Brass Topics, Abbreviated Recapitulations, and the Bildungsreise

Abstract

This chapter proceeds from a memorable passage near the end of the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony, where the woodwinds and brass unite in a forceful rendition of the opening gesture of the movement’s first subject. This fanfare in the coda represents the climactic stage in a process that has been at work since the start of this movement, a process that can be understood as an ingenious convergence of two of Mendelssohn’s well-established habits in orchestral sonata-form composition: deploying brass-related topics to generate a sense of closure and his tendency towards the drastic telescoping of recapitulations. The chapter further proposes that an autobiographical register might be at work in the movement’s distinctive deployment of rhetorical forces, asking whether we might discern here a meditation on Mendelssohn’s own journey towards personal maturity and independence.