Composer in Scotland

Press, 19 August 1978, Page 17

Composer in Scotland

Mendelssohn in Scotland. By David Jenkins and Mark Visocchi. Chappell and Elm Tree Books. 116 pp. $14.30. P In 1829 the composer Felix Mendelssohn toured Scotland with his companion Karl Klingemann. That journey, which inspired two of Mendelssohn’s best known compositions, is recounted in this attractive, documentary essay which draws heavily on the letters the travellers wrote home to Germany. Mendelssohn was then aged 20 and the romance of the Highlands and Hebrides inspired not onlv his musical talent, but also an artistic enthusiasm. This book includes 10 sketches bv Mendelssohn, among them his impression of Edinburgh citv and castle, Loch Lomond, and Birnam Wood near Dunkeld. From the turbulent fury of the Atlantic rollers the young composer was to draw inspiration for “Fingal’s Cave”; the whole journey, 13 vears later, led to the “Scottish Symphony” completed in 1842. That year he conducted the symphony in London and as a result was received at Buckingham Palace bv Queen Victoria, then aged 23. Prince Albert played the Organ for Mendelssohn (as a contemporary drawing in this book shows) while Queen Victoria looked on in admiration. Then the Queen sang for him “with charming feeling and expression,” but a parrot had first to be removed from the room because Victoria said “he will scream louder than I sing.” All charming froth, and no more than a footnote to the career of Mendelssohn, but a diverting account

of a foreigner’s glimpses of England and Scotland nearly 150 years ago. For instance, when Mendelssohn and Klingemann went off by sea to visit Fingal’s Cave with a tour party the sea became rough and “ladies as a rule fell down like flies, and one or the other gentlemen followed their example; 1 only wish my travelling fellow-sufferer had not been among them, but he is on better terms with the sea as a musician than as an individual or a stomach.”