Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony #3 in A Minor, Op. 56 “Scottish” (1842)

What the hell?   I know Mendelssohn can write a killer piece when he wants to — see the First Piano Concerto (1831) — but he sure didn’t do it here.  First of all, lot of the piece is just plain boring and unimaginative.  In the last movement, for example, it takes 37 measures before there’s a single chord other than i and V, and that chord (vii°6/V) is followed immediately by another nine measures of the same two harmonies.  Every time the music modulates to a new key, it focuses once again on tonic-dominant alternation, often forgoing pre-dominant harmonies entirely for long stretches of time. And while the first movement is somewhat more harmonically varied, but it beats its opening rhythm — a quarter note, two sixteenths and three eights in 6/8 — into the ground.

Second, a lot of the piece is awkward.  In the outer movements, Mendelssohn frequently uses a i chord when another chord would have made for a smoother line or a more satisfying resolution. To name just a couple of examples:

• First movement, slow introduction, mm. 25-27.  A sinuous line played by the first violins arrives on fi, harmonized as V7/V.  This is followed by V7 and V/iv — a descending fifths sequence.  But then instead of going to iv, Mendelssohn flats the mi to me and goes straight to i.  That’s not a resolution, that’s a cop-out!

• First movement, mm. 182-189.  The chord progression of the second theme:  i – i – vii°(4/3) – i, repeated twice.  In both cases, the melody over the last two chords goes ti-do-re, sol.  That sol is positively crying out to be harmonized with something other than i, especially since it’s followed immediately by two bars of i when the chord progression repeats.  How about V?  Not very creative, but at least it would give the phrase some forward motion.  Or how about I, the major tonic?  That’s got character and style!  Or how about some inversion of vii°/iv?  That could be used to move into iv, extend the phrase, and get out of the four-bar box that Mendelssohn seems to be stuck in.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.  Like I said, the piece is awkward.  And it’s not just awkward on the local level, either.   The slow movement, for example, starts off with some chromatic music full of half-diminished seventh chords, which is actually quite touching and even romantic, but it keeps drifting into diatonic music with a sort of “after the battle” quality — think second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth (1808) — and the way it wanders between the two feels confused rather than ambiguous.  Actually, “confused” is probably the best word I could use to describe the piece.  It doesn’t feel like a work that has clarity of thought behind it.  I’m going to assume that this was a rush job for Mendelssohn, because I don’t understand how someone capable of writing the E Minor Prelude and Fugue from Six Preludes and Fugues (1837) could turn this out unless he didn’t have time to apply his craft carefully.

All of that said, I do like the scherzo quite a bit.  (Don’t I always?)  It’s based on a cute folky tune full of dotted rhythms that for some reason makes me think of seafaring, and it’s quite a bit more inventive and clearly organized than the other movements.  There are some great abrupt shifts between major and minor, and a passage in which Mendelssohn gets to show of his contrapuntal chops, with the oboe and clarinet playing Bachian melodies in super-staccato sixteenths over gavotte-like music in the strings.  That then leads into a strange and original passage in which the winds, brass and timpani play what would be a triumphant fanfare — if it weren’t all staccato and all pianissimo.  I wouldn’t call the movement a great masterwork, but it’s technically and artistically so far above the other three that I don’t know what to think.