Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt), Overture in D major, Op. 27

Program notes

About the Work

Goethe’s two short poems Meeresstille (“Calm Sea”) and Glückliche Fahrt (“Prosperous Voyage”) were hugely popular in the early nineteenth century. Beethoven set them as a cantata for chorus and orchestra, Schubert set the first as a song, and in 1828 the nineteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn turned them into a concert overture without words. The titles are not a pair of synonyms. For a sailing ship a dead calm was a real danger, since without wind the crew could only wait, and the “prosperous voyage” begins when the breeze finally rises and the ship can move again.

The overture was first tried out privately at a concert in the Mendelssohn family home in Berlin on 7 September 1828. Mendelssohn kept revising it for several years afterwards.

Like The Hebrides, the overture is not a prelude to an opera or a play but an independent piece of orchestral scene-painting, and it anticipates the tone poems of later composers. Mendelssohn himself described the plan of the opening in a letter: a note “gently sustained by the strings for a long while hovers here and there and trembles, barely audible”, until the music comes to a halt “with thick chords and the Prosperous Voyage sets out”.

What to Listen For

The Calm Sea is an Adagio of almost motionless music: soft, sustained chords, a hymn-like melody in the strings, and a sense of waiting. There is no drama here, only stillness and unease.

Listen for the moment when a small rising phrase in the flute, like the first breath of wind, breaks the spell. The orchestra swells, the tempo quickens and the Prosperous Voyage begins, a bright and energetic Allegro in which the winds, timpani and trumpets join in. Near the end a broad, ceremonial passage seems to welcome the ship into harbour. Then comes Mendelssohn’s surprise: instead of ending with a blaze of brass, the overture closes quietly, with a brief, gentle memory of the voyage.