Demonstrates the profound impact of The Poems of Ossian on composers of
the Romantic Era and later: Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms,
Massenet, and many others.
Beyond Fingal's Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination is the first
study in English of musical compositions inspired by the poems published
in the 1760s and attributed to a purported ancient Scottish bard named
Ossian. From around 1780 onwards, the poems stimulated poets, artists,
and composers in Europe as well as North America to break away from the
formality of the Enlightenment. The admiration for Ossian's poems
-shared by Napoleon, Goethe, and Thomas Jefferson - was an important
stimulus in the development of Romanticism and the music that was a
central part of it. More important still was the view of the German
cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw past the
controversy over the poems' authenticity to the traditional elements in
these heroic poems and their mood of lament.
James Porter's long-awaited book traces the traditional sources used by
James Macpherson for his epoch-making prose poems and examines crucial
works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and
Massenet. Many other relatively unknown composers were also moved to
write operas, cantatas, songs, and instrumental pieces, some of which
have proven to be powerfully evocative and well worth performing and
recording.
