The Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave)
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig, Saxony, on November 4, 1847. Bartholdy was the name of his mother’s brother Jakob, who had changed his own name from Salomon, taking Bartholdy from the previous owner of a piece of real estate he had bought in Berlin. It was he who persistently urged the family’s conversion to Lutheranism: the name Bartholdy was added to Mendelssohn—to distinguish the Protestant Mendelssohns from the Jewish ones—when Felix’s father converted in 1822, the children having already been baptized in 1816.
Mendelssohn completed the Hebrides Overture in December 1830 and revised it twice. The original premiere was given by London’s Philharmonic Society Orchestra led by Thomas Attwood at Covent Garden. The composer himself led the first performance of the final version on January 10, 1833, in Berlin.
The score of the overture calls for 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
The twenty-year-old Mendelssohn visited Scotland in August 1829, following a successful engagement with the Philharmonic Society of London and in the company of his friend and traveling companion Karl Klingemann. On August 7, the two visited Fingal’s Cave, a tourist attraction on the southwest shore of Staffa, one of the Hebrides Islands off Scotland’s west coast. On August 10, Klingemann wrote from Glasgow that “the Highlands and the sea together brew nothing but whiskey, fog, and foul weather....Three days ago we were on our steamer....The lower the barometer fell, the higher the sea rose. It stretched its myriad tentacles ever more brutally and churned more and more,” and he described Fingal’s Cave with its basalt columns as resembling “the interior of an immense organ. It lies there alone, black, echoing, and entirely purposeless—the grey waste of the sea within and without it.” Mendelssohn’s own impression arrived home in the form of a twenty-two-measure musical sketch designed to convey “how amazingly the Hebrides affected [him]” and from which grew the opening of the Fingal’s Cave Overture.
Mendelssohn seems never to have resolved the choice of title. Before the overture’s completion, he referred to it as “The Hebrides.” The first score was entitled “The Lonely Island” but was originally played as “The Isles of Fingal.” The printed parts of the first version had the title “Hebrides,” but the published score of the revised overture was entitled “Fingal’s Cave.”
“I would gladly give all my works if I had succeeded in composing a piece like the Hebrides Overture,” wrote Johannes Brahms. Richard Wagner, considerably more tolerant of Mendelssohn the composer than of Mendelssohn the conductor, viewed this overture as “one of the most beautiful works of music that we have,” as the masterpiece of “a first-class landscape painter....There is a magnificent intellectual vision throughout, a fine sensibility; and the manifestations of both are reproduced with the greatest art.” British commentator and composer Donald Francis Tovey wrote that, in this piece, “Mendelssohn was surely occupied chiefly with the unconscious digesting of his impressions of Hebridean scenery, the roar of the waves rolling into the cavern, the cries of sea-birds, and perhaps more than anything else, the radiant and telescopic clearness of the air when the mist is completely dissolved or not yet formed.”
The overture’s principal musical idea is a descending motive ripe for expansion and development, and the sense of space in this piece is suggested at once by the overlapping octaves in violins, clarinets, oboes, and flutes. The initial picture is completed by string tremolos and rustling woodwinds as the seascape unfolds. The second theme—“quite the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote,” states Tovey—is as expansive as the initial idea is concise. Later in the piece there is room for fanfares and elemental outbursts, but also for the sort of “staccato e leggiero” motion typical of Mendelssohnian scherzos. The overture ends quietly, with as much sense of mystery and anticipation as at the beginning. For the further spelling out of so much that is embodied in this work one may look to yet another of Mendelssohn’s compositions, inspired by the same trip to Scotland in 1829, begun when work on the Fingal’s Cave Overture was in progress, but not completed until twelve years later, in 1842—the Scottish Symphony.
Marc Mandel
Marc Mandel, former Director of Program Publications for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the staff of the BSO in November 1978 and managed the orchestra’s program book from 1979 until his retirement in July 2020. He is co-editor of Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976, published in May 2026 by Oxford University Press.
The first American performance of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture was given by George Loder with the Philharmonic Society in New York’s Apollo Rooms on November 16, 1844. A Boston performance took place on March 15, 1845, at the Odeon, with George J. Webb conducting the Academy of Music.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of the Hebrides Overture took place in Worcester on January 4, 1883, with Georg Henschel conducting, followed by performances in Boston, Cambridge, and Providence.