III.
this movement has been criticized as being sanctimonious. i'm not really sure mendelssohn had it in him to write anything bordering on irreverent, but i find this movement quite beautiful regardless of what he intended.
d major, the first and only theme is a choir-like hymn given by the strings in a sort of mini-rounded binary form, the second phrase with the winds exploring a bit of A Major before the strings yank it back into D major.
from 2:00 begins a short section. i'm really not sure why litton gets so much faster in this recording, i would prefer he just kept his former tempo and let the harmonies do the tension-building. but anyway, this section features a bit of an agitato string accompaniment with a little bit of anguished interjections from the winds.
this leads us into a restatement of the theme at 2:38 in the wrong key of A major (the accompaniment figure remains to give it a bit of a push). the difference here is that when he blossoms the theme, instead of a major predominant chord, we get a d minor chord (iv in a major). this requires us to take a bit of a detour so he introduces a bit of a new material to finish it. but since we are in the wrong key, he cadences in a surprise G7-C and takes some time to do a short development on the opening themes, over a gentle rolling accompaniment of thirty-second notes which will last until the end of the movement. this development lasts until 4:03 where finally he gets to bring back D Major with the delicious g minor chord at 4:13. he repeats all this material in the right key.
4:53 represents the big A7 chord which will allow us to cadence affirmatively in D Major, and he puts a punctuation on that with the big arpeggio in the violins at 5:15. coda begins right after this, and takes us to a cadence which concludes the sinfonia quietly and sets us up for the cantata to follow.
The structure of this symphony is a bit complicated. "lobgesang" translates roughly to "hymn of praise," and it is mendelssohn's one choral symphony. the wiki page is pretty uniquely unhelpful for those looking at this symphony from an orchestra view. the orchestra plays three orchestral movements, all chunked together in a "sinfonia," and then the chorus joins for ten more movements, bringing the whole thing to a healthy total of over an hour (about 70 minutes), which was pretty extreme for a symphony (beethoven 9 is 70-80 minutes at a pretty glacial pace).
anyway we shall just cover the sinfonia, which itself is comprised of three smaller movements.
I. Maestoso con moto - Allegro
II. Allegretto
III. Adagio religioso
written in 1840 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the invention of the printing press, it nevertheless makes no explicit reference to writing or printing, instead using primarily sacred text which often refers to the general idea of enlightenment, which was strongly tied to the culture of printing and reading. but it was also known as the "gutenberg cantata" and he also insisted on the genre label as "symphony-cantata," suggesting that he really wasn't thinking much of beethoven 9 when he composed it, formally. musically it has much more in common with bach's cantatas, which were also written with recitative-aria form.
while this symphony is published as no. 2, it was written fourth of the five. mendelssohn was quite hard on his other symphonies and never was satisfied with either of his most popular symphonies, the scotch (#3) and the italian (#4).
the symphony is scored for 2/2/2/2 4/2/3/0, timp + str, adding two cornets, an organ, and of course the SATB chorus for the latter movements.
these two videos are the first two segments of the sinfonia, which basically act as two different movements played attacca, the first in the home key of Bb major and the second in the relative minor of G. the recordings are andrew litton and the bergen philharmonic.
I.
the first movement is in a standard sonata-allegro form. there is a grand fanfare of a b-flat major theme first given by the trombones and echoed by the rest of the orchestra, and this is one of the most important themes in the symphony, recurring throughout the sinfonia as well as the cantata section, set to the words "alles was odem hat, lobe den herrn" or "all things that draw breath, praise the lord." the exposition proper begins at 1:04 and features a typically joyous mendelssohn theme characterized by dotted-rhythm arpeggios and a leap upwards descending by scale. he starts this theme twice and then springs off into one of his characteristically frenzied cascading runs, upon which he once again imposes the fanfare theme at 2:08 and even takes it through some development culminating in a big C major chord acting as the dominant of F (minor). instead he then gives us the second theme set in A-flat major (f-minor's relative major) at 2:40. as typical, the second theme is more lyrical, characterized by lots of parallel thirds. with a surprise c major chord (III of A-flat) he pivots into f-major, which will set us up for the animato at 3:20, introducing a bit of new material in the vein of the first theme and wrapping up the exposition nicely at the big f-major cadence at 4:21.
this part is the development, which goes on steadily using the fanfare theme as the primary modulating motive. he reaches a point where the strings are in e-flat, and uses the brass fanfare as the motivator for further modulation, eventually ending up at 5:31, a long section featuring running triplets in the strings and a big pedal Bb which destabilizes the fact that it's actually a I chord and perpetuates the development. there's a big pause after a long set-up for a g minor cadence. instead he does a development of the second theme set up in e-flat major but quickly springing upwards to a build-up to the recap (beginning of the second vid), which begins right at 0:46.
not much more to say about this movement, both the first and second theme material are abbreviated, with the second theme being stated in the right key of Bb at 1:07 with no gap/misleading key setup in between and the animato material at 1:39 also in the right key. 2:48 is the beginning of the coda, which begins like the development but takes us into a big cadence of Bb instead of other keys. the cool part is he jumps back into the maestoso version of the fanfare theme at 3:47 to conclude the "movement."
then cue a pivot from the tonic into the relative minor and we're off to the second movement.
II.
this movement is simpler and shorter, characteristic of a typical ternary or song-form second movement. in 6/8, the flanking sections are waltzlike and melancholy. the a-section is itself a sort of rounded binary, with a first section that repeats and a section that explores the dominant major (D), rounding off with a recall of first section material that wraps up in a gray unison pizz on g.
the middle section starts at 7:00 in G Major and features a 6/8 version of the fanfare theme we have come to know so well, presented by a wind chorale (one set of program notes i found describes this section as the sacred to the flanking sections' "secular."). it alternates every four bars or so with string material taken straight out of the A section. it cadences at 8:23 in g major and there is a bridge section with pizz bringing it back to the A section. all the thematic material returns to the home key, proven by a g minor coda at 9:14. like the first section, the movement itself ends with two final pizzes.
