Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (1829-32)
Great composers who visited Britain in the nineteenth century seldom ventured as far north as Scotland. Berlioz nearly made it in 1853, when it was suggested he perform Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Glasgow Choral Union, but the singers refused to have him as conductor. Chopin certainly made it in 1848, though the journey nearly killed him. But it was Mendelssohn whose Scottish tour in 1829 was the most productive of its kind ever undertaken by a composer from elsewhere.
Not only did Holyrood Palace inspire the opening of his Scottish Symphony (a theme which, aptly enough, was to reappear under the title of Bad Weather at the start of another of his works) but the sight of Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa obviously bowled him over during his voyage to the Hebrides. In a letter to his family, he spoke of how "extraordinarily" the scene affected him, and he enclosed 21 bars of music which, he said, had sprung to mind there. These were the first bars of the Hebrides overture, though the rest of the work was not completed until he reached Italy the following year. It was then, as one of his biographers later commented, “among the laurels and orange groves that his thoughts and affections carried him back to the waves of the North Sea.”
Most of the music of the overture is built from the undulating, repeated phrase with which it opens. Wagner described the piece as an "aquarelle," and compared one passage to the wailing of sea-winds. But perhaps, in saying this, he was thinking ahead to his own Flying Dutchman overture - Mendelssohn’s, for most of the way, is a seascape recollected in tranquillity, and not even the spiky woodwind in the work's inspired middle section nor the rough waves that rise towards the end (where the pace quickens, the strings hurtle along in semiquavers, and trumpets and drums add an element of menace) are allowed to disrupt the formal perfection of the score.
When the storm subsides, we can expect the little introductory motif to be still there, and so it is. It has already provided a link with the theme of the second subject, first heard on bassoons and cellos and subsequently, in a poetically extended form, on the clarinets. Sir Donald Tovey, in one of his famous essays, declared this to be quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote, but notice how it makes its point in the first place without disturbing the natural flow of the music. Facile? Subtle? There may be works by Mendelssohn that tread a tightrope between these qualities, but the grey and silver beauty of the Hebrides overture shows the hand of a master.
© Conrad Wilson
