Travel to Scotland without a plane ticket

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) 
The Hebrides, Op. 26 (Fingal’s Cave) (1832) 

Prodigies happen. Many are mere Infant Phenomena who flare briefly then gutter, has-beens by puberty and headed for a wanly incompetent adulthood. Then there are the Felix Mendelssohns of our world, their talent measured in gigajoules and their capacity to develop that potential unlimited. Mendelssohn was on at least four A-lists for the entire span of his career: pianist, organist, composer, and conductor. He was a polished gentleman, faithful husband, and loving father. He was an excellent amateur painter. 

No wonder some of his colleagues hated him. They needn’t have bothered: Mendelssohn was his own harshest critic. He was a serial worry-wart and incessant reviser who maintained a little list of works he had dubbed as “shoddy merchandise” and planned to destroy. His early death from a brain aneurysm – the man more or less worked himself to death – meant that everything was published anyway. Felix would not have been amused. 

In 1829, as befitted the scion of an upper-crust family, Felix went on a Grand Tour. Along the way he spent a goodly time in Scotland, where he discovered the brooding beauty of the Hebrides, an island archipelago off the west coast. A boat trip through Fingal’s Cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides inspired Mendelssohn to compose his Hebrides Overture, Op. 26 the following year. At least that’s what he said. According to a fellow traveler, Felix spent the boat ride wallowing in severe seasickness, so perhaps the inspiration was retroactive. After the usual flurry of revisions and rewrites, Mendelssohn launched the Hebrides Overture on its maiden voyage in London on May 14, 1832. 

The Hebrides Overture is an early example of what would come to be called a “tone poem” – i.e., an orchestral work with a programmatic background, be it literary or pictorial or even philosophical. Well-known examples include Liszt’s Hamlet, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, and Richard Strauss’s A Hero’s Life and Don Quixote. 

Mendelssohn was a conservative composer with a distinctly classicist bent, so he structured the Hebrides Overture in strict sonata-allegro form. Each of the fundamental themes takes on a programmatic aspect: the opening “water” figure serves as primary, the lyrical secondary theme suggests people awash in admiration of nature’s bounty, while the heraldic closing theme … well, brings it to a close. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) 
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 (1785) 

Mozart’s move to Vienna in 1781 acts as a dividing line in his biography. Before Vienna he was a promising young composer with some substantial achievements to his credit; in Vienna he became Mozart, ever since cherished, celebrated, even mythologized. In 1781 he was 25 years old, precisely the right age to strike out on his own, free from Salzburg and his father’s suffocating presence, responsible to nobody except himself. 

He prospered in Vienna, as opera productions, concerts, and commissions ensured him a decent livelihood. Like any creative artist, he had his fallow periods and abandoned projects. But his output during that decade in Vienna is nothing short of miraculous. The tragic disease – we may never know precisely what it was – that took him away just short of his 36th birthday robbed humanity of untold treasures yet to come, but what we have is beyond price. 

There’s an oft-told anecdote about Mozart’s father Leopold, kapellmeister to the Archbishop of Salzburg and a persistent, if well-intentioned, thorn in his son’s side. Leopold arrived in Vienna at 1:00 PM on Friday, February 11, 1785. He was tired and hungry, and he really wanted lunch and a nice hot bath, but Wolfgang immediately swept him up into a madcap scramble to prepare the orchestral parts for a concerto due to be premiered that very evening. Somehow it all got done, and that night Wolfgang’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor K. 466 – a crown jewel of Western music – was revealed to the world. But the story, good as it is, doesn’t end there. Wolfgang wrote another piano concerto during Leopold’s month-long visit: No. 21 in C Major K. 467, which brims over with sunny joy and breathtaking lyricism.  

The chipper march rhythm that opens the first movement sets the mood for the elegantly structured tune-fest to come, which includes what sounds for all the world like a sneak preview of Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, then three years in the future. The second-place Andante opens with a melody so beguiling that it has been popularized twice, once as the theme song for the now-forgotten movie Elvira Madigan, and again by no less than Neil Diamond. Alas, those adaptations miss the underlying melancholia of the original. In the Allegro vivace assai the concerto returns securely to earth in a finale so exuberantly dance-like as to be a kissing cousin to a polka. 

Felix Mendelssohn 
Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56 (“Scottish”) (1829–1842) 

The critic for London’s Harmonicon shifted into hyperbolic overdrive as he reported on a young composer’s debut at the Philharmonic Society, on May 25, 1829. “This gentleman,” he purred, “only about one- or two-and-twenty years of age … shews a genius for composition that is exceeded by only the three great writers … and he will in a few years be considered as the fourth of that line which has done such immortal honour to the most musical nation in Europe.” 

By those “three great writers” the critic meant Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with Mendelssohn as the “fourth of that line.” Quite the compliment, and even if Mendelssohn couldn’t quite live up to such an Olympian level of expectation, he certainly became one of Europe’s dominant musicians and an indisputable master composer whose works have graced concert halls for almost two centuries. 

Establishing a chronology of Mendelssohn’s mature symphonies is a headache, and that’s even without considering the twelve ‘string symphonies’ that he wrote during his salad days as a student of Carl Friedrich Zelter. Mendelssohn’s chronic revising and reluctance to publish has a lot to do with that. Both the “Reformation” (No. 5) and “Italian” (No. 4) symphonies were published posthumously. Illogical though it may be, Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56 is actually Mendelssohn’s last one, even if its numbering suggests otherwise. 

The story of the “Scottish” symphony begins with Mendelssohn’s 1829 trip to London, where he wowed the commentarial establishment and public alike. It wasn’t all work and critical huzzahs, however. Mendelssohn had arrived as a breathlessly enthusiastic tourist, eager to drink in everything the British Isles had to offer. “NEXT AUGUST I AM GOING TO SCOTLAND,” he gushed in a March 1829 letter, “with a rake for folk songs, an ear for the lovely, fragrant countryside, and a heart for the bare legs of the natives.” (Apropos that last statement, keep in mind that he was fundamentally still a teenager, having turned 20 just a month earlier.) He was deeply moved by Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh: “In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved … everything round is broken and moldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish symphony.” 

And indeed he had. But that initial inspiration – it’s the opening of the symphony that we now know – was not followed by anything else for over a decade. But like so many other long-gestating Mendelssohn works, it was worth the wait. Brooding and atmospheric, the “Scottish” symphony teems with understated passions and suggestions of Scottish folk music, although it contains no actual folk elements. The overcast mood of the opening is followed by a propulsive first movement proper, characterized by sudden outbursts that interrupt hushed, tension-filled passages. 

Since the “Scottish” symphony dispenses with full breaks between movements, the second-place Scherzo follows directly and provides a vivacious, sunny contrast to the smoldering first movement. This is the Mendelssohn of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in full regalia, ebullient and bubbly, but here with a distinctly northern accent given the ‘Scotch snap’ rhythms of its main melody.  

In the third-place Adagio, the fairy-dust Mendelssohn of the Scherzo gives way to the warmly lyrical composer of the beloved Songs Without Words, but a certain gravitas prevails; described as an Ave Maria for Mary Queen of Scots, it is unmistakably prayerful in places, funereal in others, dignified and sorrowful within its gentle melancholy. The finale more erupts than begins, very much in keeping with its marking of Allegro guerriero – fast and warlike. We might expect the carnage to continue right to the end, but Mendelssohn has a surprise in store. After an unexpected halt, a majestic chorale-like statement arises. It might sound new at first hearing but is in fact closely related to the symphony’s opening passage. Furthermore, it’s a close cousin to Mendelssohn’s 1830 Ave Maria for eight-part choir and organ, deepening the symphony’s references to the tragic queen of Holyrood.