Italian Symphony

Italian Symphony, orchestral work by German composer Felix Mendelssohn, so named because it was intended to evoke the sights and sounds of Italy. Its final movement, which is among the most strongly dramatic music the composer ever wrote, even uses the rhythms of Neapolitan dances. The symphony premiered in London on March 13, 1833.

In 1830–31 Mendelssohn, barely into his twenties, toured Italy. He had gone south from Germany to enjoy the climate and the art, both of which he apparently found satisfactory. The region’s music, however, was a different story, as Mendelssohn vented in letters to friends and relatives: “I have not heard a single note worth remembering.” The orchestras in Rome, he reported, were “unbelievably bad,” and “[i]n Naples, the music is most inferior.” Despite these negative reactions, or perhaps in hopes of erasing them, Mendelssohn began his Italian Symphony while still on tour. The piece was completed in the fall of 1832, on a commission from the Philharmonic Society of London, and the composer himself conducted its premiere. The work was a tremendous success, and Mendelssohn described it as “the jolliest piece I have so far written…and the most mature thing I have ever done.”

Despite the audible delights of the piece, the Italian Symphony was not easy in the making. Even its creator admitted that it had brought him “some of the bitterest moments” that he had ever experienced. Most of those trying times seem to have been spent with an editor’s pen in hand, looking for ways to make the piece better. In 1834, over a year after the work’s public premiere, Mendelssohn began extensive revisions on the second, third, and fourth movements. The following year he reworked the first movement, and he was sufficiently satisfied with the result to allow another London performance in 1838. Yet Mendelssohn still withheld the composition from publication and refused to permit its performance in Germany. He continued tinkering with it until he died in 1847. Four years after Mendelssohn’s death, Czech pianist Ignaz Moscheles, who had been one of Mendelssohn’s teachers and had conducted the 1838 London performance, edited an “official” edition that finally appeared in print.

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Musicologists have offered many interpretations of the Italian Symphony. For example, the extroverted opening movement might call to mind a lively urban scene, perhaps of Venice. The reverent second movement likely represents Rome during Holy Week, for Mendelssohn’s letters reveal that he was impressed by the religious processions he witnessed. The third movement, a graceful minuet distantly reminiscent of Mozart, is suggestive of an elegant Florentine Renaissance palace. Neither these nor any other interpretations of the first three movements are definitive, however.

By contrast, the fourth, and final, movement needs no speculation. It depicts without a doubt a rural scene in southern Italy, for it blends two lively folk dance styles: the saltarello and the tarantella. The dances, different in rhythmic structure, are alike in general character. Both are wild and swirling, abundantly energetic (bordering on frenetic), and unquestionably Italian. In the symphony’s uninhibited finale, Mendelssohn, so deeply displeased with Italian concert music, showed his favourable reaction to the country’s folk music. He also demonstrated that Italian regional music styles could be used to great effect in an orchestral composition.