Mendelssohn: The Hebrides and Other Overtures

Larry Todd offers a historical, stylistic, and analytical guide to three remarkable works which secured for Mendelssohn no small measure of his fame.

R. Larry Todd (Author)

9780521407649, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 September 1993

132 pages, 2 tables 27 music examples
21.6 x 14 x 0.8 cm, 0.18 kg

'R. Larry Todd's slim volume about Mendelssohn's overtures is packed through with fascinating detail …' Newsletter, Ipswich Arts Association

The concert overtures A Midsummer Night's Dream, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave), conceived by Mendelssohn before the age of twenty, have ranked amongst the most enduring of the nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. R. Larry Todd offers a historical, stylistic, and analytical guide to these three remarkable works which secured for Mendelssohn no small measure of his fame. After placing the overtures in the context of Mendelssohn's astonishing compositional development during the 1820s, the volume disentangles the complex history of their creation and considers in turn their style and formal structure, their contents as programme music, aspects of their orchestration and their reception and influence. All this is supported by a wealth of primary documents, including Mendelssohn's correspondence, memoirs of his friends, and nineteenth-century critical reviews.

1. Background
2. Genesis
3. Musical influences
4. Formal considerations: a synoptic overview
5. The Overture as programmatic music
6. Some thoughts on Mendelssohn's orchestration
7. Influence and reception of the overtures.

Subject Areas: Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH]