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
A Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon is a "horrid brute". Towards the end of the 19th century, Georg Brandes (1895–6) and Frederick S. Boas (1896) were the last major additions to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" criticism. Brandes' approach to anticipates later psychological readings, seeing Oberon's magic as symbolic and "typifying the sorcery of the erotic imagination". Brandes felt that in the play, Shakespeare looks inward at the "domain of the unconscious". Boas eschews the play as ethical treatise or psychological study and instead takes a more historicist and literal approach. To Boas the play is, despite its fantastical and exotic trappings, "essentially English and Elizabethan".