We look at the artistically fertile travels the composer took around Europe as a young man and how they spawned some of his best-loved works.
Today young people tour Europe and get a general cultural education through the customary Interrail trip, and in the early 1830s young Felix Mendelssohn was just the same, with carriages and boats instead of trains. And instead of coming back with a phone full of Instagram-worthy holiday snaps, during his years of continental travel between 1829 and 1832 he came back with the ideas for some of his finest compositions.
The British Isles
At the suggestion of his father the young composer set off for the England in spring 1829. Arriving seasick in London after an 11-day transit from Hamburg (hardly a Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage) it was an inauspicious beginning to his relationship with the country where he would find some of his most vocal supporters. With Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey in his mind, he resolved to record his experience in letters. “London is the grandest and most complicated monster on the earth,” Mendelssohn wrote to his father. “Things roll and whirl around me and carry me along as though in a vortex.” Though while London was full of conducting opportunities, he found much artistic inspiration north of the border. In Edinburgh the ruined Holyrood chapel was particularly impressive: “Everything around is broken and moldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish symphony.” These initial sketches, however, would not be fully realised until the completion of his Third Symphony 11 years later. A visit to the wild western island of Staffa proved influential in the composition of his Hebrides Overture, though he actually began writing the theme for the piece the day before his visit (see the Hebrides Overture performed by the Bergen Philharmonic).
At this time Mendelssohn was also mindful of the looming 300th anniversary of Luther’s 1530 Augsburg Confession, an event of central importance in Protestantism. With his own strongly-held Protestant faith, he wanted to commemorate the event musically. But instead of choosing a choral form, he wanted to tell the story of the Reformation by means of the symphony. Leaving Scotland, Mendelssohn travelled to north Wales and it was there, at the bottom of a lead mine he was visiting, that the composer came up with the idea for the work’s ending (he also dreamed up with First String Quartet during the Wales excursion). Though hampered by an injury sustained in a carriage accident in London, the composer was back in Berlin by the end of the year and able to properly set to work on what was to become his Fifth Symphony. Illness set him back, however, and he was not able to complete the piece until May the following year, just one month before the anniversary celebrations and so too late to be included in them. By this time, however, Mendelssohn’s wanderlust was calling again.
Down to Italy
Despite an offer of a teaching position at Berlin University, the composer headed south for Italy in May, stopping off to visit his childhood hero Goethe along the way. The writer’s Italian Journey was no doubt an inspiration for Mendelssohn’s trip, but their meeting was a little more fraught than the one they’d had when Mendelssohn was a child, the composer later describing the writer as being like “an old lion who wants to go to sleep.” Once in Italy, Mendelssohn’s impressions of the local culture were mixed. In Venice, he immersed himself in Renaissance painting, but on the whole his musical experiences were disappointing, as he later complained: “I have not heard a single note worth remembering.” He was scathing about the music scene in Naples, and things were apparently even worse in Rome – the orchestras were shoddy, the papal singers untalented and the tradition of Catholic liturgical music generally impenetrable to Mendelssohn. He did, however, find satisfaction in creating manuscripts of the work of the Renaissance composer Palestrina and a meeting with Berlioz provided a chance to get to know one of his contemporaries, though one cut from a much different cloth. The bohemian and musically radical figure of the French composer contrasted greatly with Mendelssohn’s refined manner, yet the composers took to each other. Mendelssohn’s feelings about the Symphonie fantastique were slightly less warm, however. One felt like “washing your hands after handling one of his scores,” Mendelssohn sniffed, and he summed up the hallucinatory themes of Berlioz’s symphony curtly: “An artist goes to a ball… then all the instruments have a hangover and vomit music.”