Composed: 1833
Premiered: 1833, London
Duration: 27 minutes

Mendelssohn’s long visit to Italy in 1830-31 is recorded in a series of lively letters home to his family (including some charming pencil sketches), and in his best-loved, most-performed symphony, the Italian. To a person from northern Europe, Italy in the 1830s was a remote, magical place. The light, the heat, the noisy, exuberant people, to say nothing of the architecture and painting: it all added up to an overwhelming experience for the young Mendelssohn. He was in Rome for the Carnival, and he also saw the funeral of a pope and the celebrations after the election of his successor.

He accumulated various musical ideas, but composed very little during this time. When a commission for a new symphony arrived from the Philharmonic Society of London in 1832, this provided the stimulus to put his Italian fragments together. The cheerful bustle of the first movement, the sombre processional of the second, the graceful third one, and the finale, a vivid Sicilian dance (a saltarello, entirely in the minor) present a kaleidoscopic view of Italy as seen by a perceptive, impressionable visitor.

Although the symphony was duly performed in London in 1833, and subsequently elsewhere, Mendelssohn was not entirely satisfied with it. He delayed publication of the score while he continued to tinker with it, looking for improvements and revisions. He never finished; the symphony was published after his death, in the form we know and love, but not quite as the composer would have liked it to be.

Program note by the late Dr. C.W. Helleiner.