Fingal’s Cave (Hebrides) Overture, Op. 26 — Felix Mendelssohn

On the 7th of August 1829, after a rough trip across the sea from Oban, Mendelssohn, his friend Karl Klingemann and a boatload of fellow sight-seers were put ashore on the island of Staffa in the Hebrides. As Klingemann recalled, “We clambered along by the hissing sea on the stumps of pillars to the celebrated Fingal’s Cave - with its many columns it resembles the interior of an immense organ. It lies there alone, black, echoing, and entirely purposeless - the grey waste of the sea in and around it.” The composer, who was not as good a sailor as Klingemann, had less to say about it but, to demonstrate how much the Hebrides had affected him, on that same day in August he wrote down for his sister a melodic idea which, he said, “came to my mind there.”

That was the beginning of the Hebrides Overture. Although the six-note motif can have meant very little even to Fanny Mendelssohn when the composer sent it to her out of context, from its first entry in the opening bars of the overture (on bassoon and lower strings over sustained B minor harmonies) it has a peculiarly intense atmospheric influence. The greatness of the work rests in the fact that the same theme has an equally positive technical effect - although the score had to be revised several times before Mendelssohn found the right balance between form and content and was satisfied that it was ready for its first performance in London in 1832.

In the finished version of the overture the six-note Hebridean theme recurs literally dozens of times, in its original shape or in any one of several variant forms. Out of hearing only for as long as it takes to introduce the lovely second subject on cellos in D major, it undergoes a dramatically poetic development in an orchestral storm evocatively coloured by fanfares and bird calls carried on the changing wind. An abbreviated recapitulation makes way for a resumption of the storm in an animato coda and a suddenly peaceful ending which neatly combines the two main themes in the final bars.