Felix Mendelssohn
Hebrides Overture (“Fingal’s Cave”)
Born into a cultured and loving family, Felix Mendelssohn was also fortunate enough to have his talent recognized early. His father, a banker, could afford private lessons for his son and enrolled both Felix and his musically talented sister Fanny in the Berlin Singakademie, where Felix studied composition with director Carl Friedrich Zelter. He blossomed quickly as a composer. By the time he was 11 years old, Mendelssohn had written over 40 works; when he was 17 he completed his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826). His parents encouraged their talented young son, but they also wanted him to be a well-rounded adult, with a chance to see and learn from the wider world. Thus, when the composer reached his 21st birthday in 1829, his father encouraged him to leave Germany on a series of travels, telling him “to examine the various countries closely,” as Mendelssohn later wrote. “I was to make my name and gifts known, and was to press forward in my work.”
And so Mendelssohn undertook his first journey to Britain in April of that year. During his trip he visited the island of Staffa in the Hebrides archipelago off the western coast of Scotland. These islands were supposedly the birthplace of the ancient bard Ossian (later discovered to be a creation of his ‘discoverer,’ James MacPherson, an 18th century writer). One of “Ossian’s” poems described the exploits of Fingal, or Fionn mac Cumhail, a warrior-hero of Gaelic mythology. Fingal was said to have built the Giant’s Causeway, a series of hexagonal columns of basalt along the northern coast of Ireland, as well as a sea grotto on the coast of Staffa formed of the same basaltic rock. Mendelssohn and his friend, the poet Carl Klingemann, braved choppy seas to row to the mouth of Fingal’s cave and view the basalt forms inside. Klingemann later described the cavern: “Its many pillars made it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and without.” Inspired by the sight, Mendelssohn returned to his inn and wrote a letter to his sister Fanny in which he enclosed twenty bars of a theme that would become the opening for his overture. He told her, “In order for you to understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came to my mind there.”
Mendelssohn completed the overture a year and a half later, in December of 1830, and presented it to his father as a birthday gift. He revised the work in 1832, titling it Die Hebriden (The Hebrides) and dedicating it to his friend, the pianist Ignatz Moscheles. It was premiered by the London Philharmonic Society and met with great success; composers such as Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann soon praised it as a masterpiece. Immediately after the premiere, Mendelssohn further revised the piece, and it was finally published in 1835 as Fingal’s Cave.
Low strings open the piece with the theme Mendelssohn had mailed off to his sister, a restless one-measure motif that repeats for 46 bars over continually changing harmonies and dynamics that rise and fall like the swelling sea. A brass fanfare announces the arrival of the second theme in D major, stated by cellos and bassoons. Critic Donald Tovey called this “quite the greatest melody that Mendelssohn ever wrote.” The violins take up the theme, the development leading to a turbulent climax that ends in another fanfare and a call-and-response series between brass and woodwinds. The recapitulation of the opening theme becomes increasingly more agitated, resulting in virtuosic work for the entire string section. A lovely clarinet duet provides a brief respite, then the extended coda returns us to the “storm” that subsides only in the final bars, with a soft repetition of the opening figure by clarinets and a quiet, rising statement by the flute.