Hebrides Overture Op. 26, "Fingal's Cave"
        Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
        Composed 1829

Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, Germany on February 3, 1809. He was the son of a banker and the grandson of the noted philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. He was a prodigy and is nearly unique in that rare class as he was raised in a nurturing environment and not an exploitive one as were Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber. He made his debut as a concert pianist at age 9 and, at age 10, had one of his compositions performed by a local ensemble. His parents provided him with his own orchestra. Much of his early music, and that composed by his older sister Fanny, was meant to be performed at home using these forces. Having admired the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mendelssohn conducted the Passion According to St. Matthew to great acclaim at age 20, the year he first visited England.

Like Felix Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony, The Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave, is a result of the twenty-year-old composer's journey to the British Isles in 1829. Mendelssohn, and his companion, a diplomat named Klingemann, made what must have been a very arduous journey to this remote location on Scotland's western shore. Fingal's Cave is a phenomenon of nature, a sculpted indentation within the steep and angular basalt cliffs, hollowed out of the rock by the frequently hostile waves of the North Atlantic. Fingal's Cave is located on Staffa, a tiny, barren island just west of Mull which is part of the chain of islands known as the Inner Hebrides.

Upon seeing this fantastic landscape, Mendelssohn was inspired and composed 21 measures of music which he put in a letter home. On the following day, while seated in a row boat before the large grotto, he decided to incorporate into the work the music which had come to him the day before. The remote beauty of the Scottish coastline resulted in arguably one of the most wonderfully descriptive and powerfully dramatic concert overtures ever composed. It exists in three manuscripts, the original and two revisions. The published version is the shortest and clearly the one Mendelssohn preferred. Unlike most overtures of this time, The Hebrides Overture is not a work extracted from a larger scale composition such as an opera, a suite, or a ballet; but instead, was meant to stand alone as an orchestral work.

Early in the 19th century, the symphony as a musical form became the dominant feature of an orchestral concert. It was not until the end of the 18th century that the general public became accustomed to buying tickets and attending musical events in city-owned concert halls. The concert overture served some of the same functions as the other overtures. It helped to set the tone for the longer and more substantial music which was to come and also helped to quiet the audience. Because concert overtures are relatively short, they gave the management of the theater some extra time to seat late-comers.

Mendelssohn was a pioneer in this form. This fact is of particular interest because Mendelssohn was also one of the first "music directors" as we now define them. This perfect musician standardized the role of the conductor; that is to stand before the assembled musicians and extract from them his personal concept of the work by waving a baton in his right hand to keep time and using his left hand to signal entrances, establish balance between the sections, and convey dynamics and other nuances. As a music director, Mendelssohn saw the need for pieces such as his Hebrides Overture. When the work was published, "Fingal's Cave" appeared on the title sheet of the score and "Hebrides Overture" appeared on all the parts. Mendelssohn referred to the work in his letters as "The Solitary Island"; the original name he gave to the composition. The Overture is dedicated to Mendelssohn's friend, the great pianist Ignaz Moscheles.

Mendelssohn did use his conducting posts as a means to promote works by contemporary composers who interested him (Weber, Schumann, Cherubini) and to revisit the great works of the past devising concert programs featuring the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Handel, Gluck, and Haydn. He demanded that the musicians perform the music sensitively and accurately, and at the tempo that he set.

On March 28, 1837, Mendelssohn married Cecile Jeanrenaud and they produced five children. The marriage was a happy one, but the sudden death of his beloved Fanny in March of 1847 sent Mendelssohn into a downward spiral. He suffered a stroke and died at age 38 in Leipzig on November 4, 1847.

Joseph Truskot

      Concerto No.2 in F minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op.21
            Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
            Composed  (1829-1830)

Most of the qualities associated with the music of Frederic Chopin were developed after the Polish-born composer became the idol of Parisian salon society.

Thus it is the more remarkable that Chopin composed his two piano concertos, his only large-scale pieces for piano and orchestra, when he was scarcely twenty years old and still a resident of his native Poland. Realization that the F minor Concerto was one of Chopin's earliest compositions, written before he had seen Paris at all, causes both surprise and near incredulity. For the Concerto, despite certain structural weaknesses that have been cited far too often, is extraordinarily prescient of many traits of Chopin's later, more mature style. There are the delectably limpid melodies, many notes of which are surrounded with an elaborate garlanding of non-harmonic ornamental tones and the frequent passing modulations which are responsible for the shimmering, motile texture of so much of Chopin's harmony. There are no actual Polish folk tunes, although the finale is in the style of a Krakowiak -- a dance originating in the city of Cracow.

It is quite certain that Chopin had not heard Beethoven's piano concertos, models for most composers of the time, by 1830 when he essayed his own concertos. His models were probably such minor composers as Moscheles and Hummel. Hence, his sometimes faltering treatment of the concerto form is not surprising. After his arrival in Paris, Chopin was influenced by the salon tastes of the cult that fostered his career and he wrote mostly shorter, "character" pieces. Therefore, the two concertos written in adolescence remain our only indication of what this greatly gifted composer might have written had his mature life been passed in a more intellectual, less hedonistic environment.

Louise Cuyler

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op.55  "Eroica"
          Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
          Composed (1803)

Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is one of music's landmark works, not only a towering masterpiece in itself, but the gateway between the dwindling classical and the emerging romantic styles. Certainly music has never been the same since Beethoven; still less has the symphony been the same since the Eroica. Apparently Beethoven had planned his Third Symphony as a gesture of homage to Napoleon Bonaparte whom he had admired extravagantly as a champion of democracy. When the Revolutionary Frenchman declared himself Emperor, however, Beethoven, in a fury of disillusion, discarded his original plan. A copy of the Eroica in the library of the Gessellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, not an autograph but with notes in Beethoven's own hand, still shows a partially erased caption "intitulata buonoparte." Instead, "Sinfonia eroica, per festeggiar il sovenire d'un gran uomo." (Heroic symphony to celebrate a great man) -- the Eroica in familiar parlance.

Our present-day surfeit with the voluptuous sounds of late romantic music, not to mention the cerebral concoctions of the serialists, makes difficult a true comprehension of such direct, eloquent music as Beethoven's Eroica. The essential power of the work derives from nobility of concept, candid, memorable themes, and a plan for dispersion of them within the general framework of a classical design. Many gestures that were to be Beethoven hallmarks emerge in the Eroica: a profusion of inspired themes and motivic materials; frequent use of Sforzato (a sudden violent accent) and expansion of materials in a fashion scarcely dreamed of by classical composers. A few comments on each of the four movements follow.

1. Allegro con brio
Two terse E-flat chords in full orchestra are followed by the Eroica motto-theme, revealed in simple grandeur by cellos. This is truncated summarily at its fifth measure by the chromatic note C-sharp, and the next measures are devoted to restoration of the key of E-flat, then development of the Eroica them. The heroic dimension of the first movement is indicated by its total length: all of 691 measures -- more than twice the length of the typical Haydn or Mozart first movement.

2. Marcia funebre (Adagio assai)
This funeral march, lament for the "hero" of the title, replaces the symphony's traditional slow movement. It is cast in a large three-part design (ABA) with its middle section in C-major to contrast the C-minor of the Marcia. The pathos of the movement undoubtedly helped endear it, and the entire Symphony, to the romantic generations that followed Beethoven.

3. Scherzo (Allegro vivace)
A typical Beethoven scherzo movement with a favorite Beethoven ruse -- insertion of a sudden section of "two" rhythm just before the close, to revitalize the predominant "three" of the Scherzo.

4. Finale (Allegro molto)
The basic materials for this imposing set of variations are two themes from Beethoven's Prometheus music. A brilliant flourish in form of a perpetual motion for strings, followed by several brusque chords sets the stage for the first of the Prometheus themes, heard pizzicato in strings. The second, more lyric Prometheus theme is added in woodwinds at the third variation. There are seven variations in all finishing with a rousing Coda for this glorious Symphony.

Louise Cuyler