On October 1, 1837, the composer and folk song enthusiast Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860) wrote to Robert Schumann: “I have long entertained the idea of making comparisons between Beethoven's music and Ossian's poetry … I would very much like to know if Beethoven really took Ossian to heart, because all his music sounds Ossianic.” From this it appears the impact of The Poems of Ossian on Beethoven has very likely been underplayed by music historians, either because they believed the poems to be unimportant, of dubious ontology, or because the documented reference by the composer is solitary and can safely be ignored in comparison with the known quantities of other writers, such as Goethe and Schiller, whose poetry the composer set to music. Beethoven (1770–1827), after all, lived at the height of Ossian's influence on German poets and writers. In the light of works such as the “Eroica” Symphony, however, and the composer's confession some six years after completing it that Ossian was one of his favorite authors, the link cannot easily be dismissed. While the “Eroica” occupies a special position in Beethoven's life and work, this chapter will also refer to other compositions in which a variety of influences from Ossian is detectable.

As for the “Eroica,” what new can be said about a renowned work that has provoked a deluge of commentaries since it was written? Anything that might be added here cannot claim special attention among influences affecting its genesis; there are simply too many factors bearing upon its conception, and also its finalizing in the autumn of 1803. Beethoven's generally reliable biographer Alexander Thayer recorded in his notebook that of all his symphonies, the composer preferred the “Eroica.” Whether or not this anecdote is true, the symphony has stimulated a variety of interpretations, but few of these mention the poems of Ossian; if they do, it is merely off hand or in passing. This is distinctly odd, when the composer explicitly referred to Ossian.

Note: the abbreviations follow the forms in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The dating is normally that of publication or, if unpublished, that of the manuscript. Bracketed entries signify that the material is not taken directly from Macpherson's poems.

Phase 1: ca. 1780–1815

Oithóna (op), François-Hippolyte Barthélémon, 1768

Oithona (op), Francois-Hippolyte Barthelemon, 1768

“Darthulas Grabes-Gesang” (v, acc) Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff, 1774 (MS; v, fp acc, 1782)

“Selmar und Selma” (v, kbd); “Selma und Selmar” (v, kbd); “Ullin zum tapfern Carthon” (v, kbd), Christian Gottlob Neefe, 1776

Darthula (2 vv, orch), Thomas Linley the Younger, ca. 1776

“Dauras Trauer” (v, kbd), Seckendorff, 1779

“Selma und Selmar” (v, pf), Johann Friedrich Reichardt, 1779

Comala (music drama), Pietro Morandi, 1780

“Selma” (v, pf), Reichardt, 1780

Colma (monodrama), Friedrich Wilhelm Rust, 1780

“Songs of Ardven, no. 2: Sung before Fingal, in the Hall of Selma” (S, A, B vv, 2 vns, fp or org), Anon., ca. 1780

“Ossians Sonnengesang” (v, kbd), Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, 1782, 1803

“Darthulas Grabes-Gesang” (v, kbd), Seckendorff, 1782

Fingal in Lochlin (incid music), Rust, 1782

Inamorulla oder Ossians Grosmuth (incid music), Rust, 1783

“Address to the sun” (glee), John Wall Callcott, 1783

“Ossians Sonnengesang” (v, kbd), Johann Friedrich Christmann, 1785 [cf. Zumsteeg 1782]

“I sit by the mossy fount” (v, kbd), [melody from Franz Josef Haydn], 1787

Komala (Spl), Friedrich Boutterweck, 1788

Calto (music drama), Francesco Bianchi, 1788

“The Maid of Selma” (v, fig bass), James Oswald, 1788

“Song of Selma” (v, fig bass), Oswald, 1788

“Ode from Ossian's Poems” (v, harpd/pf), Francis Hopkinson, 1788

“Minonas Gesang” (v, kbd), Reichardt, 1788

Duntalmo (music drama), Luigi Caruso, 1789

“Ossian auf Slimora” (v, kbd), Zumsteeg, 1790, 1803

“Song of Selma” (duet, fig bass), Oswald, 1790

“Some of my heroes are low” (glee, 5 vv), R. J. S. Stevens, 1790

Colma (music drama), William Bach, 1791

The figure of Colma appeared first in “Fragment X” of Macpherson's anonymously published Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). Unnamed there, she is the lover of Salgar (or Shalgar), slain along with her brother in their mortal combat with each other, and the poem opens with her famous declaration, “It is night; and I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms.” In “The Songs of Selma,” she is introduced and named by Minona, daughter of Torman and sister of Morar: “Colma left alone on the hill, with all her voice of music! Salgar promised to come: but the night descended around. Hear the voice of Colma, when she sat alone on the hill!” Colma repeats her lament, and concludes, “I sit in my grief. I wait for morning in my tears. Rear the tomb, ye friends of the dead; but close it not till Colma come. My life flies away like a dream: why should I stay behind?” An extension of her original song in the Fragments adds, “Our tears descended for Colma, and our souls were sad.” The general atmosphere of mourning led by Ullin, Fingal's chief bard, and Ossian himself, is intensified with the lament for Alpin and Ryno, two of their fellow bards.

This tale of Colma appealed to both French and German composers, the latter more searching in their approach: nine German-language settings of Colma appeared between 1791 and 1873. The number in itself is not especially impressive, but one of the settings, “Kolma's Klage,” is by Franz Schubert, and apart from the wide diffusion of his music in German-speaking lands, his influence on the development of both the melodie and the romance in France after 1830 or so was considerable. The French settings of “Colma” were restricted, however, to the period roughly between 1800 and 1817 when Ossian fever in France was at its height. The music for M.-J. Chenier's versification of “Colma” (possibly by Mehul, ca. 1800) was followed by settings by Jean-Baptiste Bouffet (1809), Camille Pleyel (1815), and Henri-Montan Berton (1815–17).

The scéne lyrique has a continuous if mottled history in France. Stemming from Rousseau's Pygmalion (1762), the genre became progressively more dramatic in character and was often identified with the mélodrame on the one hand and the drame lyrique on the other. It remained more akin to the Italian cantata, however, with a soloist or soloists, instruments, and sometimes chorus as well, performed as a concert piece rather than a full-fledged tragédie en musique, the form of opera initiated by Lully in the second half of the seventeenth century. Lully's successor Rameau subsequently created other related genres, such as his opéra-ballets, pastorales héroïques, and comédies lyriques, bringing them to a high degree of sophistication.

It was Jean-Frédéric Edelmann (1749–94) and his better-known pupil Etienne Mehul who took up the form of the scéne lyrique and developed it in such a way that Hector Berlioz, a few years later, was able to complete works which included Herminie (1828) and La mort de Cleopatre (1829) as effective, cantata-like compositions. These were written for soprano and orchestra, and Herminie won second prize in the Prix de Rome competition. But it was on his fourth attempt, Sardanapale for tenor, chorus and orchestra (1830), that Berlioz finally won joint first prize. In due course almost every major French composer from Berlioz to Debussy (L'Enfant Prodigue, 1884) undertook to compose a scéne lyrique, from simple voice and piano works to more ambitious choral-orchestral compositions.

Always one for promoting French musicians, Berlioz referred to Theodore Louis Gouvy (1819–98) in the Journal des débats (1851) as an important composer, one who should be known in Parisian musical circles. But the public at that time in the capital was only interested in opera, and Gouvy's extensive instrumental works, many of which were published during his lifetime, had to wait for universal recognition until the twentieth century. He produced over two hundred substantial compositions, including symphonies, cantatas, and religious works, but his industry, poetic sensitivity, and skill are all apparent in the single composition he based on Ossian: the scène lyrique, Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian, op. 15, published in 1858. Its full score of 72 pages is redolent of a mind acutely responsive to nuances in the chosen text, which is based on Macpherson's prose poem “Berrathon.”

“A wonderful masterpiece,” wrote Donald Francis Tovey on his copy of the score of Étienne-Nicolas Méhul's opera, Uthal, adding rather acidly, “within the limits of its dry cliches.” What Tovey meant by “dry clichés” were those associated with French opéra comique of the period, notably in the works of Andre Gretry (1741–1813), the most influential and popular French composer of the day: that is, music interspersed with spoken dialogue, the latter often overlong. He was no doubt referring to a limitation of the genre, namely the breaking off of musical development in order to advance the plot with dialogue. But Tovey was enthusiastic about the orchestration and tonal resources that Mehul devised for a one-act opera that lasts less than an hour. Famously, the composer omitted violins from his scoring in order to suggest the darker color of the story's origins in the poems of Ossian. Some critics objected to this as tending to produce monotony: Gretry is notoriously recorded as remarking, “Je donnerais un louis pour entendre une chanterelle!” (I'd give a ducat to hear an E string). Berlioz thought the effect of violas and cellos would be a “monotonie plus fatigante que poetique de la continuite de ce timbre clair-obscur” (a monotony more tiring than poetic with the prolongation of that light-dark coloration). Tovey was right, however, in noting that the brevity of the opera would counteract such criticisms.

Uthal is a work by Méhul (1763–1817), the most important opera composer of the age in France, composed in his later maturity. But this opera has had few performances since it was written. It was first performed at the Opéra-Comique on May 17, 1806, two years after Le Sueur's more famous opera Ossian, ou les Bardes (1804). Le Sueur's work had caused a sensation: Napoleon was enthusiastic, rewarding the composer with the Legion d'honneur (instituted on May 19, 1802), and accounts of it stirred audiences and composers as far as Italy and Russia.

The advertisement of January 25, 1792, reads: “Hanover Square Rooms. — Tomorrow, January the 26th, will be performed COMALA, a musical piece; consisting of Recitative, Airs, Duets, and Choruses, the entire composition of Miss Harriet Wainewright. The words taken from a dramatic Poem of Ossian. Leader of the Band, Mr. Cramer. Principal Vocal Performers: Mr. Page, Mr. Bartleman, Mrs. Barthelemon, Miss Hagley, and Miss Corri. The doors to be opened a quarter before eight. Performance to begin a quarter before nine. Tickets half-a-guinea; to be had at Messrs. Ransom, Moreland, and Hammersley's, Bankers, Pall Mall, and also, for convenience, at Longman and Broderip's, No. 26, Cheapside, and No. 13, Haymarket. No person can be admitted without a ticket. Books of the Performance at the Rooms on the evening.”

Thus was described an event of some importance in the musical life of London, a dramatic work for the stage based on Ossian, by a woman, publicly performed some twenty-four years after Francois-Hippolyte Barthelemon's desultory attempt with his Oithona of 1768. Although the composer's autobiography does not reveal a motive for choosing this particular poem, it appears to have appealed to her as the tragic tale of a noble huntress. It relates how Comala, daughter of Sarno ruler of Inistore (the Orkney islands), falls in love with Fingal, chieftain of Morven, and follows him disguised as a youth when Fingal marches to resist the army of the invading Caracul. Having spurned Hydallan, Fingal's warrior lieutenant who is enamored of her, Comala throws herself from a rock when Hydallan falsely tells her Fingal has fallen in battle. Fingal, however, returning victorious, laments her passing with his bards.

The title page of the score published by William Napier in 1803 reads: “Comàla/ A Dramatic Poem/from/Ossian/As performed at the/Hanover Square Rooms/Set to Music by/Miss Harriet Wainewright/Dedicated with Permission to the/Most Noble Marquis Wellesley./London/Printed for the Author by William Napier,/Musician in ordinary to his Majesty/Lisle Street, Leicester Square.” The dedication page is dated “Calcutta, August, 1803,” and signed “Harriet Stewart” (Wainewright's married name). Beneath the formal dedication there follows the usual fulsome address to a patron.

Otto Bismarck concluded the unification of Germany at Versailles on January 18, 1871. Praise of the Hohenzollern dynasty accompanied the elation felt in Germany at the defeat of France, and no less a composer than Johannes Brahms was caught up in the surge of national feeling with the writing of his Triumphlied, op. 55, which he dedicated to Wilhelm I. Bernhard Hopffer (1840–77), as a young composer, was inevitably drawn into writing patriotic works of this kind. The year 1871 was an auspicious one for him: his opera Frithjof, written when he was just 21, had its premiere on April 11 in Berlin, receiving ten performances.

At the beginning of 1872, however, Hopffer contracted a lung ailment that forced him to live in spa towns in Switzerland and Italy. He finally settled in Wiesbaden in the autumn of 1876. His brother Emil, who had also studied music and to whom he was very close, joined him there in the spring of 1877. Despite his poor health Hopffer completed another opera, Sakuntala, on a text by his brother who, also ailing, passed away in July of that same year. Bernhard, deeply upset by Emil's death, sought physical and spiritual relief in the curative spa, the former Jagdschloss (Hunting Lodge) Niederwald, at Rudesheim, where, after a short illness, he died on August 20, 1877. Among his papers were the scores of Sakuntala, the comic operas Der lustige Capitan and Der Student von Prag (his first composition), lieder, cantatas, and other works that remain unperformed.

Hopffer seems to have composed his cantata Darthula's Grabesgesang, op. 23, during his time in Rudesheim; Robert Lienau published the work posthumously, in 1878. It is dedicated to Louis Ehlert. The story of Darthula made an early impact in German-speaking lands: Michael Denis (1729–1800), a Jesuit priest in Vienna, had produced the first complete translation of the Ossian poems in 1768–69. “Darthula” was greatly admired by Friedrich Schiller, who believed the poem to be one of the most beautiful in Ossian.

Sporadically, as the nineteenth century progressed, the poems of Ossian continued to inspire musical works in Britain: a ballet, Mora's Love, or The Enchanted Harp (1809), and an unfinished opera, Fingallo (ca. 1810), by Henry Bishop; a ballad opera, Malvina, with music by the Irish composer Thomas Simpson Cooke (1826); an overture, Ossian (1882), written and performed in 1882 by the London-born composer Frederick Corder (1852–1932), curator of the Royal Academy of Music from 1889 (his planned opera on the topic, ca. 1905, was apparently never performed); and William Augustus Barratt's cantata The Death of Cuthullin (1897). As tensions mounted over colonial wars and European unrest at the beginning of the twentieth century, the association with loss of compatriots in battle found ready expression in works such as Stanford's Irish Rhapsody No. 2: Lament for the Son of Ossian (1903) and Liza Lehmann's cantata Leaves from Ossian, its disquiet and longing conveyed by solo voices, chorus, and orchestra (1909).

A handful of works based on Ossian survived the Great War, including Edgar Bainton's opera Oithona (1915), revisiting the protagonist of Barthelemon's effort in 1768. Bainton (1880–1956) wrote the work for the Glastonbury Festival of 1915, although at the time of production he was in a civilian detention camp in Ruhleben, Germany, where he was held from 1914 to 1918. The work received four performances at Glastonbury, along with the second act of Wagner's Tristan. The critic for The Times, writing on August 12, 1915, noted that “the composer has gone to early British legend for his subject, and that type of subject has unfortunately earned a reputation for unreality in opera … Of the two scenes, the second, which begins with the lament of Oithóona and ends with her self-sought death in the battle between her two lovers, is the better, because the emotion of the drama is stronger and the music rises to its opportunities.”

Ossian was much in the air at this time. For the second of a series of War Emergency Concerts in London, the promoter Isidore de Lara asked the composer Eugene Goossens (1893–1962) if he could supply an orchestral work at short notice.

James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Galic or Erse Language in Edinburgh in 1760. The success of this work was followed by the publication in London of Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763). Together with the later editions, The Works of Ossian (1765) and the revised The Poems of Ossian (1773), this poetry was hugely influential on the course of European Romanticism. With their novel emphasis on heroic ideals, noble behavior, and feeling rather than the formal elegance of Enlightenment verse, these prose poems impressed personalities such as Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon as well as literary giants from Goethe and Schiller to Byron and Pushkin. Composers such as Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms set the poems that Macpherson (and others, including the Irishman Edmund de Harold) had rendered, sometimes very freely, from oral and written Gaelic sources attributed to the legendary third-century bard Ossian (the anglicized version of the Gaelic name Oisin). While the English-language versions, principally those of Macpherson, were met with enthusiasm and also skepticism as to their authenticity, they inspired translations into most European tongues. In turn, the translations as well as the English-language originals provided the basis for a remarkable number of music settings. Over three hundred compositions (monodramas, operas, cantatas, pieces for solo instrument, symphonic poems) poured forth, from the late eighteenth century even into the twenty-first—works that are largely unknown or obscure but at times astounding in their originality and inventiveness. This book is chiefly about them.

The period that receives most attention here is the flowering of “musical Osssianism” just before, during, and for some time after the Romantic era, from about 1780 to 1900. My mainly chronological examination of this long century is buttressed near the outset by discussion of “traditional” sources of music and their role in the genesis of the poems (chapter 2) and towards the end by a brief exploration of “modernity” (chapter 16). We can view modernity here not just as a convenient term for an opaque time period but as a force that qualifies and modifies the dominantly “romantic” stance of composers in their emotional reaction to and realization of the poems.

Today, the auditorium of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice glows with a golden luminescence, much as it would have for operas staged during the Carnival season in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even today, after the disastrous fire of 1996 and the restoration in 2003 to a design by the architect Aldo Rossi, modern lighting recreates all the burnished splendor that gilt embellishment, ceiling frescoes, and chandeliers offered to the impresarios, stage designers, composers, singers, and orchestral musicians of Romantic opera and their audiences. These planners and executants demanded and enjoyed an enviable lightness and radiance in their performance spaces even before the revolutionary gas lighting was introduced in 1826. Sophisticated techniques of illumination for stage performances had been developed from the sixteenth century. But by 1825 the authorities in Venice had “repeatedly expressed their displeasure with the way the decoration of the theater auditorium had deteriorated on account of the smoke from the oil-lamps.”

The history of performance and staging at La Fenice is remarkable, not least because, during the period of Carnival from December to March, the operas produced there in the early nineteenth century included two on themes from Ossian, namely Fingallo e Comala (1805) and Ardano e Dartula (1825) by Stefano Pavesi, a productive composer who completed over sixty operas. His most conspicuous triumph, the two-act opera buff a Ser Marcantonio, with a libretto by Angelo Anelli, which was first staged at La Scala, Milan, on September 26, 1810, attained no fewer than fifty-four performances, and subsequent engagements in other theaters followed up to 1831. But his first notable success was Fingallo e Comala, premiered at La Fenice on December 26, 1804, St. Stephen's Day, as the inaugural production of the Carnival season. Pavesi is important because of the political and artistic influences that bore on his career in Venice: first, the rise of Napoleon, and second, the effect on him of the opera by Jean-Francois Le Sueur Ossian, ou les Bardes (1804).

Pavesi was not the first Italian composer to be drawn to the Ossian poems as a source for the musical stage.

James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1760–63) employ a memorable musical image twice: frst, in the prose poem “Berrathon,” in which the bard Ullin is pictured in the palace of Fingal, striking “the half-viewless harp,” and again in the second book of the epic poem Temora, when Ossian is mourning for his son, Oscar: “Open thou thy stormy halls. Let the bards of old be near. Let them draw near with songs and their half-viewless harps.” This notion of “half-viewless” suggests something dimly perceived, visually and aurally. The idea appears again, with a somewhat different application, in “The Songs of Selma,” as Ossian says, “Often by the setting moon, I see the ghosts of my children. Half viewless, they walk in mournful conference together.” The trope of an indistinct harp, however, barely perceived but nevertheless resonant, seems appropriate for the way in which the musical response to Ossian has been largely ignored or downplayed. Few know that in addition to a few pieces by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, the poems of Ossian, since their appearance in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, have stimulated forty or so operas and scores of cantatas, songs, and symphonic works.

From the preceding chapters, we can glimpse the long-acting effect of Ossian on composers. Apart from the recognized works of masters such as those cited above (and, as I have argued, the more problematic case of Beethoven), perhaps a dozen or more of those discussed here, about one-fifth of the total number of musical compositions based on Ossian, stand out as reaching an elevated level of inspiration and craftsmanship. While this is a personal selection, I would maintain that these works show a magisterial blend of Romanticism and modernity in their melodic invention, harmonic language, and instrumental texture, or any combination of these factors. That is, the composers have not only realized their individual feelings but also created something new—and in reaching out to others, something “modern.” In the process of transmediation they have achieved a delicate balance between Romanticism and modernity, and as a result this mastery is found at many levels in each work.

Five bards passing the night in the house of a chief, who was a poet himself, went severally to make their observations on, and returned with an extempore description of, night.

First Bard: Night is dull and dark. / The clouds rest on the hills. / No star with green trembling beam; / no moon looks from the sky. / I hear the blast in the wood, / but I hear it distant far. / The stream of the valley murmurs; / but its murmur is sullen and sad. / From the tree at the grave of the dead / the long-howling owl is heard. / I see a dim form on the plain! It is a ghost! / It fades, it flies. / Some funeral shall pass this way: the meteor marks the path. The distant dog is howling from the hut of the hill. / The stag lies on the mountain moss: / the hind is at his side. / She hears the wind in his branchy horns. / She starts, but lies again. The roe is in the cleft of the rock; / the heath-cock's head is beneath his wing. / No beast, no bird is abroad, / but the owl and the howling fox: / she on a leafless tree; / he in a cloud on the hill. Dark, panting, trembling, sad, / the traveller has lost his way. / Through shrubs, through thorns, / he goes along the gurgling rill. / He fears the rock and the fen. / He fears the ghost of night. / The old tree groans to the blast; / the falling branch resounds. / The wind drives the withered burrs, / clung together, along the grass. / It is the light tread of a ghost! / He trembles amidst the night. Dark, dusky, howling, is night, / cloudy, windy, and full of ghosts! / The dead are abroad! / My friends, receive me from the night.

Second Bard: The wind is up, the shower descends. / The spirit of the mountain shrieks. / Woods fall from on high. Windows flap.

The prose poem “Dar-thula” was first published as one of the companion pieces to the epic poem Fingal (1762). Among the longer items in the volume, it combines features of the extended epic with those of the shorter lyrical and dramatic fragments. The poem, which opens with Ossian's famous address to the moon (“Daughter of heaven, fair art thou”), relates the love and death of Darthula, daughter of the chieftain Colla. She falls in love with the youth, Nathos, but dies with him and his two brothers in armed struggle with Cairbar, usurper of the throne of Ireland, who was also in love with her. A remarkable feature of the original poem is its interplay of present, past, and future as Ossian, serving as narrator, comments on the fate of Darthula and her beloved Nathos.

Macpherson, who keeps close to traditional Gaelic accounts, commented in his notes that the heroine's name means “a woman with fine eyes” and that Darthula “was the most famous beauty of antiquity.” Her counterpart in Irish tradition is Deirdre, who remains alive to lament the death of her brothers, while Darthula, after witnessing her brothers’ fate, dies when an arrow pierces her side, and she falls on the body of Nathos. Even when this original narrative was modified (as in Herder's versification of the final scene) or drastically altered for local conventions (as on the Italian stage), the story of the beautiful Darthula drew a response from composers who recognized its universal appeal. Those who set “Dar-thula” over a span of two centuries inevitably faced the problem of having to negotiate between personal understanding of the poem's content and prevailing compositional standards.

In terms of period, the musical settings of “Dar-thula” fall into three main groups. The first, a “pre-Romantic” or early Romantic cluster, runs from a manuscript song by Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff (1774) to Stefano Pavesi's opera Ardano e Dartula (1825). Second is a full-fledged Romantic group stretching from Otto Ernst Lindner's Lied (1855) to a fragment by the German-American composer Hermann Hans Wetzler (1888).

Modernity, the advent of “the new” in social life, has also been a recurring phenomenon in the history of Western classical music. Influential composers have framed modernity in their visions of artistic change: Monteverdi, Gluck, and Beethoven are notable examples in a recurrent if discontinuous aesthetic program. When the poems of Ossian appeared, they were themselves modern in departing from Augustan classicism to create a style based on heroic ideals, noble behavior, and sentiment (feeling). By translating these notions into musical terms following the French Revolution, Beethoven became the most modern composer of all, and with his successors in the later nineteenth century, modernity was condensed into its artistic agency, namely modernism. Recently, both Wagner and Brahms have been proposed as the precursors of a musical modernism. Composers of the twentieth century were only freed from overripe Romanticism by such as Scriabin and Debussy, who evolved complex harmonies that could be relished for their own sake, for the resonance of their overtones. Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faune (1894), Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra (1912), and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) marked the rupture with the Romantic past. The Soviet Revolution of 1917 then created a radically new context for composers who fell under its influence.

At the time, Schoenberg had broken with the past by rethinking tonal architecture, but did so only after he had shaken off the influence of Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss (though not that of Brahms). Before he had reached that point, he was sufficiently captivated by Herder's “Darthula's Grabesgesang” to draft an extensive sketch for a cantata (1903) on these Ossian-inspired verses, which were, by that time, well known in the German-speaking world. He left the work unfinished to complete his grandiose cantata on a “Nordic” theme, the Gurrelieder, begun in 1901. Perhaps the forces of modernity, in relation to his Herder cantata, were more demanding than he had anticipated. At any rate, by the time the Gurrelieder had reached performance in 1913, Schoenberg's idiom had changed radically, abandoning late Romanticism to embrace new pitch concepts in works such as the Five Orchestral Pieces and Pierrot Lunaire, op. 20 (also 1912).

Felix Mendelssohn was seasick. The composer, during his visit to the isle of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides on August 8, 1829, was “under the weather,” so to speak, on the steamer Ben Lomond. Unusually, he made no recorded reference later, in his letters or sketchbook, to the island's renowned Fingal's Cave, only to “the most fearful sickness” on the voyage. However, his companion, Karl Klingemann, cheerfully unaffected by the Hebridean swell, did provide a vivid description of the island and the cave, likening the pillars of the latter to “the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, absolutely without purpose, and utterly isolated, the wide grey sea within and without.” The day before Mendelssohn's visit to Staffa, the composer had written to his family in Berlin, “In order to make you realize how extraordinarily the Hebrides have affected me, the following came into my mind there,” and followed this with a twenty-one-bar outline of the opening of his Die Hebriden (the “Hebrides” overture, op. 26, also titled “Overture to the Isles of Fingal” and “Fingal's Cave”) in short score.

Vividly, the orchestration of the piece evokes the Ossianic seascape by means of unusual melodic and harmonic devices as well as clarity of instrumental color; these together create a memorable procession of dovetailed tonal frescoes, the opening theme in B minor and its many repetitions capturing the swell of the sea and salty air, while later in the work trumpets recall the ghostly clamor of ancient battles as they unfold in the poems.

The experience must have unnerved the young composer, brought up as he had been in a cultivated, bourgeois environment in Berlin. That he made no record or account of his floating visit other than the overture itself is highly significant.