Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture Op. 26

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was a German composer, pianist, musical conductor, and teacher, one of the most celebrated figures of the early Romantic period. In his music Mendelssohn largely observed Classical models and practices while initiating key aspects of Romanticism—the artistic movement that exalted feeling and the imagination above rigid forms and traditions.

In 1811, during the French occupation of Hamburg, Mendelssohn's family had moved to Berlin, where the young Mendelssohn studied the piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, who, as a composer and teacher, exerted an enormous influence on his development. Other teachers gave Mendelssohn lessons in literature and landscape painting, with the result that at an early age Mendelssohn's mind was widely cultivated. His personality was nourished by a broad knowledge of the arts and was also stimulated by learning and scholarship. He traveled with his sister to Paris, where he took further piano lessons and where he appears to have become acquainted with the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mendelssohn was an extremely precocious musical composer. He wrote numerous compositions during his boyhood, among them 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concerti, sonatas, and fugues. Most of these works were long preserved in manuscript in the Prussian State Library in Berlin but are believed to have been lost in World War II. He made his first public appearance in 1818—at the age of nine—in Berlin.

He also became active as a conductor. On March 11, 1829, at the Singakademie, Berlin, he conducted the first performance since Bach's death of the St. Matthew Passion, thus inaugurating the Bach revival of the 19th and 20th centuries. Meanwhile he had visited Switzerland and had met Carl Maria von Weber, whose opera Der Freischütz, given in Berlin in 1821, encouraged him to develop a national character in music.

In the summer of 1829 he went to Scotland, of which he gave many poetic accounts in his evocative letters. He went there "with a rake for folksongs, an ear for the lovely, fragrant countryside and a heart for the bare legs of the natives." The literary, pictorial, and musical elements of Mendelssohn's imagination are often merged. Describing, in a letter written from the Hebrides, the manner in which the waves break on the Scottish coast, he noted down, in the form of a musical symbol, the opening bars of the Hebrides Overture.

Between 1830 and 1832 he traveled in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland and, in 1832, returned to London, where he conducted the Hebrides Overture and where he published the first book of the piano music he called Lieder Ohne Worte (Songs Without Words), completed in Venice in 1830. Gradually Mendelssohn, whose music in its day was held to be remarkable for its charm and elegance, was becoming the most popular of 19th-century composers in England. His main reputation was made in England, which, in the course of his short life, he visited no fewer than 10 times.

In 1833 he became music director at Düsseldorf, where he introduced into the church services the masses of Beethoven and Luigi Cherubini and the cantatas of Bach. At Düsseldorf, too, he began his first oratorio, St. Paul. In 1835 he became conductor of the celebrated Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig, where he not only raised the standard of orchestral playing but made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany. Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann were among his friends at Leipzig, where, at his first concert with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, he conducted his overture Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage).

In 1843 Mendelssohn founded at Leipzig the Conservatory of music where, together with Schumann, he taught composition. Visits to London and Birmingham followed, entailing an increasing number of engagements. These would hardly have affected his normal health; he had always lived on this feverish level. But at Frankfurt in May 1847 he was greatly saddened by the death of his sister. It is at any rate likely that for a person of Mendelssohn's sensibility, living at such intensity, the death of this close relative, to whom he was so completely bound, would undermine his whole being. In fact, after the death of his sister, his energies deserted him, and, following the rupture of a blood vessel, he soon died.

Mendelssohn was one of the first of the great 19th-century Romantic composers, and in this sense he remains even today a figure to be rediscovered.

The Hebrides Overture Op. 26
The Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra
Jansug Kakhidze, conductor

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Mendelssohn
• Felix
• Romantic
• Period
• The
• Hebrides
• Overture
• Lithuanian
• Chamber
• Orchestra
• Classical
• Music

[psrusek]

This tune includes one of the most perfect and inspired melody of all. The best music I've ever heard.

[everydayholidayay]

Wonderful tour to the Hebrides. Thanks. Brightest Blessings!



[zacharymd]

Mendelssohn composed this wonderful overture when he was just 20 year old.

It is a poem that sets the mood and takes you throughout the Hebrides.

Simply beautiful!

Thanks a lot :-)

[ChemindeFer100]

I've watched all your videos and really this is the one that has impressed me the most because of the beautiful pictures you have chosen to go along with this incredible composition by Mendelsohn.

Well done!

[ElijahGideon]

By far the best Hebrides Overture on YouTube. Very well executed.

At times mysterious, triumphant and exiting. What this composition was meant to be. Thanks for posting.

[willowcreekguy]

This is such an extraordinary overture by Mendelssohn with amazing images. Indeed a great video.

Thank you!