AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

90 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
THE VISUAL IMAGINATION OF A ROMANTIC SEASCAPE:
MENDELSSOHN’S HeBrideS OVERTURE REVISITED
Annett Richter
University of Missouri, Columbia
The strong presence of a visual imagination in Mendelssohn’s orchestral music has informed
recent musicological writing in its pioneering attempt to unlock the programmatic content
in the Hebrides (or Fingal’s Cave) Overture. As Thomas Grey has suggested, Mendelssohn’s
Hebrides Overture lends itself to the identification of a “complex of visual impulses . . . that
[characterize a] quintessential Mendelssohnian ‘landscape’ composition . . . with its masterful
evocations of wind and wave, light and shade, and its play of subtly patterned textures.”
Grey’s aligning of the visual aspects of the overture’s middle section with Ossianic history
paintings from the Napoleonic era makes his reading of the extra-musical content in this piece
innovative. However, the relationship between the overture and these particular paintings
seems to establish itself at best in their titles and in their presentation of historical figures. In
addition, Grey’s exploration of the visual narrative appears to be limited to the development
of the overture as it evokes “a visionary, phantasmagoric battle scene.” While the latter is a
valuable conjecture, this paper argues that not only the middle but also the outer sections of
the overture can be understood in reference to contemporary painting, specifically to British
seascape painting.
Grey interprets the beginning and ending of Fingal’s Cave as an uninhabited landscape
surrounded by water—an image which does not vanish once the central “battle scene” begins.
On the contrary, the presence of the sea in both the exposition and the recapitulation
not only frames the visual narrative of the overture, but it takes on different moods and represents
a powerful, fickle force of nature to which humankind is exposed in combat in the
development section. Drawing upon pertinent works by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), this
paper establishes parallels between contemporary British seascape painting and Mendelssohn’s
overture, and casts new light on the context in which we might reinterpret the “battle scene.”
Moreover, Mendelssohn’s own drawings and the letters he wrote to his family from his journey
to Scotland in 1829—documents that merit more attention from a musicological point
of view—become significant for rethinking the subject matter of this piece. Even though we
might be inclined to hear the Hebrides Overture as a sounding evocation of the past and historical
legends, the verbal and visual mementos from Mendelssohn’s journey to the Scottish
islands point instead to viewing the work as a realistic reflection of the collective impressions
the composer gathered while traveling to and visiting the Hebrides by steamboat. The observations
Mendelssohn repeatedly communicates here invest the overture with a subjective
immediacy and actuality that strongly parallel Turner’s paintings, particularly his Staffa, Fingal’s
Cave.
Through an iconographic reading of Mendelssohn’s drawings (View towards the Hebrides,
The Foot of Ben More, Falls of Moness) and Turner’s seascape paintings in close reference to
the overture, this study suggests that it is not the “Ossianic manner” but rather the realistic
and precarious nineteenth-century sea voyage that is central to the musical narrative in the
Hebrides Overture.