Mendelssohn - Wedding March

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in Hamburg in 1809. Despite his short life - he lived for only 38 years - he explored many musical genres and gave humanity a number of unforgettable melodies. Perhaps the best known is the Wedding March, composed as part of the incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The triplets sounding over a C harmony at the start of the Wedding March make almost everyone recognize it immediately: "Ohhh, the wedding music!" . There is a reason this piece became so popular. After the beautifully building C major, we wait eagerly for the full orchestra - or organ - to settle onto A minor, followed by a majestic B major, and then the theme glides past several times with such effortless grandeur that our ears can hardly drink in all the notes fast enough.

I was curious to see what could be made of this piece on a ukulele, since it requires a somewhat wider range. A single small instrument cannot reproduce the effect of a full orchestra, but I decided to try at least to adapt the main theme for ukulele. Following the chords and melody, this is what I came up with:

It is very important that on A minor we also fret the third fret of the A string - the note C. I marked this in the video as well. The chord will look as though we are holding A minor and C major at the same time:

[chord:Am-2-0-0-3]

This is a perfectly legitimate A minor chord, because A minor consists of the notes A, C and E. Adding that extra fretted note therefore does not interfere with the harmony; it is simply a note we do not usually fret in the basic shape.

The Wedding March is played at a wide variety of tempos. Sometimes it is performed as a very bouncy, fast march, which I do not particularly like - the same enormous mistake is often made with Mozart's Turkish March. A healthy medium, firm tempo works best: the notes should flow well and we should feel the energy, without sounding as though we are racing through the piece.

The weather is improving and wedding season will soon begin, so this popular and beautiful piece could even be learned for such occasions!