Mendelssohn saw Staffa and Fingal’s Cave on August 7, 1829. He at once determined to picture the scenes in music. He wrote to his sister on that day: “That you may understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind”; and he then noted down twenty-one measures in alla breve, which coincide for the first ten and a half measures with the later measures in 4-4. Ferdinand Hiller, who lived with Mendelssohn in Paris during the winter of 1831-32, tells how Mendelssohn brought to him the sketched score. “He told me how the thing came to him in its full form and color when he saw Fingal’s Cave; he also informed me how the first measures, which contain the chief theme, had come into his mind. In the evening he was making a visit with his friend Klingemann on a Scottish family. There was a pianoforte in the room; but it was Sunday, and there was no possibility of music. He employed all his diplomacy to get at the pianoforte for a moment; when he had succeeded, he dashed off the theme out of which the great work grew. It was finished at Düsseldorf, but only after an interval of years.” Hiller was mistaken about the place and time of completion.
The overture was first performed on May 14, 1832, from manuscript, in London, at the sixth concert of the Philharmonic Society at Covent Garden. Thomas Attwood conducted. The composer wrote: “It went splendidly, and sounded so droll amongst all the Rossini things.” The Athenæum said that the overture as descriptive music was a failure. George Hogarth wrote in his History of the Philharmonic Society (1862): “It at once created a great sensation—a sensation, we need scarcely add, that has not been diminished by numberless repetitions. At a general meeting of the Society on the 7th of June, 1832, Sir George Smart read a letter from Mendelssohn requesting the Society’s acceptance of the score of this overture; and it was resolved to present him with a piece of plate in token of the Society’s thanks, which was forthwith done.” The Harmonicon praised the overture highly, and found the key of B minor well suited to the purpose.
CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN, IN E MINOR, OP. 64
I. Allegro molto appassionato II. Andante III. Allegretto non troppo; allegro molto vivace
The concerto does not call for any true depth of emotional display. The sentiment is amiable and genteel, with a dash of becoming melancholy, and the strength is the conventional strength of a man who in music had little virility. Beautifully made, a polished piece of mechanism, the concerto always, under favorable circumstances, interests and promotes contagious good feeling.
Mendelssohn in his youth composed a violin concerto with accompaniment of stringed instruments, also a concerto for violin and pianoforte (1823) with the same sort of accompaniment. These works were left in manuscript. It was at the time that he was put into jackets and trousers. Probably these works were played at the musical parties at the Mendelssohn house in Berlin on alternate Sunday mornings. Mendelssohn took violin lessons first with Carl Wilhelm Henning and afterwards with Eduard Rietz, for whom he wrote this early violin concerto. When Mendelssohn played any stringed instrument, he preferred the viola.
As early as 1838 Mendelssohn conceived the plan of composing a violin concerto in the manner of the one in E minor, for on July 30 he wrote to Ferdinand David: “I should like to write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E minor is running in my head, and the beginning does not leave me in peace.” On July 24 of the next year he wrote from Hochheim to David, who had pressed him to compose the concerto: “It is nice of you to urge me for a violin concerto! I have the liveliest desire to write one for you, and if I have a few propitious days here, I’ll bring you something. But the task is not an easy one. You demand that it should be brilliant, and how is such a one as I to do this? The whole of the first solo is to be for the E string!”
The concerto was composed in 1844 and completed on September 16 of that year at Bad Soden, near Frankfort-on-the-Main. David received the manuscript in November. Many letters passed between the composer and the violinist. David gave advice freely. Mendelssohn took time in revising and polishing. Even after the score was sent to the publishers in December, there were more changes. David is largely responsible for the cadenza as it now stands.
Mendelssohn played parts of the concerto on the pianoforte to his friends; the whole of it to Moscheles at Bad Soden.