Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination

Description

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. Battling critics, engaging composers : Ossian's spell -- On Macpherson's native heath : primary sources -- A culture without writing, settings without a score, Haydn without copyright, and two Oscars on stage -- "A musical piece" : Harriet Wainewright's opera Coma?ala (1792) -- Between Gluck and Berlioz : Ma?ehul's Uthal (1806) -- Fingallo e Comala (1805) and Ardano e Dartula (1825) : the Ossianic operas of Stefano Pavesi -- From Venice to Lisbon and St. Petersburg : Calto, Clato, Aganadeca, Gaulo ed Oitona, and two Fingals -- 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 -- The maiden bereft : "Colma" from Rust (1780) to Schubert (1816) -- Sca?enes lyriques sans frontia?eres : Louis Tha?eodore Gouvy's Le dernier hymne d'Ossian (1858) and Lucien Hillemacher's Fingal (1880) -- Ossian in symbolic conflict : Bernhard Hopffer's Darthula's Grabgesang (1878), Jules Bordier's Un ra?eve d'Ossian (1885), and Paul Umlauft's Agandecca (1884) -- The musical stages of "Darthula" : from Thomas Linley the Younger (ca. 1776) to Arnold Schoenberg (1903) and Armin Knab (1906) -- The cantata as drama : Joseph Jongen's Comala (1897), Jørgen Malling's Kyvala (1902), and Liza Lehmann's Leaves from Ossian (1909) -- 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) -- 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) -- 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 I: Title page and dedication of Harriet Wainewright's Coma?ala -- Appendix 2: French and German texts of Louis Tha?eodore 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.