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
Excursus: Mendelssohn Waives the Rules: “Overture to the Isles of Fingal” (1832) and an “Unfinished” Coda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2019
- 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
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beyond Fingal's CaveOssian in the Musical Imagination, pp. 113 - 122Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019