Felix Mendelssohn
Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”)
Of the three child prodigies featured in today’s concerts, Mendelssohn outdid them all in sheer volume of composition (over 40 works alone in 1820, when he was just 11 years old). Like the others, he made his mark early, his best known youthful works being his String Octect (1825) at age 16 and the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), at age 17. Mendelssohn’s parents encouraged their talented young son, but they also wanted him to be a well-rounded adult, with a chance to see and learn from the wider world. Thus, when the composer reached his 21st birthday, his father encouraged him to leave Germany on a series of travels, telling him “to examine the various countries closely,” as Mendelssohn later wrote. “I was to make my name and gifts known, and was to press forward in my work.” (It helped, of course, that Mendelssohn’s father was a successful banker and able to pay for the trip!)
Mendelssohn lived up to his father’s wishes. His first journey, to Britain in 1829, resulted in a number of compositions, including the Hebrides Overture (1830), and some sketches for his Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”), which he later completed in 1842. He made such an impression on the musical scene in London that two generations of English composers were influenced by his example. But he soon moved on to the next portion of his journey, traveling to Italy in May of 1830.
On the advice of one of his mentors, the great poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he made the rounds of Venice, Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Genoa, and Milan over the course of a year and a half. He enjoyed the scenery and the cities immensely–in fact, in a letter written in Rome in the spring of 1831, he explained to his family that he was having difficulty working on the Scottish symphony because “The loveliest time of the year in Italy is the period from April 15 to May 15. Who then can blame me for not being able to return to the mists of Scotland?” He soon began making new sketches for another symphony, which he himself called his “Italian.”
“It will be the jolliest piece I have ever done, especially the last movement,” he told his sisters. He couldn’t complete it to his satisfaction during his tour, and after time back at home and a winter in Paris, he completed it in Berlin in 1833, offer ing it to fulfill a commission from the Philharmonic Society of London. He conducted the premiere with that orchestra in London on May 13 of the same year. The work met with success, but Mendelssohn was dissatisfied with the final movement and pulled the symphony from performance a year later, intending to revise it. He never allowed its performance in Germany and although he did make some revisions, the piece was not published until 1851, four years after his death.
It is not clear exactly what Mendelssohn thought needed “fixing” in this ebullient, joyous work. The opening movement, Allegro vivace, introduces a theme similar to a horn-call in the violins over rapidly pulsing woodwinds. The pulsing pattern lends the movement its air of urgent motion, as if we were speeding through the Italian country side (indeed, the 1979 film Breaking Away uses portions of this movement to score footage of an Italian bicycling team). The rhythms of this section are thought to be based on the Italian tarantella, a feverish dance intended to cure the dancer from a tarantula bite.
In contrast, the second movement, Andante con moto, is all reserved grace. Its main theme has been variously identified as the melody of a Czech pilgrim song, a variation on “Es war ein König in Thule” by Mendelssohn’s teacher Karl Friedrich Zelter, or even a take on one of Mendelssohn’s own “Lieder ohne Wörter” (Songs without Words). Another source claims it depicts a solemn religious procession the composer witnessed in Naples. Whatever its origin, this D-minor movement contrasts slow, sustained themes over a gently ‘walking’ countermelody. It closes with a quiet, pizzicato bass line, then the third movement, Con moto moderato, a minuet, makes a stately entrance. This movement was supposedly inspired by Goethe’s poem “Lilis Park,” which describes an elaborate formal garden and menagerie with a bear (the poet), presided over by a beautiful woman. The trio section of the minuet with its horn chorale and swelling brass represents the powerful bear, who longs to escape. Although the trio melody attempts to assert itself during the final coda, in the end it remains ‘subdued’ by the minuet.
The finale, Presto, is a saltarello, a Neopolitan dance Mendelssohn may have seen performed at the Carnival festivities in Rome. The dance dates back to the sixteenth century, and features lively leaps, hops, and wild arm movements. This final section of the symphony is equally wild, opening vigorously and maintaining a breath taking pace. The central development includes Mendelssohn’s own version of a Rossini crescendo, continuously building from pianissimo to fortissimo. The closing section references the theme of the first movement, but now in in the key of this move ment, A minor. The movement brings the symphony to an energetic and dramatic close–certainly every bit as “jolly” as Mendelssohn assured his family it would be.