Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony

“We come from somewhere. We are connected with the past.” For Jörg Widmann, that connection is not an excuse to retreat into nostalgic preservation but a point of departure — one that takes concrete form in the program he has designed for The Cleveland Orchestra. Widmann places three of his own works alongside Felix Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony, shaping the program as a sequence of distinct approaches.

Widmann’s connection to The Cleveland Orchestra extends back more than 15 years, to his tenure as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow from 2009 to 2011. This return to Cleveland brings a new vantage point: having had his music performed by the Orchestra, Widmann appears for the first time on its podium and, in the following week, as a clarinet soloist. For the Munich-born musician, these roles are not separate. “This unity of music making has never stopped,” he says, invoking a model he associates with figures like Mendelssohn, for whom composing and performing were different facets of a single activity. 

That idea extends to how Widmann builds a program, which he likens to the process of composing. His aim is not simply to juxtapose past and present but to alter how each is heard in relation to the other, so that audiences listen to both “in a new way.” 

Whether writing for a specific soloist or orchestra, adds Widmann, the resulting piece will reflect something of their personality. The same principle applies in his programming. He chose his brief Fanfare for Ten Brass Instruments (2014) as an opener to let The Cleveland Orchestra’s distinctive brass sound shine at the outset. 

Con brio (2008), one of his most frequently performed pieces, grew out of a direct engagement with the music of Beethoven. Commissioned as part of a project pairing Beethoven’s symphonies with responses by contemporary composers, Widmann was tasked with writing an overture for a program featuring the Seventh and Eighth symphonies. Con brio is limited to the same orchestral forces as these works — plus a piccolo, which Beethoven used sparingly in his other symphonies — but treats that constraint as a creative spur. 

The piece does not quote Beethoven in any obvious sense. Widmann asked himself: What parts of Beethoven’s music still carry force? “It’s the accents, the sforzandi” — those moments where Beethoven places stress in unexpected parts of the bar. Even when recognizable material appears — a pair of notes from the Eighth Symphony, the dotted rhythms of the Seventh, or the radiant fanfare of the Fifth’s finale — it is immediately altered, exaggerated, or cut off, reduced to flashes. 

Widmann pushes these gestures through techniques Beethoven would not have used: winds producing only air with “kissing sounds,” strings driven into abrasive timbres, pulsations that turn the piece into a “hidden timpani concerto.” The point is not reference but pressure: how far an inherited language can be stretched. 

Danse macabre, a more recent work from 2022, takes a different approach to the past by engaging with a topic that has haunted composers across musical history. “This is one dance that none of us know,” remarks Widmann: “the dance of the dead.” He opens the extraordinarily virtuosic Danse macabre with a summons: the sound of 12 midnight strokes. These are produced not by an actual bell but by timbres constructed from instruments within the orchestra, including harmonics in the harp and inside the piano. The effect is at once precise and uncanny, an act of “translation” that Widmann notes is central to his composition process. 

From there unfolds “a dance that death dances with us, in ever new turns, pirouettes, masquerades — but it always remains death. ... His pull and his power must be stronger than we know from any earthly dance.” 

Paradoxically, Widmann found himself writing music of vital force, resulting in “one of my most important, most intense and most propulsive orchestral pieces to date.” As in Con brio, rather than merely quote or reproduce a known musical idiom, he reimagines it from within, allowing his soundworld to emerge in altered, often disquieting forms. 

Danse macabre, with its evocation of death, finds an unexpected echo in Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony, which Widmann describes as ending in “a dance of the living.” The chorale that Mendelssohn famously quotes in the final movement — “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God) — sets a text by Martin Luther that directly invokes the devil. “Protestantism cannot define itself without opposition to the devil,” notes Widmann. 

The symphony itself grew out of a specific historical moment. In 1830, to mark the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession — the 1530 declaration of Lutheran belief — Mendelssohn set out to write what he called a Kirchensinfonie, a symphonic work of faith without text. At the same time, he was consciously positioning himself within the symphonic tradition, making an early bid to carry forward Beethoven’s legacy on a large scale. Composing the piece proved difficult. It was delayed, revised, and finally premiered more than two years after its conception, but met a hostile reception. Critics dismissed it as overly learned and insufficiently melodic. 

One of the most pointed responses came from the poet Heinrich Heine, who accused Mendelssohn of trying to secure his place in Protestant culture — a judgment that struck at the composer personally. The grandson of the great Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix had been baptized a Lutheran yet remained aware of the complexity of that inheritance. He withdrew the score, and it remained unpublished during his lifetime, later entering the repertory as his “Symphony No. 5,” despite being the second he completed. 

Widmann returns to that history directly. “I almost have a mission with this piece,” he says. His reading does not radically reinterpret the “Reformation” Symphony so much as bring its underlying tensions into sharper focus. The early criticism, for him, reflects not only reception but misunderstanding. 

Widmann’s reading hinges on identity but resists the familiar framing of Mendelssohn as simply asserting a Protestant voice. Instead, he hears the work as holding identities in tension that are embedded within the musical language itself. In the slow introduction, the “antique” style of Catholic sacred music is followed by the “Dresden Amen,” a sequence of notes associated with both Catholic and Lutheran worship, setting the stage for a work shaped by historical confrontation rather than resolution. 

The Andante, according to Widmann, is “clearly a Jewish movement,” pointing to the main melody’s resemblance to an Israeli folk tune. A crucial moment in the symphony comes in the transition to the finale. In the score’s original version, a recitative links the third-movement Andante to the concluding chorale, quoting a moment from J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that occurs at the moment of Christ’s death. Mendelssohn later removed this passage, and Widmann insists on honoring that revision. The recitative, in his view, created a bridge that smooths over the tension between the composer’s Jewish and Christian identities. 

Without it, the structure is exposed. The slow movement comes to rest and stops; the finale begins without the explicit bridge the recitative provides, the chorale emerging tentatively on the flute (Luther’s own instrument) before gathering force. For Widmann, the abruptness is the point. Mendelssohn does not resolve the tension or guide the listener across it but places the two identities side by side. In this reading, the symphony does not reconcile these identities but allows them to coexist, fully and without mediation. 

— Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Gramophone, and Strings magazine, he is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival. 

Jörg Widmann’s performance is generously sponsored by Astri Seidenfeld.