Symphony No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 52 ‘Lobgesang’

Program notes

About the Work

In June 1840 Leipzig celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing with movable type. For a city that lived by the book trade this was a great civic occasion, and Mendelssohn, conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig’s leading musician, was asked for music. He wrote two pieces. The first was a Festgesang for men’s voices and brass, sung in the open air when the festival opened; one of its tunes was fitted after his death to the words of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’. The second was the Lobgesang, or Hymn of Praise, first performed on 25 June 1840 in the Thomaskirche, the church where Bach had been cantor.

Mendelssohn called it a ‘symphony-cantata on words of the Holy Bible’. Three orchestral movements, played without a break, lead into a long sequence of choruses, arias and duets for two sopranos, tenor, chorus, orchestra and organ. He assembled the text himself, mostly from the Psalms and Isaiah, and nowhere does it mention Gutenberg or printing. Its subject is thanksgiving and the passage from darkness into light, which suited a festival honouring the invention that had put the Bible into ordinary hands. The whole work grows from the words of the last verse of the last psalm: ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.’

A symphony that ends with voices could hardly avoid comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth, then only sixteen years old, and other composers of the time were trying out the same mixture; Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette dates from the year before. Mendelssohn’s plan differs from Beethoven’s, though. The vocal part is not a finale but well over half of the work, and the orchestral movements serve as a prelude to it.

The title ‘Symphony No. 2’ is not Mendelssohn’s. He published the work as Lobgesang, and the number was attached decades after his death by the editors of the collected edition, who needed to fill a gap in the sequence. It has nothing to do with chronology: the ‘Italian’ Symphony, published later as No. 4, had been performed seven years earlier. The current catalogue of his works lists the Lobgesang with his sacred music.

One part of the score is far better known than the whole: the harmonisation of the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ (‘Now thank we all our God’) found in many hymn books is the one he made for it.

What to Listen For

The very first sound is the key to the work: the trombones, alone, proclaim a broad, rising theme, and the full orchestra answers. Much later this theme turns out to be the tune to which the chorus sings ‘Alles, was Odem hat, lobe den Herrn’ (‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord’). It returns during the orchestral movements and again in the closing bars, so it frames the whole score.

The three orchestral movements run together. After the energetic first comes a lilting movement in a minor key, more a wistful song for the strings than a scherzo; in its middle section the winds intone a chorale-like melody while fragments of the opening motto pass through the texture. The slow movement that follows is marked ‘religioso’ and has the warmth of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words.

The voices enter with the motto theme, now with its words. Of the numbers that follow, the best known is the duet for the two sopranos with chorus, ‘Ich harrete des Herrn’ (‘I waited for the Lord’), a piece of great tenderness.

The dramatic centre comes next. The tenor sings of the snares of death and then asks, three times and each time more anxiously, ‘Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?’ (‘Watchman, will the night soon pass?’). The answer comes from a solo soprano, unaccompanied at first: ‘Die Nacht ist vergangen’ (‘The night is departed’). The chorus bursts in with the same words, and the darkness is over.

After that blaze Mendelssohn does something simple. The choir sings the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’, its first verse with no instruments at all and its second with the orchestra moving around the tune. A duet for soprano and tenor leads to the final chorus, which gathers speed in a fugue and then, at the very end, brings back the trombones’ theme and the words that began the vocal part.