Is there a topography of music? Some innate correlation between habitat and harmony, sound and space? Or is it mere conditioning that conjures up in our mind's eye the glories of Prague at the close of Smetana's Vltava, or swans circling above the endless Finlandian forests of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony? Is it wishful thinking that the music of Elgar seems to mirror the very contours of the Malvern Hills, while the ballets of Copland somehow summon up visions of the vast plains of the American West, even to those who have never seen them? And why do certain works by Grieg send us pining for the fjords? Of course, place is often depicted most vividly of all by those who do not belong there, but whose concern is to construct an exoticized Other. Spain seems to lie before us far more clearly in the Iberian fantasies of the French, China in the chinoiserie of Puccini, and Antarctica in the Seventh Symphony of Vaughan Williams than in anything any Spaniard, Chinese, or musicking penguin might contrive.

Of all the exotic locations popularized by travelers and travel writers of Europe since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, one close to home proved to possess an appeal as powerful as it was lasting. Switzerland—to be precise, the sublime Switzerland of the Alps with its spectacular sunsets, lakes, and waterfalls—exerted an immense influence on the Western psyche.