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 among the most enduring of the nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. R. Larry Todd offers a historical, stylistic, and analytical guide to these three remarkable works. His clearly structured and accessible text is supported by a wealth of primary documents, including Mendelssohn's correspondence, memoirs of his friends, and nineteenth-century critical reviews.
"...Todd certainly does deal eloquently with the intertext between Mendelssohn's stance and that of the aethetician Adolph B. Marx, particularly in relation to their respective work around Goethe and Shakespeare." Steve Sweeney-Turner, The Musical Times
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.