Christopher Hogwood edits Mendelssohn’s overtures and symphonies for Bärenreiter. In this article he reports on the problems associated with the sources, and the conclusions for his edition.
Before embarking on a study of Mendelssohn’s symphonies and overtures in order to prepare new Urtext editions, I had the notion that he, like Mozart, had spent a short lifetime effortlessly turning out a sequence of polished masterpieces which were immediately published and praised. The true picture turns out to be very different: Mendelssohn, in his own words, suffered from "Revisionskrankheit" and could not look at any page of his music without being driven to revise and alter it – even against the advice of his family and all musical colleagues. The result is that multiple versions exist of almost every piece he wrote, many of them performed but then abandoned in disgust. Even pieces as familiar to us as the Italian and Reformation symphonies the composer refused to have published and even declared that they should be burnt!
Among the overtures we find similar problems, with five possible versions of the Hebrides Overture and a strange situation with the overture Ruy Blas, where neither of Mendelssohn’s two versions was printed, but a quite different posthumous version in which he had no hand has become very popular.
Untangling the history of the Scottish symphony, which was prepared for publication, nevertheless produces alternative readings spanning 14 years. He performed his earliest version in Germany, revised it for his London concerts in 1842, and then adapted it again before publication. In addition to some hundred small changes, Mendelssohn recast and shortened the “storm music” in the coda of the first movement, replacing 51 bars with 41 newly composed ones and abbreviating the Andante coda; in the finale he removed the two most contrapuntal sections of string writing and reduced the movement overall by some 22 bars. Since each version was sufficiently polished for performance, it would seem that here we have a perfect opportunity to present a “process” edition, where the various stages of the composer’s adaptations are made clear and given a chance of performance.
This unusual approach – denying the supremacy of the Fassung letzter Hand – is demonstrated in the history of the ‘Italian’ symphony – a problematic work which the composer himself tried to ban from performance after its premiere in London in 1833. A year later he made substantial revisions to the last three movements, but left the first movement as it was only because, as he remarked in a letter, he felt unable to "get it right", and from that point onward put the work aside. It was never published in his lifetime, and in 1851 Breitkopf & Härtel printed the penultimate version, apparently unaware of the three revised movements. All the changes improve the overall strength of symphonic argument, and often in details of texture, instrumentation, and even rhythmic and harmonic organization Mendelssohn refines his first thoughts. There are changes of construction (though not of thematic material), of tempo markings, and of orchestral balance, most of which will be new to a modern audience and justify the use of the composer’s revisions, even though we only have the first movement in its original form, which Mendelssohn considered needed changing from the second bar onwards! This is a clear case where public popularity has raised the earlier version to such a position that it would be inconceivable not to publish it for performance; on the other hand, one should not hide the three revised movements.
With the Reformation Symphony still bigger surprises await; in the process of trying to reduce the work to a length suitable for its celebratory function, he cut out one entire movement preceding the Finale, a passage that expands on the flute cadenza and prepares the arrival of the chorale theme with more engaging musical drama. Here again the modern player and listener should have the option of hearing what the compose originally intended.
In sum, a very different picture of Mendelssohn is now slowly emerging — a self-critical, sometimes overly destructive composer, whose compositions need to be viewed in the light of their full history and presented publicly in the most honest texts.
Christopher Hogwood