Symphony No. 4 in A Major, “Italian”

Composer: MENDELSSOHN, Felix
  • Mendelssohn started planning this symphony during a visit to Italy in 1830, during which he  visited art galleries, chatted with a Palestrina scholar, hung out with Berlioz, heard the Easter services at the Sistine Chapel (including the Allegri Miserere), visited Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius, and made drawings of the Italian countryside and ocean.1
  • Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony premiered in London on May 13, 1833, under the composer’s direction. The work was published posthumously as Mendelssohn’s Symphony no. 4 in 1851.2
  • The third movement, Andante con moto, has been compared with the “Marche des pèlerins” (Pilgrims’ March) from Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, which was composed about the same time.3
    • Fun fact: Mendelssohn and Berlioz went sight-seeing together in Rome in 1830, visiting ancient Roman ruins. We don’t know if they showed each other ideas for the Italian Symphony and Harold in Italy, but we do know they shared other compositions they were working on.4
      • For example: Berlioz thought Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture was “finely-spun yet richly colored.” Mendelsssohn thought the opening of Berlioz’s Sardanapalus was “pretty awful” and thought that the Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath from the Symphonie fantastique used massive instrumental forces poorly, creating “mere grunting, screaming, screeching here and there.”

“The Italian symphony is making great progress. It will be the jolliest piece I have ever done, especially the last movement.”

Felix Mendelssohn, writing to Fanny Mendelssohn from Rome on February 22, 1831.5

Sources

  1. R. Larry Todd, “Mendelssohn(-Bartholdy), (Jacob Ludwig) Felix,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 14, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000051795. 
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 238.
  5. Quoted in The Mendelssohn Companion, ed. Douglass Seaton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 437.

Cut IDs

44377