6 of the Most Romantic Symphonies in Classical Music History

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 14th, 2026

What makes a symphony romantic?

For one, a symphony can be stylistically of the Romantic Era – Romantic-with-a-capital-R, full of sweeping melodies, warm orchestral colour, and heart-tugging harmonies.

But a symphony can also be romantic in a more personal sense: when it springs from a composer’s love for someone – or even somewhere.

Today, we’re looking at six symphonies that are Romantic in both senses of the word: stylistically of the era, and emotionally rooted in a love story.

All six of these works remain among the most popular romantic symphonies in the classical repertoire.

Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique (1830)

The Love Story

This symphony’s autobiographical program was directly inspired by Berlioz’s own tumultuous love life and romantic fixations.

In 1827, after seeing Irish actress Harriet Smithson perform the role of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Berlioz became obsessively infatuated with her.

Although the production was in English, Smithson’s performance was so gripping that it electrified Parisian audiences.

Hector Berlioz in 1832

One audience member in particular was electrified: Hector Berlioz.

He fell in love not with Smithson as a person – he wouldn’t get to know her for quite some time – but rather with her talent and appearance, as well as the many Romantic Era ideals she represented.

While in the throes of this fixation, Berlioz channeled his infatuation into a symphony.   

The music is programmatic and, in Berlioz’s own words, follows a “young artist of morbidly sensitive temperament” (a not-so-subtle stand-in for himself) as he plunges from ardent passion into the depths of delusion.

The beloved’s tender theme (idée fixe) is first heard in the symphony’s opening movement, but it later curdles into a vulgar fiddle tune in the witches’ sabbath, symbolising how his idealised love has turned into a nightmare.

The orchestration here is noteworthy, featuring an expanded percussion section, new instruments like the English horn, and striking effects like col legno bowing, where string players tap the wood of their bows on the strings to create spooky sounds.

Harriet Smithson

Berlioz kept trying to get Smithson’s attention. He sent her numerous letters and even went so far as to stalk her lodgings, to no avail. In fact, she didn’t even attend the symphony’s 1830 premiere.

However, two years later, she finally heard a performance. She was astonished that she had inspired such a work, and they soon began dating.

They married in 1833. The marriage collapsed within a matter of years. But this symphony, the spark of inspiration that signaled the start of their relationship, remains a revolutionary Romantic Era statement that out-survived their love – and them.

Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 4, “Italian” (1833)

The Love Story

Horace Vernet: Felix Mendelssohn, 1831

Felix Mendelssohn was not undergoing a tortured love affair while writing the Italian Symphony.

In fact, this work is more influenced by a place he loved than a person: the “romance” here is between the composer and Italy itself.

Mendelssohn’s letters from his 1830–31 Italian journey are ecstatic in their admiration.

“This is Italy! … the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it,” he wrote to his family.   

Each movement of the symphony takes on a different aspect of the life he observed in Italy. The joyful first movement is followed by a slow movement reflecting a religious procession he saw in Naples. The dance of the third movement is a standard minuet and trio, and the final movement incorporates two different Italian dances, the quick Roman saltarello (a jumping dance), and the Neapolitan tarantella.

Its joy makes it one of the most “Romantic” – if not overtly romantic – symphonies of the era. Read more about Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4.

Schumann – Symphony No. 1 “Spring” (1841)

The Love Story

Robert and Clara Schumann

The “Spring” Symphony emerged from the happiest period of Robert Schumann’s life: his first year of marriage to pianist Clara Wieck.

After years of struggling to win the approval of Clara’s father, the star-crossed lovers were finally able to marry in September 1840.

This personal triumph sparked an extraordinary burst of creativity. 1840 had been Robert’s “Year of Song,” when he poured his love into over a hundred love songs.

But by 1841, with Clara’s encouragement, he had turned to the symphony.

She wrote in her diary:

“It would be best if he composed for orchestra; his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano… His compositions are all orchestral in feeling… My highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra – that is his field! May I succeed in bringing him to it!”

As for his part, Robert later said that the work was inspired not just by spring’s external imagery but by his own “spring of love” (“Liebesfrühling”).   

Astonishingly, Schumann sketched this symphony out over just four days in January 1841. It exudes all of the exuberance you might expect from such an energetic start.

Schumann wanted the opening trumpet fanfare “to sound as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening,” heralding spring’s (and love’s) arrival. This motto theme, bold and hopeful, recurs as a unifying idea.

He crafted music that somehow sounds like spring, featuring buoyant rhythms, anticipatory tremolo passages in the strings, and woodwind passages that resemble birdsong.

Throughout, the symphony’s tone is one of youthful hope, excitement, and, importantly, satisfaction. It’s very much in line with Romantic Era ideas and idealism about the rejuvenating power of both love and nature.

Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 4 (1877)

The Love Story

Tchaikovsky with his wife Antonina Milykova

Few symphonies are as closely tied to a composer’s personal emotional life as Tchaikovsky’s Fourth.

Written in 1877, it coincided with a period of acute turmoil in Tchaikovsky’s romantic and emotional life.

That year, against his better judgment, Tchaikovsky entered into a hasty marriage with a young conservatory student, Antonina Miliukova – a marriage that proved disastrous and lasted only weeks before he fled her forever.

Tchaikovsky may have hoped marriage might quell rumours about his homosexuality, but the reality drove him to a nervous breakdown.   

During the aftermath of this catastrophic marriage, Tchaikovsky poured his inner despair and conflict into his fourth symphony.

He described the opening fanfare as the “Fate” that hangs over a person’s life: a concept that colored the entire symphony.

In a candid letter to his patroness and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky admitted: “I was very depressed last winter when writing the symphony, and it is a faithful echo of what I was experiencing.”

Madame von Meck, who became Tchaikovsky’s benefactor in 1877, actually played a critical role in the symphony’s creation and the composer’s life at that particular time.

She provided financial support so he could quit teaching, along with an emotionally intimate – if strictly epistolary – friendship.

Nadezhda von Meck

The dedication of the fourth symphony even reads “To my best friend”: Tchaikovsky’s tribute to von Meck, and a thank-you for helping to usher him through an especially trying time in his life.

It’s ironic that one of the most infamous marital breakdowns in classical music history inspired one of the standout symphonies of the Romantic Era.

Mahler – Symphony No. 5 (1901–02)

The Love Story

Alma Schindler, 1902

The years 1901–1902, when Mahler composed his Fifth Symphony, were momentous in his personal life, especially in terms of romantic love.

In November 1901, Gustav Mahler met Alma Schindler, a young composer and socialite from Vienna.

Their whirlwind courtship was intense; by March 1902, they were married. (Alma was pregnant at their wedding.)

This intense new love had a profound impact on Mahler, and we see its reflection most clearly in the symphony’s Adagietto.   

According to Alma’s testimony, the Fifth’s Adagietto (which starts at the 46:15 mark in the video above) was Mahler’s love song to her.

Historians have noted that Alma’s picturesque storytelling isn’t always strictly accurate, but the following story remains persuasive. Apparently, he left her a small poem with the Adagietto’s manuscript, saying: “How much I love you, my sun, I cannot tell you in words – only my longing and my love and my bliss.”

Today, the Adagietto is regarded as the wordless love letter from Mahler to his new wife, communicating in music what he felt he was unable to say in words.

It provides a transcendent counterbalance to the earthiness of the rest of the symphony, enhanced by its orchestration for strings and harp alone.

Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 2 (1907)

The Love Story

Sergei Rachmaninoff and Natalia Satina

The creation of his Symphony No. 2 marked a particularly redemptive chapter in Rachmaninoff’s professional life: one shaped by the support and love he found in his marriage.

A decade earlier, in 1897, Rachmaninoff’s first symphony had premiered to disastrous reviews (one critic likened it to “a program symphony about the Ten Plagues of Egypt”).

The fiasco of that premiere sent the young composer into a deep depression and a creative block. He recovered only with the help of therapy and through composing his successful Second Piano Concerto (1901).

During that same period, he fell in love with and became engaged to Natalia Satina, his cousin and childhood sweetheart.

After overcoming significant obstacles (including family disapproval and Orthodox Church restrictions on cousin marriage), Sergei and Natalia married in 1902 on a rainy spring day.

By the time he was writing the second symphony in 1906, Rachmaninoff had been happily married for a few years and was a father. His first daughter, Irina, was born in 1903, and his second, Tatiana, was born in 1907.

Enjoying such a stable, loving home life provided Rachmaninoff with a foundation of emotional security that was crucial to his productivity after the turmoil of his earlier years.  

In late 1906, he and Natalia moved to Dresden specifically to escape the pressures of Moscow so that he could focus on composition in peace.

There, with his wife and daughter by his side, he worked on the symphony – though not without bouts of self-doubt.

At one point, he nearly abandoned the score, calling it “boring and repulsive” in a typical burst of self-criticism, before eventually returning to it.

It’s easy to imagine that the heartfelt outpouring of the symphony – especially its incandescent Adagio – was nurtured by the contentment and warmth of Rachmaninoff’s married life.

The triumphant premiere of the symphony in early 1908 in St. Petersburg was a vindication; the public and critics hailed it, and it earned Rachmaninoff a prestigious Glinka Award.

Today it remains one of the symphonic highlights of the late Romantic Era, beloved for its lush string writing and deeply felt, warmly expressed emotion.

Conclusion

Romanticism in symphonic music wasn’t just an artistic movement; it was also a way for composers to transform their private longing, devotion, and emotional crisis into publicly performed art.

From Berlioz’s hallucinatory passion in the Symphonie fantastique to Rachmaninoff’s newfound confidence in his Second, these six works reveal how love – fulfilled, frustrated, or otherwise – shaped some of the most powerful music of the Romantic Era.

Taken together, they show just how deeply composers’ love stories shaped their compositions, and why these pieces remain so easy to love even today.

Mendelssohn: The Hebrides Overture Premiered Today in 1833

 by Georg Predota  January 10th, 2019

Exterior of Fingal’s Cave

Described as one of the natural wonders of Scotland, Fingal’s Cave is located on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides. Formed from hexagonally jointed basalt columns it became known as “Fingal’s Cave” after the hero of an epic poem by the Scottish historian James Macpherson. It was part of his highly influential Ossian cycle of poems supposedly based on old Scottish Gaelic verse.

Fingal’s Cave

And when the novelist Sir Walter Scott visited the cave, he wrote, “it is one of the most extraordinary places I ever held. It exceeded in my mind, every description I had heard of it…. as high as the roof of a cathedral, and running deep into the rock, eternally swept by a deep and swelling sea”. Other famous visitors to the cave included the author Jules Verne, poets Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson, the painter J.M.W. Turner and Queen Victoria. And then there was Felix Mendelssohn, who visited the cave in 1829 during his tour of Scotland.

Mendelssohn’s sketch of Scottish Landscape

In July and August 1829, Mendelssohn and his poet friend Karl Klingemann visited Edinburgh and Abbotsford. He began to draft the opening of his Symphony No. 3—eventually to be subtitled “Scottish”—and he wrote to his sister Fanny. “In order to have you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affect me, the following came to my mind.” And that postcard contained the opening phrase of what would eventually become his Hebrides Overture. It is been suggested that the echoes Mendelssohn experienced in the cave inspired this particular theme, although there is no definitive proof that Mendelssohn ever got close enough. The first complete draft of the work was completed on 16 December 1830 and entitled “The Lonely Island.” Not entirely satisfied with the work, Mendelssohn embarked on a series of revisions. The final version, now titled “Hebrides Overture,” was completed on 20 June 1832, and it premiered on 10 January 1833 in Berlin with the composer conducting. Richard Wagner subsequently called the work “one of the most beautiful pieces we possess.”

5 Composers Who Were Also Accomplished Visual Artists

 by Emily E. Hogstad  December 28th, 2025

While they’re known primarily for their music, several iconic classical music composers also expressed their creativity through visual art.

From Felix Mendelssohn and his Romantic era landscapes to John Cage and his chance-driven ink washes, these five composers created drawings, sketches, and paintings that help illuminate their artistic inner worlds.

Today, we’re looking at the lesser-known art by five great composers.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn was not just a celebrated composer; he was also a prolific visual artist.

He began taking drawing and painting lessons at an early age. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced hundreds of pieces of art in pen-and-ink, watercolour, and oils.

It’s no surprise that this child of the early Romantic era favoured subjects like dramatic natural landscapes and historic architecture.

Mendelssohn’s landscape painting

During one family tour of Switzerland in 1822, the 15-year-old Mendelssohn drew over forty ink-and-pencil landscape sketches of the Alps.

Later trips to Scotland (in 1829) and Italy (in 1831) likewise inspired numerous scenic drawings and watercolours of breathtaking locales.

He would also create memorable musical portraits of those countries, most famously with his Hebrides Overture and his Fourth Symphony, nicknamed the “Italian.”

Mendelssohn wrote in 1838 that while vacationing in Switzerland, “I composed not even a bit of music, but rather drew entire days, until my fingers and eyes ached.”

The beloved hobby allowed him to remain creative even when he was struggling with finding musical inspiration.     

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)

Composer Arnold Schoenberg is remembered best today as a composer and pioneer of atonality, but he was also a gifted Expressionist painter.

He began painting around 1907 and started focusing on the hobby in earnest months later during a particularly tumultuous period in his life.

Arnold Schoenberg

That year, his wife, Mathilde, left him for several months to have an affair with painter Richard Gerstl. After she returned to Schoenberg that November, Gerstl died by suicide.

While dealing with the emotional fallout, Schoenberg created a series of intense portraits characterised by stark colours, exaggerated features, and haunted gazes.

These paintings – which Schoenberg often titled “Gaze” or “Looking” – were meant to express something profound about his interior emotional state at the time of their creation.   

He ended up aligning with the loose Vienna-based group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), named after Wassily Kandinsky’s 1903 painting of the same name.

In fact, Schoenberg showed paintings at the Heller Gallery in Vienna (1910) and in the Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich (1911) at Kandinsky’s invitation.

Schoenberg painted around 60–70 paintings, mostly between 1908 and 1912. After 1912, his output dipped, and he returned to focusing on music.

Arnold Schoenberg’s self portrait, “The Red Gaze”

He later mused about the connections between the two arts in an interview:

I planned to tell you what painting meant to me. In fact, it was to me the same as making music. It was to me a way of expressing myself, of presenting emotions, ideas, and other feelings.

And this is perhaps the way to understand these paintings, or not to understand them. They would probably have suffered the same fate as I have suffered; they would have been attacked. The same would happen to them that happened to my music.

I was never very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don’t know whether this is why I did it in music, and also why I did it in painting.

George Gershwin (1898–1937)

George Gershwin is famed as a composer of jazz-influenced classics, but he was also an avid painter: he created over 100 works during his lifetime.

He took up painting in 1927, encouraged by his younger brother Ira and their cousin, the artist Henry Botkin.

He worked primarily in oil painting and charcoal or pencil sketches, focusing on portraits and figure studies of the people in his world. He was especially fond of impromptu, casual portraiture.

George Gershwin, self-portrait, 1936

Among Gershwin’s best-known paintings is his portrait of his Hollywood tennis partner, fellow painter-composer Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1934–36). Today, that painting hangs in the U.S. Library of Congress.

George Gershwin painting Arnold Schoenberg

One friend, Merle Armitage, noted that Gershwin “was in love with colour and his palette in paint closely resembled the colour of his music. Juxtaposition of greens, blues, sanguines, chromes, and greys fascinated him.” Appropriate favourites for the composer of Rhapsody in Blue!   

It should also be noted that Gershwin was an art collector as well as artist, owning works by Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Kandinsky, and others.

He even kept Mark Chagall’s painting, The Rabbi, over his piano, where he would see it every day he went to work.

It’s tantalising to think about how the aesthetics of these artists might have affected his own music.

As he once told a friend, “Painting and music spring from the same elements, one emerging as sight, the other as sound.”

Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

Paul Hindemith, 1923

In addition to his compositions and viola-playing, German composer Paul Hindemith was known for his whimsical drawings.

Although he never formally trained as a visual artist, he drew prolifically from childhood until the end of his life.

He would regularly seize any scrap of paper at hand – menus, napkins, concert programs – and fill them with impromptu sketches and cartoons.

Hindemith’s doodles

His subjects were numerous and tended toward the bizarre: he’d portray whimsical, fantastic subjects in a cartoonish style, such as tubas with legs, cats who played musical instruments, or even dancing elephants.   

Hindemith always treated his drawing as a casual, fun outlet. He never catalogued his visual art in any systematic way, or treated them as anything but throwaway doodles.

The only meticulously dated collection of Hindemith’s visual art is his series of Christmas cards, which he drew and sent out to friends, family, students, and colleagues every year. He kept up the tradition for decades, until his final Christmas in 1963.

John Cage (1912–1992)  

John Cage, avant-garde composer of 4’33” fame, created a significant body of visual art during the last twenty years of his life.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Cage turned to printmaking, drawing, and watercolour as extensions of his experimental philosophy. By the time of his death, he had produced a large and distinctive oeuvre of works on paper.

Cage’s visual art is notable for applying the same principles of chance and indeterminacy that he used in music. While making his watercolours and prints, Cage would let random operations guide the creation of the works.

John Cage’s painting

As a result, Cage’s art has a uniquely serene yet unpredictable quality – splashes of colour or delicate pencil lines appear according to coin flips and computer-generated randomness, not by his own subjective aesthetic judgment.

Cage’s largest sustained visual art project was done in collaboration with the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia. Between 1983 and 1990, he spent several week-long residencies there, creating a total of 125 unique watercolours. All of them were later published in the compendium The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors.

Conclusion

The visual artworks these composers left behind are compelling in their own right, but they’re also fascinating for what they say about their creative spirit and vision.

Whether it was Mendelssohn sketching alpine peaks in Switzerland, Schoenberg confronting his inner turmoil on canvas, or Cage embracing indeterminacy with brush and ink, each of these composers used visual media to explore ideas that sound alone didn’t allow them to.

Appreciating their artwork gives us an invaluable lens for hearing – and better understanding – their remarkable music.

13 Facts You Didn’t Know About Fanny Mendelssohn

by Emily E. Hogstad

Most musicians don’t know a lot about Fanny Mendelssohn besides the fact that she was Felix’s uber-talented older sister. But she was a hugely important musical figure in her own right.

We look at thirteen facts you (probably) didn’t know about the life and career of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.

Fanny Mendelssohn © play-images.primephonic.com    4. She wrote her own music for her wedding the night before the ceremony. Felix had never gotten around to doing it for her, as he’d promised he’d do.

5. She named her son Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel after her three favorite composers: Bach, Beethoven…and her brother. Sebastian would be her only child.

Miriam’s Song of Praise by Wilhelm Hensel
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020

6. Wilhelm Hensel used her as a model for a famous painting depicting Miriam, a Biblical figure often used to represent the art of music. In 1838 Queen Victoria met Hensel, saw the painting, and commented on Miriam’s beauty. Hensel eventually presented the painting to the queen, and in return she gave the Hensels a diamond and emerald ring.

7. While Felix visited Queen Victoria, he had an awkward encounter with her, thanks to Fanny’s genius. Victoria singled out one of his songs for praise, and he was forced to admit that he hadn’t actually written it: Fanny had. Turns out that, unbeknownst to the public, Fanny had secretly published several works under Felix’s name!

8. Her 1829 Easter Sonata was also originally attributed to her brother. When the manuscript was discovered in 1970, scholars saw that it was signed “F. Mendelssohn” and automatically assumed it was a lost work of Felix’s. Later research revealed that it was, in fact, written by Fanny.    

9. She became famous for the musical events she held at her salons. If her gender was going to prohibit her from playing in public, she decided she’d bring the audience into her home.

Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn

10. She was a conductor. One of the benefits of giving concerts in her home was that she could take on any musical role or responsibility she wanted. She once wrote to Felix, “Mother has certainly told you about the…orchestra on Saturday and how I stood up there with a baton in my hand… Had I not been so horribly shy, and embarrassed with every stroke, I would’ve been able to conduct reasonably well.”

11. At the age of 40 she finally decided to go against her brother’s wishes and to start publishing music under her own name. She wrote a fretful letter to Felix informing him of her plans: “Actually I wouldn’t expect you to read this rubbish now, busy as you are, if I didn’t have to tell you something. But since I know from the start that you won’t like it, it’s a bit awkward to get under way. So laugh at me or not, as you wish: I’m afraid of my brothers at age 40, as I was of Father at age 14… In a word, I’m beginning to publish.” Unfortunately, she didn’t have much time left.

12. Her final illness was sudden. On May 14, 1847, at the age of 41, Fanny assembled a chorus at her house to rehearse a piece by Felix. She was directing from the piano when she lost sensation in her hands. This had happened before, so she took a break and rubbed her fingers with vinegar to try to get the feeling in them back. She yelled from the other room as they sang, “How beautiful it sounds!” She then had a stroke, and she died before the day was over.

13. Felix was beyond devastated at her death. He became paranoid that he’d also die young from a stroke. And five months after Fanny’s death, that’s exactly what happened.

Buried Treasures: Felix Mendelssohn: Concerto for Piano, Violin and Strings in D Minor (1822)

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Felix Mendelssohn

When Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) died at the incredibly young age of thirty-eight, he simply had not yet made arrangements for literally hundreds of unpublished musical manuscripts and artworks, alongside thousands of personal letters to and from the composer. During his lifetime, and for a short period thereafter — with a large number of music published during a period of two years following his death — Mendelssohn was almost universally lauded musical genius. What is more, Mendelssohn was also the artistic director and chief conductor of The Gewandhaus (Garment House) in Leipzig, a venue that has long been recognized as one of the most important performing centers in Europe. Under his tutelage and leadership, the Gewandhaus Orchestra became a cultural institution. Mendelssohn not only initiated the revival of music by Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart, he also assured that his brand of musical historicism was disseminated throughout Europe and beyond. With the help of Richard Wagner who declared “Judaism the evil conscience of our modern civilization” in his 1850 treatise Judaism in Music, Mendelssohn and his music were quickly subjected to deliberate and systematic forms of historical revisions. And when Wagner declared Mendelssohn’s music “an icon of degenerate decadence,” publishers far and wide declined to make his manuscripts and letters public.

Of course, Wagner was not able to completely erase or dismiss Mendelssohn’s influence on Germanic arts, nor was he able to excise him from music-historical memory. This, of course, led to serious irritation within the propaganda machinery of Nazi Germany, and his name was promptly added to various lists of forbidden artists. At that time, according to Stephen Somary, founder and artistic director of the Mendelssohn Project, “a majority of Mendelssohn manuscripts — both published and unpublished — were housed in the basement of the Berlin State Library. They were smuggled to Warsaw and Krakow during the winter of 1936/37, and when the city fell under Nazi control in 1939, they were hurriedly smuggled out again and disbursed to locations wide and far between.” Following WWII, the majority of manuscripts remained buried behind the Iron Curtain. Haltingly, various unknown versions and unknown compositions were discovered and made available in one form or another.

The Gewandhaus

Initially, these efforts focused on works Mendelssohn composed before his 14th birthday, pieces that had originally been presented at private concerts at the Mendelssohn home. Among them various sonatas for viola and for violin, religious choral music, numerous piano compositions and even a fourth opera. But it also included a succession of concertos, among them a concerto for piano and string orchestra in A minor (1822) and two concertos for two pianos and full orchestra in E and A-flat, originating from 1823 and 1824, respectively.

The concerto for violin, piano and string orchestra in D minor was composed for an initial private performance with his best friend and violin teacher Eduard Rietz. On 3 July 1822, Mendelssohn revised the scoring, adding timpani and winds and the premiere of this version was apparently performed on the same day. For reasons detailed above, it remained unpublished until 1960, when the Astoria Verlag in Berlin issued a miniature score, edited and arranged by Clemens Schmalstich. In 1966, Theodora Schuster-Lott and Frieder Zschoch prepared a scholarly edition for the Deutsche Verlag für Music as part of the new Mendelssohn complete edition, “which was engraved, but never published except in a reduction by Walter-Heinz Bernstein for violin and two pianos.” Finally, in 1999 the 1960 miniature score was reissued in a scholarly edition with the wind and timpani parts added. And just in case you are wondering, the A-minor Piano Concerto of 1822 had until recently been unavailable in any edition, and the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra in E major, composed as a birthday gift for his sister Fanny, had to wait until 2003 before audiences could get a listen to the original version.

And just in case you are interested in all the works and versions by Felix Mendelssohn, they are now available to the general public and performing artists, have a quick look at this link!