The Hebrides (overture) a concert conducted by Thomas Attwood, that also featured Mendelssohn's "Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream". The final revision was completed by 20 June 1832. and premiered on 10 January 1833 in Berlin under the composer's own baton. The music, though labelled as an overture, is intended to stand as a complete work. Although programme music, it does not tell a specific story and is not "about" anything; instead, the piece depicts a mood and "sets a scene", making it an early example of such musical tone poems. The overture consists of two primary themes; the opening notes of the
Overture poem, a form devised by Franz Liszt in several works that began as dramatic overtures. The distinction between the two genres was the freedom to mould the musical form according to external programmatic requirements (Temperley 2001). The symphonic poem became the preferred form for the more "progressive" composers, such as César Franck, Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and Arnold Schoenberg, while more conservative composers like Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann and Arthur Sullivan remained faithful to the overture. In the age when the symphonic poem had already become popular, Brahms wrote his "Academic Festival Overture", Op. 80, as well