Symphony No.4 in A major (“Italian”) Op.90

As a culture tourist in Rome in 1831 Mendelssohn was not at all impressed by the state of Italian music. But he loved the country. “Why should Italy still insist on being the Land of Art,” he asked, “when in reality it is the Land of Nature, delighting every heart?… No lack of music there; it echoes and vibrates on every side – not in the vapid and vulgar theatres.” Here, surely, in his delight in the scenery and the atmosphere of the Campagna, was the inspiration for the Symphony he began in Rome at just that time and completed on his return to Berlin in 1832.

While there is nothing specifically Italian in the material of the first movement, no German symphony before Mendelssohn’s Fourth in A major had begun with such a vivid expression of the joys of spring – all the more keenly felt by the composer in Rome when it was still February and there was, he told his sister, “a most lovely spring air, a warm blue sky…the almond trees in flower everywhere, bushes bursting into leaf.” The physical exhilaration implicit in the repeated quaver background to the first subject is sustained throughout the movement. The second subject, introduced by clarinet and bassoons over a quaver accompaniment on violins and violas is scarcely less elated. In the development the momentum is maintained by a fugato on a new theme with a counter-subject in persistent quavers and with increasingly urgent reminders of the first subject. The integration of the fugato in the coda is a particularly masterful example of Mendelssohn’s craftsmanship.

Whether Mendelssohn actually found the inspiration for his slow movement in Naples, as he hoped he would, his letters from Italy do not record. The image evoked by the Andante con moto is of a religious procession with a hymn sung by oboe, bassoons and violas over the regular tread of cellos and basses. The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is a similarly sombre procession eventually illuminated, like Mendelssohn’s, by a clarinet melody in the major. In the same way, the origin of Mendelssohn’s third movement is not so much Italy as the Minuet and Trio of    Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. It is no paradox to add that both the material of the Con moto moderato and the scoring for horns in the trio section are Mendelssohn at his most characteristic and most inspired.

What is really Italian about the “Italian” Symphony is the last movement, marked Saltarello. It could be that it derives from Mendelssohn’s experience of the Roman Carnival in 1831. Certainly, the saltarello (also used by Berlioz in another Roman Carnival) is a dance native to the Romagna. Mendelssohn quotes two saltarello tunes – the first introduced by woodwind, the second by violins – and halfway through the movement he interpolates a tarantella, which suggests that he did find some inspiration in Naples after all.