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.