Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note to the Reader
- 1 Battling Critics, Engaging Composers: Ossian's Spell
- 2 On Macpherson's Native Heath: Primary Sources
- 3 A Culture without Writing, Settings without a Score, Haydn without Copyright, and Two Oscars on Stage
- 4 “A Musical Piece”: Harriet Wainewright's opera Comàla (1792)
- 5 Between Gluck and Berlioz: Méhul's Uthal (1806)
- 6 Fingallo e Comala (1805) and Ardano e Dartula (1825): The Ossianic Operas of Stefano Pavesi
- 7 From Venice to Lisbon and St. Petersburg: Calto, Clato, Aganadeca, Gaulo ed Oitona, and Two Fingals
- 8 Beethoven's Ossianic Manner, or Where Scholars Fear to Tread
- Excursus: Mendelssohn Waives the Rules: “Overture to the Isles of Fingal” (1832) and an “Unfinished” Coda
- 9 The Maiden Bereft: “Colma” from Rust (1780) to Schubert (1816)
- 10 Scènes lyriques sans frontières: Louis Théodore Gouvy's Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian (1858) and Lucien Hillemacher's Fingal (1880)
- 11 Ossian in Symbolic Conflict: Bernhard Hopffer's Darthula's Grabesgesang (1878), Jules Bordier's Un rêve d'Ossian (1885), and Paul Umlauft's Agandecca (1884)
- 12 The Musical Stages of “Darthula”: From Thomas Linley the Younger (ca. 1776) to Arnold Schoenberg (1903) and Armin Knab (1906)
- 13 The Cantata as Drama: Joseph Jongen's Comala (1897), Jørgen Malling's Kyvala (1902), and Liza Lehmann's Leaves from Ossian (1909)
- 14 Symphonic Poem and Orchestral Fantasy: Alexandre Levy's Comala (1890) and Charles Villiers Stanford's Irish Rhapsody No. 2: Lament for the Son of Ossian (1903)
- 15 Neo-Romanticism in Britain and America: John Laurence Seymour's “Shilric's Song” (from Six Ossianic Odes) and Cedric Thorpe Davie's Dirge for Cuthullin (both 1936)
- 16 Modernity, Modernism, and Ossian: Erik Chisholm's Night Song of the Bards (1944–51), James MacMillan's The Death of Oscar (2013), and Jean Guillou's Ballade Ossianique, No. 2: Les chants de Selma (1971, rev. 2005)
- Afterword: The “Half-Viewless Harp”—Secondary Resonances of Ossian
- Appendix 1 Title Page and Dedication of Harriet Wainewright's Comàla
- Appendix 2 French and German Texts of Louis Théodore Gouvy's Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian
- Appendix 3 Texts of Erik Chisholm's Night Song of the Bards
- Appendix 4 Provisional List of Musical Compositions Based on the Poems of Ossian
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note to the Reader
- 1 Battling Critics, Engaging Composers: Ossian's Spell
- 2 On Macpherson's Native Heath: Primary Sources
- 3 A Culture without Writing, Settings without a Score, Haydn without Copyright, and Two Oscars on Stage
- 4 “A Musical Piece”: Harriet Wainewright's opera Comàla (1792)
- 5 Between Gluck and Berlioz: Méhul's Uthal (1806)
- 6 Fingallo e Comala (1805) and Ardano e Dartula (1825): The Ossianic Operas of Stefano Pavesi
- 7 From Venice to Lisbon and St. Petersburg: Calto, Clato, Aganadeca, Gaulo ed Oitona, and Two Fingals
- 8 Beethoven's Ossianic Manner, or Where Scholars Fear to Tread
- Excursus: Mendelssohn Waives the Rules: “Overture to the Isles of Fingal” (1832) and an “Unfinished” Coda
- 9 The Maiden Bereft: “Colma” from Rust (1780) to Schubert (1816)
- 10 Scènes lyriques sans frontières: Louis Théodore Gouvy's Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian (1858) and Lucien Hillemacher's Fingal (1880)
- 11 Ossian in Symbolic Conflict: Bernhard Hopffer's Darthula's Grabesgesang (1878), Jules Bordier's Un rêve d'Ossian (1885), and Paul Umlauft's Agandecca (1884)
- 12 The Musical Stages of “Darthula”: From Thomas Linley the Younger (ca. 1776) to Arnold Schoenberg (1903) and Armin Knab (1906)
- 13 The Cantata as Drama: Joseph Jongen's Comala (1897), Jørgen Malling's Kyvala (1902), and Liza Lehmann's Leaves from Ossian (1909)
- 14 Symphonic Poem and Orchestral Fantasy: Alexandre Levy's Comala (1890) and Charles Villiers Stanford's Irish Rhapsody No. 2: Lament for the Son of Ossian (1903)
- 15 Neo-Romanticism in Britain and America: John Laurence Seymour's “Shilric's Song” (from Six Ossianic Odes) and Cedric Thorpe Davie's Dirge for Cuthullin (both 1936)
- 16 Modernity, Modernism, and Ossian: Erik Chisholm's Night Song of the Bards (1944–51), James MacMillan's The Death of Oscar (2013), and Jean Guillou's Ballade Ossianique, No. 2: Les chants de Selma (1971, rev. 2005)
- Afterword: The “Half-Viewless Harp”—Secondary Resonances of Ossian
- Appendix 1 Title Page and Dedication of Harriet Wainewright's Comàla
- Appendix 2 French and German Texts of Louis Théodore Gouvy's Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian
- Appendix 3 Texts of Erik Chisholm's Night Song of the Bards
- Appendix 4 Provisional List of Musical Compositions Based on the Poems of Ossian
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Beyond Fingal's CaveOssian in the Musical Imagination, pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019