7 Felix Mendelssohn 7the String Octet in E-flat Major (1825), displaying not only
technical mastery and an almost unprecedented lightness
of touch but great melodic and rhythmic originality.
Mendelssohn developed in this work the genre of the
swift-moving scherzo (a playful musical movement) that
he would also use in the incidental music to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1842).
In the spring of 1829 Mendelssohn made his first
journey to England, conducting his Symphony No. 1 in C
Minor (1824) at the London Philharmonic Society. In the
summer he went to Scotland, of which he gave many poetic
accounts in his evocative letters. Describing, in a letter
written from the Hebrides, the manner in which the waves
break on the Scottish coast, he noted down, in the form of
a musical symbol, the opening bars of the Hebrides Overture
(1830–32; also known as Fingal’s Cave). Between 1830 and
1832 he traveled in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland
and, in 1832, returned to London, where he conducted
the Hebrides Overture and where he published the first
book of the piano music he called Lieder ohne Worte (Songs
Without Words), completed in Venice in 1830. Gradually
Mendelssohn’s music was becoming the most popular of
19th-century composers in England.
Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A Minor–Major, or
Scottish Symphony, as it is called, was dedicated to Queen
Victoria. And he became endeared to the English musical
public in other ways. The fashion for playing the “Wedding
March” from his A Midsummer Night’s Dream at bridal
processions originates from a performance of this piece at
the wedding of the Princess Royal after Mendelssohn’s
death, in 1858. In the meantime he had given the first per-
formances in London of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Emperor
and G Major concerti. Later the popularity of his oratorio
Elijah, first produced at Birmingham in 1846, established