A Midsummer Night's Dream: Wedding March, Op. 61

There is a peculiar emotional complexity to the Wedding March that its ubiquity as a processional has obscured. Mendelssohn wrote it as part of the incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream — a play of enchantment, confusion, metamorphosis, and comedy, full of fairies and mischief — and the march carries that context even when extracted from it. The famous brass fanfare is triumphant, yes, but also slightly formal, even self-consciously pompous in the way that ceremony often is, and underneath the grandeur there is something playful: the woodwind interjections, the light string passages that appear between the main statements, the sense that joy is being expressed with a small, knowing smile. The piece has the quality of theatrical music written by someone who understood theater: it creates an entrance, frames a moment, and then lets the moment breathe. The orchestration is relatively lean and transparent — Mendelssohn at his most classically balanced — which gives it brightness without heaviness. Generations of couples have walked down aisles to these bars, and this collective human use has become part of the music's meaning: it now carries with it the accumulated weight of countless individual moments of declaration and hope. You know it before you know you know it, and that familiarity is itself part of its function — it marks a threshold that everyone in the room recognizes at once.