He jotted the retrospective opening motif down on another slip of paper and would later include it in his homeward letter. 

Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony begins plaintively: violas, woodwinds, and horns voice a chorale whose hallmark is an ascending dotted rhythm. The dotted figure—Mendelssohn’s varied take on the “Scottish snap”—is pervasive throughout Symphony No. 3. Each of the four movements in the work are closely related, tied together by the use of the asymmetrical rhythmic motif. At the top of his score, Mendelssohn indicates there should be no pauses between movements, an unusual performance practice, but this sheds clearer light on the intentional connectedness of thematic material, all born from the notes on the sketch he sent home in 1829. The opening theme is bittersweet and retrospective, as if cherishing a memory. Reverence for both Scotland’s history and nature is audible in the opening orchestral chorale. 

The second movement, Vivace non troppo, is a brisk and idyllic romp through the Scottish Highlands. The principal clarinet is highlighted at the outset of the movement: a lively theme is introduced to the orchestra by the solo clarinet and quickly volleys across the ensemble with Mendelssohn’s signature jovial precision. The pentatonic flurry harkens back to traditional Scottish reels, whose nonstop notes are an important element of Scottish dance. 

Pizzicato strings saturate the third movement, Adagio. Perhaps this is Mendelssohn’s nod to traditional Scottish harp playing, though some believe it to be a musical reference to Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake,” which tells of a harpist strumming over Loch Katrine. There is no harp in Mendelssohn’s instrumentation, but the plucked strings act as a perfect substitute for accompanying the graceful woodwind melodies. In short order, the third movement becomes the fourth: the Allegro vivacissimo begins with another snappy dotted motif that tumbles excitedly to the double bar. 

Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 is alive with the lighthearted effervescence that had become a signature feature of his symphonies; Mendelssohn employs his most mature symphonic sensibilities in his Scottish Symphony. Interestingly, the Scottish Symphony is titled as Mendelssohn’s Third although it is the last symphony he wrote. Mendelssohn’s symphonic chronology is numbered based on publication order, rather than the order his works were actually written. Likewise, his Reformation Symphony (No. 5) was the second symphony he’d written, but it was published last—posthumously, after an embarrassing Parisian ordeal left him to all but abandon the work—and thus we must now subscribe to a counterintuitive numbering system. Further complicating Mendelssohn’s symphonic chronology is his habit of lengthy compositional processes and revisions. 

His manner of revising, perfecting, and even doubting his own works was perhaps related to the plight many symphonists encountered at this time: Beethoven’s shadow. With Ludwig van Beethoven’s revolutionary Ninth Symphony just five years past at the time of Mendelssohn’s Scottish beginnings, one could imagine the younger composer quaking under the weight and importance of Beethoven’s masterwork, and thus doubted the quality of his own symphonic output. 

Mendelssohn did revise No. 3 after the first few performances, opting to cut over one hundred measures of music from the original work. While the 1842 revised version is almost universally performed by orchestras today, scholarly editions of the score and parts do include material for Mendelssohn’s original draft, dubbed the “London Version.” Confusion aside, Symphony No. 3 is certainly one of Mendelssohn’s most masterfully crafted works. 

About the annotator: Cynthia Stacy is an orchestra librarian with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and also maintains the ISO archive. Ms. Stacy studied bassoon at DePaul University and the New England Conservatory of Music, where her academic writing focused on Russian orchestral music.