The Hebrides, Overture in B minor, Op. 26 (“Fingal’s Cave”)

Program notes

About the Work

In the spring of 1829 Felix Mendelssohn, twenty years old and already the composer of the Octet and the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, went to London. When the concert season ended he set off north with his friend Karl Klingemann for a tour of Scotland. In early August they reached the west coast, within sight of the Hebrides. Mendelssohn wrote home at once: ‘In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my head there.’ Beneath the sentence he wrote out twenty-one bars of music, with notes on the orchestration. They are the opening of this overture, almost exactly as we know it.

The boat trip to the island of Staffa and its basalt sea cave, Fingal’s Cave, came only after that letter was begun. The cave gave the piece its nickname, but the music was already under way before he saw it.

Finishing it was harder. A first version was complete by the end of 1830, and Mendelssohn kept revising it. The overture was first played in London in May 1832, by the Philharmonic Society. He could not settle on a title either: The Lonely Island, The Isles of Fingal, The Hebrides and Fingal’s Cave were all used at one time or another, and the last two have both stuck.

It is a concert overture, which means that it introduces no play or opera. It stands alone, about ten minutes long, and it does not tell a story. It paints a place and the feeling of being there.

What to Listen For

The first bar is the idea Mendelssohn sent home: a short falling figure in the violas, cellos and bassoons, repeated higher, then higher again, while the violins and woodwinds hold long notes above. It sounds like water moving under still air, and nearly everything that follows grows out of it.

The second theme rises out of the cellos and bassoons, in the major: a long, warm melody that the violins then take over. The middle of the piece is stormier, with fanfares in the brass and the wave figure driven hard through the strings. Near the end, listen for the second theme coming back quietly on the clarinets, like a memory, before a last squall and a close that fades to almost nothing.