People have travelled for reasons of business or war throughout history; but travelling just for pleasure (as a “tourist”) is a relatively new idea. After all, the difficulties involved were considerable, and the benefits not readily apparent to everyone. It is not surprising that the first “tourists” in the modern sense were scholars or artists, motivated by educational or aesthetic considerations such as Rousseau’s “back to nature,” or a desire to see famous sites that had inspired earlier works of art. Thus Goethe set out on an extended Italian journey in the 1780s, lured above all by ancient and Renaissance art; and in 1829, his young disciple and friend Felix Mendelssohn went to Scotland, a country he had read about in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and in the Ossianic poems–that is, James Macpherson’s famous forgeries of purported Old Gaelic originals.
The Hebrides, a group of islands off the Western coast of Scotland, presented a Romantic landscape if ever there was one. The 20-year-old Mendelssohn, eager to see the place, took off with a friend, Carl Klingemann, following a series of successful concerts in London. He visited Scott in Abbottsford, and travelled, often on foot, all over the Scottish highlands and islands, climbed mountains, slept in seedy village inns, braving bad weather and other nuisances. He recorded his experiences in the detailed letters he sent home to his family.
On August 7, Mendelssohn and Klingemann visited Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa, a vast cavern about 33 feet wide and 60 feet high that was penetrable for some 200 feet. In Klingemann’s words, “We were put out in boats, and lifted by the hissing sea up the pillar stumps to the celebrated Fingal’s Cave. A greener roar of waves surely never rushed into a stranger cavern–its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, and absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and without.”
As for Mendelssohn, he wrote home: “That you may understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there:” He then sketched the first 20 measures of what was to become the Hebrides overture, on two staves with an exact indication of the orchestration, quite close to the final version.
Mendelssohn set to work on the score upon his return from Scotland–some of it in Wales and some of it in Italy, his next travel destination in the autumn of 1830. For a long time he was dissatisfied with what he had written, producing no fewer than four versions of the piece, changing even the title, which was variously Die Hebriden, Die Fingalshöhle, or Ossian in Fingalshöhle. The work was finally premiered in London, on May 14, 1832, under the direction of Thomas Attwood, a one-time student of Mozart.
In the view of leading Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd, the main challenge the composer faced was “how to portray the exotic quality of the subject without sacrificing the requirements of musical structure.” Mendelssohn himself expressed the same dilemma in blunter terms, writing to his sister Fanny (an enormously gifted composer in her own right): “The middle portion…is too silly, and the whole working out smells more of counterpoint than of train oil, seagulls, and salt fish, and it must be the other way around.”
How can the dictates of Classical form, to which Mendelssohn was deeply committed, be reconciled with depicting roaring waves and ragged rocks? The composer didn’t want his contrapuntal skills to show, yet he was unwilling to do without them. The result is a sonata form that is regular in its general features, yet irregular in almost all the details. The main theme consists of repetitions of a single bar, repetitions that involve skipping from key to key in a rather unorthodox fashion, and proceed by thinly disguised parallel fifths (strictly forbidden by all harmony textbooks). All themes are handled with considerably more freedom than is the case in most early 19th-century symphonic works. The concluding coda is a perfect example of the contrapuntal skills Mendelssohn wanted to hide. And he did hide them well, because the section sounds nothing like a learned exercise: it is a single rise to a climax, at the end of which we hear the opening one-bar theme on a single clarinet, fading away as the pizzicato (plucked) strings play their last, soft unison notes.