Here is the adventure surrounding the writing and performance of the concert overture
called ‘The Hebrides’. The music was inspired by composer Felix Mendelssohn’s
visit to Scotland in 1829 culminating in a sea voyage from the Isle of Mull to
Fingal’s Cave on the uninhabited, tiny, rocky, Hebridean Isle of Staffa.
The
Scene
The
year, 1829: Sir Robert Peel introduces the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 into
Parliament to establish a unified police force for London; madman Jonathan
Martin sets York Cathedral on fire, doing £60,000 of damage; Britain outlaws
suttee in India (a widow burning herself to death on her husband's funeral
pyre); William Austin Burt patents America's first typewriter; Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe's ‘Faust, Part 1’ premieres; The first Oxford and Cambridge
University Boat Race takes place; the Greek War of Independence ends after eight
years and six months; the ‘William Tell’ opera, Gioachino Rossini's last and
greatest, premieres in Paris; J.S. Bach's ‘St Matthew Passion’ is revived by
Felix Mendelssohn, conducting in Berlin; later that year the composer visits England
– and Scotland.
In
1822 Mendelssohn was thirteen. The Caledonian Canal, engineered by Thomas
Telford, was opened, linking the east and west coasts of Scotland through the
Great Glen from Clachnaharry on the Beauly Firth near east-coast Inverness to Corpach on
Loch Linnhe near Fort William on the west.
The
Journey
In
1829, Mendelssohn accepted an invitation to travel to England. The invite was
from Sir George Smart, an English musician, and the Philharmonic Society based
in London. Following a tour of England, Mendelssohn extended his travels to
Scotland, where he began work on his Symphony No. 3, 'The Scottish'. His voyages
through the rugged loch-strewn Highlands of western Scotland included
traversing its waterways by means of the new-fangled steamboat.
The
first commercially successful steamboat in Europe, Henry Bell's Comet of
1812, started a rapid expansion of steam services on the Firth of Clyde, and
within four years a steamer service was in operation on the inland Loch Lomond,
a forerunner of the lake steamers still gracing Swiss lakes. It is this type of
vessel that would have taken Felix on the water stages of his journey through the
Scottish Highlands. Remember that although these boats were then no longer
dependent on wind and tide, their engines were not yet terribly efficient. You
can imagine, like any steam engine powered by coal, a black, sooty, billowing
chimney smoke, a substantial amount of engine noise and a trail of engine oil
in its wake.
Now,
a ‘skiff’ in contrast is a seaworthy rowing boat, sometimes rigged with sail
and on 8th August, after the relative luxury of their steamboat trip, two
friends were being rowed in such an ecologically friendly but relatively small,
vunerable boat from the Isle of Mull to the uninhabited, rocky Isle of Staffa in
the Inner Hebrides, far up the west coast of Scotland. One of the friends was
being violently sick over the side of the boat but insisting as he held a
kerchief to his mouth and gripped his somersaulting stomach that they carry on
with their once-in-a-lifetime adventure to visit Fingal’s Cave. After all,
despite the ocean’s swell, the weather was not too bad at all!
Felix
Mendelssohn, composer, conductor, soloist, born 3rd February, 1809,
Hamburg, died 4th November, 1847, Leipzig, was born into a prominent
Jewish family and founded the Leipzig Conservatory, a bastion of anti-racial
sentiment. He was a romantic but
conservative composer whose works were meticulously created, usually undergoing
radical revision before completion. A crowning achievement of his was to create
a revival of interest in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, as suggested
above. He is also attributed with
introducing the concert overture (as opposed to the operatic overture), most
notably ‘The Hebrides’.
He,
Chopin and Schumann are a trinity of early 19th C. romanticism
representing a refined, less expansive style than the more extroverted Berlioz
and Liszt, or the theatrical Wagner. His music is charming but never
philosophically deep, enchantingly magical, with a genius for the scherzo. And,
clearly, he had a yen for travel.
The
day before, on the 7th August, the young Felix and friend, Karl
Klingemann, journeyed by steamer from Fort William down Loch Linnhe to Oban and
then to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. Next day, they set out for the Inner
Hebrides Isle of Staffa to visit Fingal’s Cave.
Felix’s
companion, Klingemann, was a diplomat, born in Limmer an der Leine in
1798. He was secretary of the Hanoverian Legation, a diplomatic office in Berlin and, from 1828, was
located in London. He was also a gifted poet and was Mendelssohn’s companion throughout
his travels to Scotland.
The
composer and his friend took the journey to Staffa to view the cave and eventually
were able to sit in the rocking boat at the mouth of this awe-inspiring
formation. His friend, Klingemann, wrote that Mendelssohn, terribly seasick
during the trip, got “along better with the sea as an artist than as a human
being with a stomach.”
The cave, part
of the Ulva estate of the Clan MacQuarrie from an early date until 1777, was brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by 18th-century
naturalist Sir Joseph Banks in 1772.
It
became known as Fingal's Cave after the eponymous hero of an epic poem by 18th-century
Scots poet-historian James Macpherson. The relevant section formed part of his
Ossian cycle of poems claimed to have been based on old Scottish Gaelic poems.
In
Irish mythology, the hero Fingal is known as Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to
Finn McCool and it is suggested that Macpherson rendered the name as Fingal
(meaning ‘white stranger’) through a misapprehension of the name which in old
Gaelic would appear as Finn. The legend of the Giant's Causeway has Fionn or
Finn building the causeway between Ireland, in County Antrim on the north coast
of Northern Ireland, and Staffa.
The
roots of the construction between the Causeway in Antrim and Fingal’s Cave go
back much further than the poem, however. Both visible geological wonders were
created up to 60 million years ago by the same Paleocene lava flow and share
the same unexpectedly symmetrical hexagonally-joined basalt pillars which
countless tourists have since delighted in using as stepping stones. According
to local experts, Staffa Tours, the columns of rock at both Giant’s Causeway
and Fingal’s Cave were laid down at the same time.
Thousands
of years ago, the cave was formed when underground pressures forced open a
crack, which was further hewn by violent waves striking Staffa. The cave’s
natural and spectacular acoustics amplify the sounds of the waves within its
arched roof, earning the cave the Gaelic name ‘Uamh-Binn’, the cave of melody. The
melody of the waves can be heard by visitors, including the astounded Felix and
Karl, too, well before the visiting boat arrives. Teeming birdlife nests on
Staffa from late April to August including puffins and the two friends had more
than a chance of spotting seals, porpoises, dolphins, basking sharks and even, perhaps,
whales on the trip to the island.
The
Music
The
Hebrides Overture began life with an opening theme that Felix jotted down in
Tobermory and sent back home to his sister, Fanny. Although intending to
represent his experiences travelling through the Hebrides in the manner of a
tone poem, the overture has had several name changes, including the title
‘Fingal’s Cave’, which was added by the publisher Hartmann & Breitkopf to
the version published in 1834. Today, in the UK, it is still known as ‘The
Hebrides’.
The
Hebrides is in sonata form, its first subject, suggesting the deep feelings of
loneliness and solitude that Fingal’s cave evokes, announced right at the
beginning in B minor; the second subject, depicting rolling waves, is in the
relative (D) major, followed by a development section, recapitulation and coda.
Moving from B minor to D major and then to F sharp minor in the opening six
bars gives a wild, stark feeling to the music suggesting a primitive, bleak
beauty. Mendelssohn, the arch master of
counterpoint, would normally have avoided this sequence, but here, blatantly,
he was unfettered and released himself from convention.
The
overture was, true to form, revised by the composer, particularly the middle
section which Mendelssohn called “… stupid … (savouring) more of counterpoint
than of oil and seagulls and dead fish …”. Without knowing about that intentional
musical reference to oil, seagulls and fish, the listener can be forgiven for
simply visualising an idylle, seeing with the inner eye the swell, storms and indeed calm of the ocean and the rocks and cave of the isle hewn by immeasurable inner volcanic forces but now fixed, a monument to their violent history. However, the steamships were filthy beasts and
there was no environmental lobby to object to the slicks of oil that
accompanied them through the Caledonian canal and beyond. The oil and steamboat
propellers were fatal to wildlife including the fish and, inevitably, the
birdlife, too. It was this that Felix was alluding to when revising the middle
section of his overture.
The
final version was ready for its first performance in London at the Philharmonic
Society on 14th May, 1832, conducted by Thomas Attwood. The concert
also featured Mendelssohn's ‘Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream’. The final
revision was completed by 20 June, 1832, and premiered on 10 January, 1833, in
Berlin under the composer's own baton.
