Symphony in E major (“Irish”)

third movement: Allegretto

When Sullivan wrote his Symphony in E major - several years before his first collaboration with W.S. Gilbert - he had little experience as a composer and even less reputation. He did not, on the other hand, lack ambition and he did not lack inspiration. As he wrote to his mother in the summer of 1863 when he was on holiday in Belfast, “the other night as I was jolting home through wind and rain in an open jaunting-car, the whole first movement of a symphony came into my head with a real Irish flavour about it - besides scraps of the other movements.” He was very wary, however, of adding the “Irish” subtitle to it and inviting comparison with that great favourite of the day, Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony. When, against all the odds for a British symphony, it eventually achieved its first performance at the Crystal Palace in 1866 - thanks to the intervention of “the Swedish nightingale” Jenny Lind, who guaranteed a large audience by undertaking to appear in the same concert - it was billed simply as Symphony in E major. Nearly thirty years later, after Stanford had published his “Irish” Symphony, he called the work “In Ireland,”

The most Irish and most attractive of the four movements of the Symphony in E major is the third, a kind of scherzo headed Allegretto. The theme introduced by the oboe at the beginning certainly has an “Irish flavour,” which it retains as Sullivan presents it in two well contrasted variations, a song and a march. Pizzicato strings interpolate a more playful secondary theme and clarinets change the atmosphere in a lyrical, still folk-flavoured middle section before the opening theme and its two variations are duly recalled.