Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony, Program Notes

Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 3, Scottish
Saint-Saëns, Symphony No. 3, Organ

Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, op. 56, Scottish (1829-42)
Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany
Died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig, Germany

Andante con moto - Allegro un poco agitato
Vivace non troppo
Adagio
Allegro vivacissimo - Allegro maestoso assai

Felix Mendelssohn was an enthusiastic traveler, and he chronicled many of his journeys in musical works such as the HebridesOverture, the Italian Symphony, and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. During the first of his nine visits to the British Isles, in 1829, Mendelssohn and his friend Carl Klingemann traveled to Scotland with the idea of meeting the famous Sir Walter Scott, all of whose novels Mendelssohn had read. Felix fell immediately under the spell of the rugged, romantic Scottish landscape and wrote home to his family:

"Everything here looks so stern and robust, half wrapped in haze or smoke or fog...there is to be a bagpipe competition tomorrow; many Highlanders came in costume from church, victoriously leading their sweethearts in Sunday dress and casting magnificent and important looks over the world. With long red beards, tartan plaids, bonnets and feathers, naked knees, and their bagpipes in their hands, they passed quietly along by the half-ruined gray castle on the meadow where Mary Stuart lived in splendor and saw her lover Rizzio murdered...In the twilight today we entered the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved...the roof is gone from the chapel and it is overgrown with grass and ivy; at this shattered altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is decayed and ruined, and the clear sky shines straight into it. I think that I have found there today the beginning of my Scottish Symphony."

Mendelssohn wrote down the first 16 measures of the Andante introduction to the symphony that evening, but the work would take another 12 years to complete. Mendelssohn conducted the premiere performance at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany on March 3, 1842 and conducted it at a Philharmonic concert in London the following June, after which he dedicated the score to Queen Victoria. Anyone looking for Scottish folk-tunes or "bagpipes i' th' gloamin'" effects here will be disappointed, for Mendelssohn detested folk music. Shortly after he visited Scotland and Wales he wrote: "No national music for me! Ten thousand devils take all nationalism! I was just in Wales and, dear me, a harper sits in the hall of every inn incessantly playing so-called national melodies; that is to say, the most infamous, vulgar, out-of-tune trash, with a hurdy-gurdy going on at the same time. It is distracting and has already given me a toothache!"

What Mendelssohn wanted to convey, rather than a musical travelogue, was a poetic evocation of the romantic emotions and images that Sir Walter Scott's novels and the ancient ruins of Holyrood had awakened within him. Thus, the opening Andante gives us the melancholy roofless palace of Queen Mary, empty and sad, peopled with shadowy beings. The following Allegro is darkly colored and continues the melancholy mood. As Eric Werner put it: "In the whole first movement we breathe the heavy, thick air of a Scottish Highland mist." The Andante returns to close the movement, and, without pause, the Scherzo begins, bringing a welcome change of color. The clarinet sings a jaunty tune and ushers in a dance that is light-footed and sunny as only a Mendelssohn Scherzo can be, with a rhythmic "snap" that sounds suspiciously Scottish, despite Felix' aversion to nationalist clichés. The Adagio follows without pause and changes the mood again. Here a lyrical, singing melody in the strings is contrasted with a solemn, processional marching-song in the winds. This leads, again without a break, into the Finale, which Mendelssohn originally labeled Allegro guerriero ("fast and war-like"). He later changed this to Allegro vivacissimo ("fast and extremely lively"), but it was too late; several musical pundits had already concocted scenarios for the movement with Highland Warriors charging into battle, kilts aflutter (with Liam Neesen and Mel Gibson leading the way, no doubt). In any case, it is a stirring conclusion to one of Mendelssohn's best symphonic works. Robert Schumann liked it so much when he first heard it that he rushed up to Mendelssohn and gushed that the imagery was "so beautiful I feel as if I've actually been in Italy!" Robert had been having mental problems and was easily confused. I'm sure Felix just smiled and thanked him.

Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, op. 78, Organ (1886)
Charles Camille Saint-Saëns
Born October 9, 1835 in Paris, France
Died December 16, 1921 in Algiers, Algeria

Adagio - Allegro moderato - Poco adagio
Allegro moderato - Presto - Maestoso - Allegro

"Organist, pianist, caricaturist, dabbler in science, enamored of mathematics and astronomy, amateur comedian, writer, critic, traveler, archaeologist." So Philip Hale described Charles Camille Saint-Saëns. Saint-Saëns began composing in serious at the age of six and was still composing when he died at age eighty-six, so it is safe to say that he was not only one of the most versatile geniuses who ever lived, but that he enjoyed the longest creative life in music history. And he was a genius---he began picking out tunes on the piano at age two-and-a-half, could read at three, and when he gave his first recital at age ten he offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas from memory as an encore. Saint-Saëns was sometimes compared to Mozart in his precociousness and facility, and he was a complex, contradictory personality, embodying both the French love of intellectual clarity and a kind of misty mysticism that led him to write statements such as "Nature is without aim. She is an endless circle and leads us nowhere."

He was a resolute champion of the avant-garde, helping to found the Société Nationale de Musique which premiered hundreds of new French compositions and helped show the French public that their own native composers were worthy of support. In the face of the onslaught of the cult of Richard Wagner's music, he resigned as president of the Société in 1886, a year that saw the completion of the composition that was to be his last major symphonic work: the Symphony No. 3 in C minor. The Third Symphony was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society and premiered by that orchestra in London with the composer conducting in May of 1886. It looks backward to the heroic symphonies of Beethoven rather than forward to the new Wagnerian sounds that were exciting French composers like César Frank and Vincent D'Indy. When Saint-Saëns mounted the podium to conduct the symphony, Charles Gounod, another disciple of le Wagnérisme, remarked sarcastically "There goes the Beethoven of France!"

Saint-Saëns dedicated the symphony to Franz Liszt; the great Hungarian piano virtuoso and composer who helped so many young composers get performances of their music. Liszt had arranged for the premiere of Saint-Saëns' opera Samson and Delilah in Weimar, Germany after Saint-Saëns had been unable to get it performed in France. Saint-Saëns borrowed the idea of using an organ in the orchestra from Liszt (who died shortly after the premiere), and there are echoes of Liszt's flamboyant style of orchestration in the symphony. The work calls for a large orchestra, and is unusual in the way two keyboard instruments (piano and organ) are mingled into the orchestral fabric. The Third Symphony was his most ambitious orchestral work, and contains some of his most imaginative and effective writing, but Saint-Saëns sensed that it represented the end of a musical era, and that the music of the future would flow in completely new channels. "With this," he wrote, "I have given all that I had to give. What I have done I shall never do again."

The symphony is divided into two major parts, each containing several subsections of contrasting character. It begins with a quiet introduction that Saint-Saëns described as "plaintive." This leads into a restless, agitated Allegro in which a persistent, running flow of sixteenth-notes continually pushes the music forward and keeps the mood ominous and unsettled. There is a veiled reference in the first notes of the Allegro's main theme to the Dies irae melody from the Catholic Requiem Mass (another possible tribute to Liszt, who used this tune in several of his works). This theme permeates the symphony, being presented in several disguises and transformations throughout the work. The tempo slows and mysterious pizzicatos in the basses (again quoting the Dies irae) lead into the third subsection, a Poco Adagio which is introduced by soft chords in the organ. Saint-Saëns described this section as "extremely peaceful and contemplative." The bass pizzicatos intrude again, and become the accompaniment to a lyrical, romantic melody in the violins. The first part closes with serene chords in the organ framing a coda that Saint-Saëns called "of mystical character."

The second part begins with a vigorous scherzo that restates the main theme in a new guise, giving it a fantastic, quicksilver character. There is a quite amazing and masterful transition in which this scherzo begins to transform itself before our ears from a restless, diabolical dance into a noble fugue. Saint-Saëns called this transition "a struggle for mastery ending in the triumph of calm and lofty thought." The moment of triumph is announced by a great, blazing C-major chord in the organ. Saint-Saëns then rears back and launches into a vigorous fugal Allegro that quickly becomes a spectacular showpiece of orchestral virtuosity and power, abetted by the massive sonority of the organ and the shining tone of the piano. The main theme is again transformed in the strings and piano, and there are lovely, tranquil moments for the solo horn, oboe, flute, English horn and clarinet. The ending is a hi-fi lover's dream as the full orchestra, strings swirling, organ thundering, brass blazing and drums pounding (the woodwinds might as well pack up and go home here---aside from a few scales, they'll never be heard) shakes the rafters with a triumphant and brilliant coda that will rattle the fillings in everyone's teeth.