Felix Mendelssohn came into the world in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, a year before his colleagues, Chopin and Schumann. The beautiful woman who accompanies these lines is his wife, Cécile Jeanrenaud, whom he met in Frankfurt in 1836 and with whom he fell madly in love upon seeing her. It took him only a year to take her to the altar, in 1837, when Felix was twenty-seven years old and Cécile, nineteen.
Such diligence and promptness may be due to the fact that by that time Mendelssohn was already a successful composer who, if necessary, could even count on the prompt financial assistance of his father, a successful banker, if he fell out of favor with the public. Cécile, more reserved, was the daughter of a Protestant pastor of Swiss origin who had managed to settle comfortably in Frankfurt.
Cécile was beautiful, cultured and elegant, although somewhat conventional. She would have loved to have had magnificent music accompanying her as she entered the Wallon Church in Frankfurt on the pastor's arm, but her husband's famous Wedding March did not yet exist. It would be composed five years later. Of course, they could have used Mozart's wedding march from The Marriage of Figaro, but it was not customary to perform wedding marches off stage.
The tradition of accompanying the wedding ceremony with a march was inaugurated somewhat later, in 1858, on the occasion of the wedding of Princess Victoria of Saxony with Frederick III of Germany. At the time, the princess chose two marches: the Mendelssohn piece and the wedding march of Wagner's opera Lohengrin, premiered in 1850. Since then, the tradition has remained firm, with Mendelssohn's work sweeping the preferences.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - Wedding March
The hugely popular Wedding March is a piece from Mendelssohn's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, composed as incidental music to accompany the production of Shakespeare's play of the same name. Except the Overture, written when Mendelssohn was seventeen, the music was composed in 1842, at the request of Frederick William IV of Prussia.
The march is one of the five purely instrumental pieces, which together with the vocal sections, make up the fourteen pieces of the complete work.
Of its slightly less than five minutes of duration, only the first minute is played in the ceremony. In the original version, the famous motif is taken up again later on, although this time with a harmonic variation (4:09) that will lead to its conclusion.
