Date of composition: 1829-1830
Premiere: 14 May 1832 in London
Duration: 10 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
First perfromed on 5 August 1885 in the Kurhaus of Scheveningen, conductor: Carl Joachim Andersen
In 1829, the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn travelled to England and Scotland for several months. From the west coast of Scotland, from where one can see the Hebridean islands, he sent his family a musical sketch. It contains the main theme of Mendelssohn’s most famous concert overture.
One may listen to the composition as absolute music – the artful working out of the first two themes, to which the fanfare-like sounds of the central section provide a gestural contrast – yet the work can equally well be interpreted in every detail as programme music: the gently descending theme introduced by the low instruments as a suggestive depiction of the surging sea, and the fanfares as an allusion to the battle scenes from the epic Songs of Ossian, which Mendelssohn was studying at the time.
It is therefore surely no coincidence that among the admirers of the work were the other two composers featured in this concert: Berlioz, one of the fathers of programme music, and Brahms, who remained committed to the primacy of absolute instrumental music.