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Programme note

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' (1842)

Andante con moto - Allegro un poco agitato
Vivace non troppo
Adagio
Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assai

Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Chopin made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him; and so, before that, did Mendelssohn, whose Scottish tour in 1839 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a great composer from abroad. Holyrood Palace inspired the opening of his Symphony No 3 and he himself described the moment of conception. It was, he said, on an evening visit to where Mary Queen of Scots had “lived and loved”. The chapel, he noted, had lost its roof and was overgrown with grass and ivy. The altar at which Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland was broken. “Everything in ruins, decayed, and open to the skies. I believe I found there today the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony" - though he himself preferred to call it his Scotch, unfashionably by today's standards, whereby that word is reserved exclusively for whisky. 

The actual writing of the work, however, did not begin until two years later in Rome, by which time he was also in the process of composing his ‘Italian’ Symphony. Since both works are in the same key — the Scottish in A minor moving into A major, the Italian in A major moving into A minor — it seems likely that Mendelssohn sometimes found it hard to differentiate between them. Certainly there are moments when the marching finale of the Scottish Symphony seems about to transform itself into the final saltarello of the Italian. Schumann, too, seems to have got the music confused in his mind. In his review of the Scottish Symphony in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik he paid special tribute to the “old tunes of lovely Italy” contained therein. Folk tunes, in fact, are just what both symphonies tend to lack. True, in the scherzo of the Scottish, the clarinet and strings create a wonderfully poetic evocation and extension of the kind of music Mendelssohn might have heard during his tour. But, though "Charlie is my darling’" is often cited as its source, the composer more probably arrived at the peculiarly Scottish melody of this movement entirely by himself.    

So what is actually Scottish about the Scottish Symphony? The slow introduction to the first movement may seem to Scottish listeners—if not to Schumann—to have a characteristic dourness, and it seems apt that Mendelssohn subsequently used an amended version of this theme, under the title 'Bad Weather',  as part of his Erste Walpurgisnacht. This theme casts its shadow over much of the symphony, inspiring the two main subjects of the first movement’s Allegro, being hinted at in the "Charlie is my darling"  theme of the scherzo (which uses the same rising fourths) and being heard in a glowing A major version ("Good Weather"?) at the end of the finale. There was a time when this coda was thought to have been arbitrarily tacked on, in order to bring the symphony to a triumphant close in a way that would please Queen Victoria. In fact, this coda - likened by Mendelssohn to the sound of a male-voice chorus – is one of the symphony’s many unifying features which prompted Schumann (rightly this time) to speak of the “homogeneity of all four movements”. The placid main theme of the Adagio may seem to belong to a different world, but the second subject of this movement harks back, at least in mood, to the unifying theme of the start of the work.

© Conrad Wilson