Music historians have long recognized the concert overture as a genre in which Mendelssohn made a signal contribution. Though The Hebrides and A Midsummer Night's Dream retain a preferred status as his most frequently performed overtures, for several reasons they should be considered together with the Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, thereby forming the group of three overtures treated in this volume. All three works were conceived or composed during Mendelssohn's student period of the 1820s, and indeed all three intermittently occupied his best efforts until well into the 1830s. Mendelssohn himself viewed the three as a coherent group: he deliberately withheld their publication in full score until 1835, when he finally allowed Breitkopf & Härtel to release the three together as Drei Concert-Ouverturen. Despite their disparate subjects – a Shakespeare play, two short poems of Goethe, and impressions of the Hebrides – the three reveal a commonality of stylistic approach to form, tonal planning, thematic transformation, orchestration, and treatment of programmatic ideas. The present study is intended to explore the relationships among the three works by considering, in turn, their rather complex geneses, their stylistic sources, formal structure, programmatic conception, and orchestration, and, finally, their influence and reception in the nineteenth century.

In preparing this study the author has incurred several debts to colleagues, students, and the staff at Cambridge University Press. In particular he wishes to thank Prof. Julian Rushton, the series editor of the Cambridge Music Handbooks, for his advice and counsel during the preparation of the manuscript.