Symphony No. 5, Reformation

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig, Saxony, on November 4, 1847. Mendelssohn composed his Reformation Symphony between the autumn of 1829 and April 1830. He conducted the first performance on November 15, 1832, at the Singakademie in Berlin. The score remained unpublished, however, until 1868, twenty-one years after the composer’s death.

The score of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 calls for 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). A contrabassoon doubled by serpent (an octave apart) is added in the last movement.* The symphony is about half an hour long.

* The serpent was becoming obsolete in Mendelssohn’s day. Classified by students of musical instruments as a kind of trumpet because of its cup-shaped mouthpiece, the serpent is a large instrument (from six to eight feet in length) largely of wood carved in a serpentine shape with holes at the sides to be covered by the fingers while playing. Popular in France from the 17th century, the serpent spread later to England and Germany. It was gradually replaced during the 19th century by valved brass instruments that sounded in the bass register.

The numbering of Mendelssohn’s symphonies is completely out of joint. Since so many works—including the Reformation Symphony—were published long after his death, their order of composition was not taken into account when symphonies were published in his lifetime. The First Symphony is indeed the First—omitting some dozen symphonies for string orchestra that the prolific prodigy had composed in his childhood. But the other four symphonies were written in pairs, the Fourth and Fifth in the early 1830s, the Second and Third a decade later.

In 1829, when Mendelssohn began work on this symphony, he was looking forward to a festivity planned in Germany for the following year to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Imperial Diet of June 1530, a conference that produced the Augsburg Confession, the formal profession of faith of the followers of Martin Luther. Luther himself did not attend the Diet (under an Imperial ban at the time, he remained in Coburg and kept in touch with the Protestant delegation by messengers), but while it was in session he wrote one of the most famous of his many hymn texts, a paraphrase of Psalm 46, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A mighty fortress is our God”). Under the circumstances, this hymn became something of a battle cry for the Reformation. A century later, with the 300th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession in view, Mendelssohn began considering a musical contribution to the festivities employing this chorale.

He wrote to his family from England on September 2, 1829, dropping a hint about this new work that he had conceived. Eight days later he added that he had decided to start work while he was in London. When he finished the score in Berlin the following April, he asked various people for advice as to an appropriate title. He considered and evidently rejected “Reformation,” “Confession” (here used in a sense specific to German, involving adherence to a particular form of religion), and “Symphony for a Church Festivity.” In any event, he did not complete the symphony in time for the anniversary celebrations, so there was no performance in the tricentennial year.

While Mendelssohn was in Paris in 1831-32, Antoine Habeneck planned a performance for the now completed symphony in his series of concerts at the Conservatoire. Mendelssohn was surprised at the thought of having a work so redolent of German culture premiered in the capital of France, but he did not oppose the idea. Yet after a rehearsal on March 17, 1832, the planned performance was cancelled. The musicians protested to Habeneck that the symphony lacked melody and was overladen with thick counterpoint. Mendelssohn had been humiliated, and he may never have recovered any confidence in the symphony. Though he led the first performance in Berlin eight months later (where he called it a “Symphony for the Celebration of the Church Reformation”), he apparently never performed it again. Moreover, he withheld it from publication during his lifetime; only twenty-one years after his death did the score finally see print.

Perhaps as befits a symphony composed for an historical celebration, Mendelssohn’s work draws on a number of older musical traditions beyond the obvious one of Luther’s hymn. The first phrase heard in the violas consists of four notes (D, E, G, F-sharp), which can be heard as a transposed form of the main theme in the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, or as a still older melody, a traditional contrapuntal figure. In fact, it may well be derived from the Gregorian Magnificat motive, which in turn goes back to an ancient synagogal melody. Increasingly insistent fanfare figures in the woodwinds suddenly give way to another familiar borrowing from the church—a particular form of the “Amen” chord as harmonized for the church in Dresden by Johann Gottlieb Naumann in the late 18th century. Though used originally in a Catholic church, the “Dresden Amen” quickly spread to Protestant churches as well—and to other musical works; Wagner uses it as the Grail motive in Parsifal. Mendelssohn presents it twice, pianissimo, in the strings, interrupted by a single fanfare figure.

This brings us to the main part of the first movement, an Allegro con fuoco in D minor which takes the melodic outline (a rising fifth, moving up the scale) of the Dresden Amen just heard and reduces it to the two extreme pitches. Presented by Mendelssohn in a characteristic dotted rhythm, it is hard not to hear it as an allusion to the slow introduction of Haydn’s London Symphony, No. 104, which begins with the same dotted rhythmic figure outlining the interval D–A. Already, then, the young Mendelssohn has hinted at Haydn, possibly Mozart or plainsong, and a well-known form of the “Amen.” The wonder of the movement is that all his historicizing fits so well into a sonata allegro form (in which the swelling second theme is still to come). Yet for all its backward glances, it is an energetic and well-crafted movement that builds its lengthy development section through contrapuntal interplay between the two principal themes of the Allegro con fuoco. The Dresden Amen introduces the recapitulation, which is hushed where the exposition was aggressive. The coda returns to the energy and vigor of the exposition.

The second movement is a scherzo in B-flat based on a single reiterated rhythm that runs through the main body of the movement. Mendelssohn scores the first strain for winds, then alternates winds, strings, and tutti in the longer second part. The middle section is a leisurely waltz in the surprisingly bright key of G major. The scherzo returns, but the movement does not end before a quiet coda partly reconciles the material of the main section with the contrasting middle part.

The slow movement, in G minor, is an aria for the violins with the accompaniment of repeated-note chords in the other strings and an occasional response from the woodwinds. The movement comes to an end on a sustained G in the cellos and basses, and it is here that the present performances bring the major difference from the version usually performed: an extended recitative for solo flute that leads, after the orchestra adds its support, to the familiar opening of the finale, where the flute now sings, unaccompanied and unharmonized, the opening phrase of Luther’s time-honored hymn. Gradually more instruments join in and enrich the harmonization, but just as the tune is about to close, the flute diverts it in a little cadenza, and the strings enter in a lively, syncopated 6/8 passage that modulates from G to the home tonic of D for the real beginning of the last movement. Though Mendelssohn’s themes in the finale are based largely in arpeggios and scales, he does aim toward a certain level of monumentality via brief fugal sections and other contrapuntal devices. Ein feste Burg runs through the development section, though there is little actual development as the tune leads back to the tonic for a recapitulation of the ideas we have already heard, followed in the closing pages by a final, affirmative proclamation of Martin Luther’s great chorale.

Steven Ledbetter

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.

The first American performance of Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony was given in Boston’s Tremont Temple in a concert of the Musical Fund Society conducted by George J. Webb on January 19, 1850—eighteen years before the score was published.

The first Boston Symphony performance of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 was given by Georg Henschel on January 21, 1882, during the orchestra’s first season.