A Scottish mystery

Mendelssohn’s travels

Invited to play and conduct in England in 1829, Felix Mendelssohn-bartholdy (above) then headed north to Scotland to explore the country’s sights. After visiting Edinburgh he took a steamer tour among the Inner Hebridean islands off Scotland’s west coast. Correspondence to the family back home includes a musical sketch named

Zur einsamen Insel (To the Lonely Island), which he says ‘came into my head there’.

But exactly where? When the steamer stopped by the isolated and uninhabited island of Staffa with its spectacular Fingal’s Cave, Mendelssohn was below decks, flattened by seasickness, and almost certainly saw none of this for himself. Other candidates for his inspiration are Lismore or Mull, neither of which is obviously ‘lonely’.

Perhaps one of Mendelssohn’s equally cultured travelling companions described Staffa to him, or sketched it, and this was enough to crystallise the music? The work was completed and performed as The Hebrides; but an edition of the score published in 1835 is named Fingalshöhle, ‘Fingal’s Cave’. The mystery looks set to remain a permanent fixture.