As James Porter points out in his preface, in the twenty-first century all that most people know about the Ossianic legends is Felix Mendelsohn’s overture, The Hebrides (popularly known as “Fingal’s Cave”). Opera buffs might also recognize the famous tenor aria, Pourquoi me révieller, O souffle des printemps from Massenet’s Werther, as deriving from Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian, albeit via Goethe. Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination is primarily a dense and learned musicological study of many of the over 300 surviving works of art-music, operas, cantatas, sonatas, and the like, directly derived from, or chiefly inspired by, the Ossianic poems of the eighteenth century. It is, though, of potential interest to the folklorist in several ways. First, it is a quick primer on James Macpherson’s 1760 Poems of Ossian, the work that both kick-started Romanticism and Romantic Nationalism and set many of its cultural parameters. Second, it calls attention to the actual written and orally preserved roots of the Ossianic tales. And third, it illustrates, through the continuing popularity of Ossian throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of folk legend on art-culture and popular culture.
Chapter1, “Battling Critics, Engaging Composers,” is devoted to a brief biography of Macpherson, followed by a description of the contents of the poems, a short statement of Porter’s critical approach to “transmediation” of textual material into musical expression, and a sketch of the musical phases of Romanticism. In the preface, and in chapter 2, “On Macpherson’s Native Heath: Primary Sources,” Porter outlines the controversy about Macpherson’s sources, pointing out that modern scholarship has validated his access to both oral and written sources of traditional “Fenian” material, though it also locates his English style largely in the King James Bible. Macpherson’s primary sin was his largely tacit claim that he was transcribing and translating actual Gaelic poetry into English. As Porter says, “Continental critics were not naïve: they knew all about the controversy but, like Herder, they tended to see the traditional elements, the anatomy behind Macpherson’s fleshed-out poesy” (27). Because Ossian is depicted by Macpherson as a bard and harper, the discussion of traditional Irish harping in chapter 2 is of folk-music interest, as is the discussion of the well-documented chanted recitation of “Fenian Lays” by traditional Hebridean carriers of the tradition down to the twentieth century, in fact, as recently as 1953.
Chapter 3 describes how quickly the Ossianic poems were taken up by musicians all over Europe, from Scotland to Italy, and the attention paid by composers to translating the emotional scenes of the poems into suitably emotional music (often with “Scotch” motifs). Interesting sidelights include the pirating of a melody from the second movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 76 as a setting for the Ossianic poem “I sit by the mossy Fount” in an anonymous ballad collection of 1787, and the performance of Colma a “dramatic poem with music” by William Bach (son of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach) in Berlin in 1791. Whether cause or effect of the Romantic nationalism sweeping Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ossian was certainly seen by poets and composers of the time, and by their audiences, as crucial evidence for the profundity of vernacular oral tradition being collected and published elsewhere by the brothers Grimm in Germany, Elias Lönnrot in Finland, and others in many other places.
Chapters 4 through 16 are dedicated to some famous and some obscure Ossianic composers and compositions, by such composers as Beethoven and Mendelsohn, on the one hand, and, by less-known composers such as Harriet Wainwright and Liza Lehman, on the other. There is also an analysis of the evolution of types of musical compositions inspired by Ossian. The final chapter, an afterword, provides Porter’s own aesthetic assessment of many of the compositions he has discussed. He argues that many now forgotten works, such as the opera Comala by Piero Morandi (1780) and Adolf Busch’s cantata Darthula’s Grabgesang (ca. 1912), deserve rediscovery on their own musical merits. He also here discusses the interplay of literary and musical genres in Goethe, Byron, and composers such as Schumann, Wagner, and Berlioz. The book closes with a section called “Whose Music?” in which Porter points out that along with the appropriation and use of traditional oral narratives by art-music composers for a largely urban bourgeois audience, the continued popularity of fiddle compositions such as Daniel Dow’s “Ossian’s Hall” (1773) and John Gow’s “Fingal’s Cave” of 1802, and references to the tradition by Irish, Scots, and Breton folk groups in recent years, indicate a continuing, if attenuated, interest in the tradition in folk and popular music.
--------
[Review length: 770 words • Review posted on April 23, 2020]