It is no secret that Felix Mendelssohn had a lifelong love of Scotland. Following his first visit at the age of 20, it quickly became a country he adored, so it’s not surprising perhaps that a number of his works have a Scottish narrative.
After spending some time in Edinburgh during this first visit, he travelled to Oban on the west coast, then on to the Island of Mull. It was from there, on 7th August 1829, that the young Mendelssohn wrote to his family ‘In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides have affected me, I have written down the following which came to mind …’, and enclosed in the letter was the first 21 bars of the Hebrides Overture with full details of instrumentation and dynamics!
Perhaps less known though, given the works full title, is that Mendelssohn had yet to visit Fingal’s Cave when he sketched these opening bars! It was the following day that Mendelssohn and his travelling partner, Carl Klingemann, boarded a boat to the deserted island of Staffa, and into the famous cave. Mendelssohn was too sea-sick to write a thing during this excursion, but Klingemann noted that the many pillar stumps looked ‘like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding absolutely without purpose, and quite alone’. It wasn’t until the following year that Mendelssohn completed his score for the overture, and was purportedly deeply unhappy with the central section, although it wasn’t until 1832 that he revised the work into the version we hear here.
Full of rising and falling dynamics, subtle harmonic shifts and a kaleidoscope of instrumental colour, the music is a stunning depiction of both the sea, the Hebrides and Fingal’s Cave, of Mendelssohn’s immense skill in depicting moods and landscapes through music, and of his love of Scotland.
Programme note © Amy Campbell
