1 - Background

Summary

Mendelssohn's concert overtures have always ranked among the most enduring staples of the nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire, a position conceded by even his staunchest critics. Richard Wagner, no slight disparager of Mendelssohn's music, viewed The Hebrides Overture as the ‘masterpiece’ of a ‘landscape-painter of the first order’; and George Bernard Shaw, who took Mendelssohn to task for his ‘kid glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering’, could only report glowingly in 1892 about the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture: ‘The most striking example I know of a very young composer astonishing the world by a musical style at once fascinating, original, and perfectly new, is Mendelssohn's exploit at seventeen years with the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture. One can actually feel the novelty now, after sixty-six years.’

Along with Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op. 27), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Op. 21) and The Hebrides (Op. 26) were conceived during Mendelssohn's student period of the 1820s and mark the culmination of his early efforts to make a decisively original contribution to orchestral music. A Midsummer Night's Dream dates from August 1826, less than a year after the completion of the extraordinary Octet (Op. 20) in October 1825, a period during Mendelssohn's sixteenth and seventeenth years that surely must count as the annus mirabilis in his development and maturation as a composer of the first rank. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, created like A Midsummer Night's Dream in Berlin, was first performed at the Mendelssohn home in September 1828; The Hebrides, of course, originated during the composer's Scottish sojourn in August 1829.

By his twentieth year, Mendelssohn thus had either discovered the ideas or completed scores for all three overtures.