OVERTURE, "FINGAL'S CAVE" [OR, "THE HEBRIDES"] [106]: Op. 26
Mendelssohn, visiting the Hebrides in 1829, was deeply impressed with what he saw. "In order to make you realize," he says in a letter written August 7, 1829, "how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there"—then follows, in notation, a passage from the overture. Later in the month he wrote from Glasgow: "How much lies between then and now! ... Staffa—scenery, travels, people: Klingerman [the friend who accompanied him] has described it all, and you will excuse a short note, especially as what I can best tell you is contained in the above music." In September he wrote from London: "'The Hebrides' story builds itself up gradually"; and early in the following year (January 21, 1832) he wrote from Paris: "I cannot bring 'The Hebrides' to a hearing here because I do not regard it as finished in the form in which I originally wrote it [the first version of the overture was finished late in 1830]. The middle portion ... is very stupid, and the whole working out smells more of counterpoint than of blubber, sea-gulls, and salt fish." His friend Klingermann wrote as follows of the impressions produced by Fingal's Cave: "We were put out in boats, and climbed, the hissing sea close beside us, over the pillar stumps to the celebrated Fingal's Cave. A greener roar of waters surely never rushed into a stranger cavern—comparable, on account of the many pillars, to the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, lying there absolutely purposeless in its utter loneliness, the wide, gray sea within and without."
It has been said of the music of this overture that, in hearing it, "you will think of yourself in a ship, gliding over rocking waves, about you a vast expanse of sea and sky, light breezes blowing, the romantic stories of the past coloring the sights that one has seen." Wagner, on the strength of this work, praised the composer as "a landscape painter of the first order."