Midsummer Dreams: Felix Mendelssohn’s Swedish Connections

Abstract

Two years after completing his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy began to write of another vision: visiting his friend, the composer Adolf Fredrik Lindblad, in Sweden. Over the coming years, as Mendelssohn continually returned to this idea, additional reasons to make such a journey presented themselves: performances of his works in that city, including the Shakespearean overture, were well received; he became personally acquainted with Crown Prince Oscar, to whom he dedicated the op. 44 string quartets; he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; his first cousin, Josephine (‘Peppi’) Benedicks, lived in Stockholm; and his friendship with Jenny Lind in the last years of his life only strengthened his interest in the north.While Mendelssohn’s letters to Lindblad have long been known to scholars, the Gegenbriefe from Lindblad remain unpublished. For the first time, his voice is now fully restored to the conversation in an extensive correspondence that contributes to knowledge of Mendelssohn’s interpretations of his own music and his early reverence for the late Beethoven string quartets. In addition, this article also uncovers epistolary evidence of a cluster of related compositions by Mendelssohn and Lindblad spawned by Mendelssohn’s interest in the quartet in F Major (op. 135), including a little-known song that Lindblad dedicated to Felix on the occasion of his marriage.Mendelssohn’s journeys to Scotland and Italy inspired his musical imagination in ways that have richly benefitted the concert repertoire. How might he have translated his impressions of Nordic history, culture and geography into new aural atmospheres, had he followed his dream to travel northwards?