- Person
- Felix Mendelssohn
- Lived
- 1809–1847
- Field
- Music
- From
- German
The story
In 1829, aged 20 and fresh from his triumphant revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion in Berlin, Felix Mendelssohn made his first visit to Britain at the invitation of Sir George Smart and the Philharmonic Society. After concerts in London he travelled north with his friend Karl Klingemann on a tour of Scotland. In Edinburgh, at Holyrood Palace, he noted down the opening theme of what became his Scottish Symphony.
The journey took him to the Hebrides and to the island of Staffa, a few miles from Mull, where Fingal's Cave opens to the sea between towering columns of black basalt. Legend linked the cave to the hero Fingal, father of the legendary bard Ossian. Mendelssohn was so moved that he wrote down the opening theme of an overture on the spot and sent it home in a letter that same evening, telling his sister Fanny that he wanted to show how extraordinarily the Hebrides had affected him.
He finished the overture on 16 December 1830, first calling it The Lonely Island. He then revised it, and the new version, now titled The Hebrides, was premiered in London on 14 May 1832. It was published the following year and dedicated to the Crown Prince of Prussia. When a German publisher issued it in 1834 as Fingal's Cave, that name stuck too, and the work is known by both titles today.
The Hebrides is a concert overture, a standalone piece meant to evoke a place or story rather than to introduce a play or opera, and some consider it an early tone poem. Its rolling, swelling music became one of the most famous musical portraits of a landscape. Johannes Brahms said he would gladly give all he had written to have composed something like it, and even Richard Wagner, later hostile to Mendelssohn, called it his masterpiece and him a landscape painter of the first order.
The overture has remained in the standard orchestral repertoire ever since. In 2002 the Bodleian Library in Oxford bought the original handwritten score for £600,000, a measure of how highly the piece is treasured nearly two centuries after Mendelssohn's visit to Staffa.
Why it matters
The Hebrides Overture gave the world a lasting musical image of Scotland's wild coast and helped establish the concert overture and tone poem as Romantic forms.
About Felix Mendelssohn
Romantic composer and conductor; revived the music of J.S. Bach and shaped 19th-century European music.
More about Felix Mendelssohn
- Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah premiered in Birmingham in 1846Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah, on the story of the Hebrew prophet, was commissioned by the Birmingham Festival and premiered at the city's Town Hall on 26 August 1846.
- Felix Mendelssohn sparked a Handel revival in GermanyIn 1833 Felix Mendelssohn opened the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf with Handel's Israel in Egypt, prepared from the original score, sparking a Handel revival in Germany.
- Felix Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843In 1843 Felix Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory, recruiting Robert Schumann and Ignaz Moscheles; it still exists today and bears his name.
- Felix Mendelssohn premiered Schubert's lost Great SymphonyOn 21 March 1839 Felix Mendelssohn conducted the premiere of Franz Schubert's Ninth Symphony in Leipzig, more than a decade after Schubert's death, after Robert Schumann found the manuscript.
- Felix Mendelssohn brought Bach's St Matthew Passion backIn 1829, aged 20, Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's all-but-forgotten St Matthew Passion in Berlin, the central event in the revival of Bach's music across Europe.
- Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto became one of the greatestFelix Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto in E minor in 1844 for his friend Ferdinand David; Joseph Joachim ranked it among the four great violin concertos.
- Felix Mendelssohn's music is heard at weddings and ChristmasFelix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, from his music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the tune of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing both come from his music.
- Felix Mendelssohn paid for Leipzig's first Bach monumentIn 1840 Felix Mendelssohn began a project for a monument to J. S. Bach in Leipzig, funding it with three concerts and paying the rest from his own fortune; it was unveiled in 1843.
Sources
- Felix Mendelssohn Wikipedia
- The Hebrides (overture) Wikipedia
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