ABSTRACT
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Third Symphony in A Minor, Op. 56 is—and always has been—the 'Scottish' Symphony: this idea seems to be one of the eternal truths of Mendelssohn scholarship, so obvious that any discussion about it would appear superfluous. The genre of the symphony presented a special problem for Mendelssohn as for anyone else at the time, since it occupied an uneasy middleground in respect to programmaticism. The attempts of modern-day musicologists—at times bordering on the desperate—to find the 'Scottish' elements in the symphony would probably have reinforced Mendelssohn in his decision to suppress the title. In the movement as a whole, Mendelssohn thus demonstrates the far from simple skill of combining the most sophisticated of classical forms with the 'poetic' image of dancing on a village green. The A minor Symphony—the first 'real' symphony of the mature Mendelssohn—was published as his first purely instrumental symphony since the C minor Symphony, Op. 11 of 1824.
