The Hebrides, Op. 26 "Fingal's Cave" by Felix #Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
The inspiration for The Hebrides overture came to Felix Mendelssohn while he was visiting the eponymous archipelago located off the west coast of Scotland during a walking tour with his friend Karl Klingemann. The two travelers may have been attracted to the remote islands by James MacPherson's infamous "translations" of ancient Gaelic epics concerning the hero Fingal. Although the poems had been debunked as eighteenth-century concoctions from MacPherson's own hand, they remained internationally popular and exerted tremendous influence on the Romantic Movement. The trip was part of Mendelssohn's travels during the years 1829 to 1832 that formed his Grand Tour, a common excursion taken by young men of prominent families to gain cultural literacy. Documentation of such journeys often consisted of letters home or drawings and watercolor paintings; Mendelssohn left all of these plus concert music.
Unlike his overtures A Midsummer Night's Dream and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, The Hebrides was not inspired by a text, but rather by a landscape, an atmosphere. The first sketch Mendelssohn made of his impressions of the Hebrides was literally that—a pen and ink drawing dated August 7, 1829. A letter home bearing the same date and titled "On a Hebridean Island" stated "in order to make you realize how extraordinarily the Hebrides have affected me, the following came into my mind there." Mendelssohn attached a sketch in piano reduction of the first twenty-one bars of the piece, indicating both scoring and dynamics, in almost exactly final form.
Mendelssohn completed and revised the piece in Italy in 1830. He revised it once more in England and France in 1832; Breitkopf and Härtel published the overture in parts in 1834 and full score in 1835. With each new revision and publication came a variation on the title: Mendelssohn called the work The Hebrides, Overture to the Lonely Island, Overture to the Isles of Fingal, Overture to the Hebrides, and Fingal's Cave.
Mendelssohn and Klingemann did not visit the famous "melodious" sea cave until August 8, 1829, a day after Mendelssohn's initial inspiration. However, Mendelssohn's eventual inclusion of the cave in the title inspired his publishers, critics and the public more than the mere idea of the Hebrides themselves. In an 1834 review, the German music periodical Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote, "the title 'zu den Hebriden' is thus far too general ... in listening to this music one should think of Staffa and its famous cave. All of the music bears witness to its simple greatness."
The evolution of the work's title suggests that Mendelssohn was not chained to specificity, but aimed to depict in abstract the atmosphere of the Hebrides archipelago. The piece can be called "characteristic" as easily as "programmatic." Mendelssohn sought an aesthetic that would not directly evoke the music of Scotland, yet would be true to the spirit of the locale; many of his revisions removed traces of complex compositional craft in favor of more primitive, and by extension, exotic language. We can find traces of this even in the repetitions of the first theme, the ornamented descending triads that occur twice on B Minor, twice on D Major, and twice on F-sharp Minor. Here Mendelssohn uses A-natural rather than A-sharp to give a modal character that suggests the ancient. In a letter to his sister Fanny, he claimed he sought a language that favored "train oil, salt fish, and seagulls over counterpoint."
- Notes by Eric Sandoval
