Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 4 in A major, Op 90, 'Italian' (1833)
Allegro vivace
Andante con moto
Con moto moderato
Saltarello: Presto
The prim young Mendelssohn had no time for the audacious Berlioz’s music, dismissing the counterpoint as "barbarous" and the orchestration as "so messy and slapdash that you want to wash your hands after going through one of his works." Berlioz, on the other hand, had plenty of time for Mendelssohn, admiring the finesse of Fingal’s Cave and conducting the Italian Symphony with such mastery that the music critic of The Times declared every tempo had been gauged to perfection for the first time in his experience. Both composers, as it happened, were superb conductors, and on one occasion exchanged batons as tokens of mutual esteem, Berlioz admitting that his "heavy oak cudgel" hardly bore comparison with Mendelssohn’s "sceptre."
Yet Berlioz’s admiration for Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony did not just lie in his ability to conduct it. The music - or at any rate its inspiration - dated from the Italian period in both their lives, when Mendelssohn, at the age of 21, was on his second grand tour of Europe, and Berlioz, at 28, had won the Prix de Rome which resulted in his truculent sojourn in the Eternal City. Mendelssohn, more enthusiastically responsive to Italy, savoured the "supreme delight in life" displayed by the Italians, and on reaching Rome - where he first encountered Berlioz, disgruntled as ever with the atmosphere of the "odious" Caffé Greco (today packed with Japanese tourists) near the Spanish Steps - he vowed to write an Italian symphony in tribute to the vivacity of the people. Yet, as with Berlioz and his Harold in Italy, he finally produced a work more symphonic than descriptive. Otherwise, he suspected, listeners might mistake his efforts for just another piece of nineteenth-century musical landscape painting, which was far from his intention.
Be that as it may, the Italian features of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 4 are unmistakable and remain part of its charm, just as the Italian side of Harold in Italy is one of its poetic pleasures. By the time of the Italian Symphony’s first performance, which Mendelssohn himself conducted in London in 1833, the symphonic and the picturesque aspects of the music had wholly gelled, just as they were also to do in Berlioz’s masterpiece, completed the following year. The similarity between their slow movements – Mendelssohn’s a sort of pilgrims’ march, Berlioz’s actually entitled Pilgrims’ March - is not their only shared feature, though it is certainly the most striking one.
But while the four movements of Berlioz’s symphony are unquestionably Byronic in mood, those of Mendelssohn’s are less specific. Though the theory that his Scotch Symphony was really his Italian, and vice versa, no longer cuts much ice, there seems little doubt that the slow movement of the Italian has nothing to do with Italy but was intended to commemorate Goethe and Zelter (Mendelssohn’s teacher, one of whose works it quotes), both of whom had died in 1832. What the Scotch and Italian symphonies do quite curiously have in common are aspects of the key of A, the Scotch beginning in A minor and ending in A major, the Italian beginning in A major and ending in A minor. In this respect the one work could be called the obverse of the other, though to what extent this was intentional is hard to say.
What is easier to identify is the sunniness of the first movement of the Italian - something in no sense Scottish - and the Mediterranean swirl of the finale, which Mendelssohn took pains to entitle Saltarello, in tribute to the leaping Italian dance relentlessly evoked by the music. In comparison the slow movement heads in a different direction, its inspiration being the allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, another study in the relationship between A minor and A major. As for the elfin grace of the third movement - a Mendelssohnian evocation of a classical minuet - its poetic central section, filled with magical horn calls, could easily come from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
© Conrad Wilson
