This saltarello was undoubtedly inspired by the Carnival at Rome, of which Mendelssohn gave a description in his letter of February 8, 1831. “On Saturday all the world went to the Capitol, to witness the form of the Jews’ supplications to be suffered to remain in the Sacred City for another year, a request which is refused at the foot of the hill, but, after repeated entreaties, granted on the summit, and the Ghetto is assigned to them. It was a tiresome affair; we waited two hours, and after all, understood the oration of the Jews as little as the answer of the Christians. I came down again in very bad humor, and thought that the Carnival had begun rather unpropitiously. So I arrived in the Corso and was driving along, thinking no evil, when I was suddenly assailed by a shower of sugar comfits. I looked up; they had been flung by some young ladies whom I had seen occasionally at balls, but scarcely knew, and when in my embarrassment I took off my hat to bow to them, the pelting began in right earnest. Their carriage drove on, and in the next was Miss T——, a delicate young Englishwoman. I tried to bow to her, but she pelted me, too; so I became quite desperate, and clutching the confetti, I flung them back bravely. There were swarms of my acquaintances and my blue coat was soon as white as that of a miller. The B——s were standing on a balcony, flinging confetti like hail at my head; and thus pelting and pelted, amid a thousand jests and jeers and the most extravagant masks, the day ended with races.”
It is a singular reflection on “local color” in music that Schumann mistook the “Scotch” symphony for the “Italian” and wrote of the former: “It can, like the Italian scenes in Titan, cause you for a moment to forget the sorrow of not having seen that heavenly country.” The best explanation of this Symphony No. 4, if there be need of any explanation, is found in the letters of Mendelssohn from Italy.
OVERTURE AND INCIDENTAL MUSIC TO SHAKESPEARE’S LAY, “A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM”
Translations by Schlegel and Tieck of Shakespeare’s plays were read by Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny in 1826. The overture, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was written in July and August of that year.
Klingemann tells us that part of the score was written “in the summer, in the open air, in the Mendelssohns’ garden at Berlin, for I was present.” This garden belonged to a house in the Leipziger Strasse (No. 3). It was near the Potsdam gate, and when Abraham Mendelssohn, the father, bought it, his friends complained that he was moving out of the world. There was an estate of about ten acres. In the house was a room for theatrical performances; and the center of the garden house formed a hall which held several hundred, and it was here that Sunday music was performed. In the time of Frederick the Great this garden was part of the Thiergarten. In the summer-houses were writing materials, and Felix edited a newspaper, called in summer The Garden Times, and in the winter The Snow and Tea Times.
Mendelssohn told Hiller that he had worked long and eagerly on the overture: “How in his spare time between the lectures at the Berlin University he had gone on extemporizing at it on the piano of a beautiful woman who lived close by; ‘for a whole year, I hardly did anything else,’ he said; and certainly he had not wasted his time.”
It is said that Mendelssohn made two drafts of the overture, and discarded the earlier after he completed the first half. This earlier draft began with the four chords and the fairy figure; then followed a regular overture, in which use was made of a theme typical of the loves of Lysander and Hermia, and of kin to the “love melody” of the present version.
The overture was first written as a pianoforte duet, and it was first played to Moscheles in that form by the composer and his sister, November 19, 1826. It was performed afterwards by an orchestra in the garden house. The first public performance was at Stettin in February, 1827, from manuscript, when Karl Löwe conducted. The critic was not hurried in those days, for an account of the concert appeared in the Harmonicon for December of that year. The critic had had time to think the matter over, and his conclusion was that the overture was of little importance.
The overture was performed in England for the first time on June 24 (Midsummer Day), 1829, at a concert given by Louis Drouet in the Argyll Rooms. Sir George Smart, who returned from the concert with Mendelssohn, left the score of the overture in a hackney coach. So the story is told; but is it not possible that the blameless Mendelssohn left it? The score was never found, and Mendelssohn rewrote it. The overture was played in England for the first time in connection with Shakespeare’s comedy at London, in 1840, when Mme Vestris appeared in the performance at Covent Garden.
The orchestral parts were published in 1832; the score in April, 1835. The overture is dedicated to His Royal Majesty the Crown Prince of Prussia.