Felix Mendelssohn had all the advantages of a wealthy family: travel, education, and social standing. However, so did a great many others. But few had weekly concerts in the home with Berlin's finest musicians, and the opportunity to have one's works performed and critiqued on a weekly basis. This positive and immediate feedback helped Mendelssohn develop quickly as a composer. His first "mature" works date from as early as his fifteenth year, and include the Octet (1825)and the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826).
A trip to Scotland, in 1829, led to at least two notable orchestral works, the Hebrides Overture and the Third Symphony. The account of his experience visiting Fingal's Cave was given in a letter by Mendelssohn's traveling companion: "Three days ago we were on our steamer and things were very different. The lower the barometer fell, the higher the sea rose. The ladies went down like ninepins, and one or two of the gentlemen followed their example. I wished my fellow-traveler in misery, Felix, had not been among them; but as an artist he gets along better with the sea than does his stomach. We were put out into boats and clambered past the hissing sea on stumps of columns up to the odiously celebrated Fingal's Cave. The many pillars make the inside resemble a monstrous organ. Black, resounding, and utterly without any purpose at all, it lies there, the broad gray sea inside it and in front of it." The experience and the cave were so inspiring that the first theme of the overture was conceived that day. So profound was the inspiration that Mendelssohn even had it orchestrated in final form in this first draft.
Even though Mendelssohn used the traditional classical orchestra of doubled winds, timpani, and strings, he was able to achieve a remarkable richness of orchestral color. The very fact that color was part of the initial conception of the Hebrides is seen in the orchestration of the first sketch. A preference for the "darker" instruments, such as cellos, violas, bassoons, and clarinets give the music its "Scottish summer" feel. Overcast skies, gray seas, and barren landscapes are clearly orchestrated into the music. Richard Wagner, no supporter of Mendelssohn as a musician or a Jew, had to admit that the Hebrides is a masterpiece of a landscape-painter of the first order. [Although one can possibly detect a criticism or devaluing of the composer in this compliment.]
Mendelssohn is referred to as a Classicist with Romantic leanings, one who relied heavily on previous forms and structures, while employing Romantic harmonies and melodies. As we see in this work, he was also an ingenious innovator. Mendelssohn's treatment of the main theme is completely original. The theme undergoes several transformations, much like the technique Liszt would formalize in the symphonic poems. These various transformations make up the first, both transitions, and the closing themes of the sonata-allegro structure. Even the second theme is similar to an inversion of the first theme. Also, the varieties of character and mood Mendelssohn achieves via the various mutations of the theme in orchestration, articulation, rhythm, and dynamics, foreshadows Wagner's development of the leitmotiv, something which Wagner noted about this work.