The ancient Scottish bard Ossian is undoubtedly the most successful and influential imaginary poet in the history of European arts and letters. James Macpherson published his English ‘translations’ of Ossian's Gaelic poems, including the epics Fingal and Temora, in the early 1760s, and within a few years they had been translated into French and German. By the 1830s they had been translated into Swedish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Hungarian, and all of Europe had been swept by Ossian-mania.

English literary critics such as Samuel Johnson and David Hume raised questions about the authenticity of the poems, and the very existence of the purported poet, almost immediately after Macpherson began to publish them, but the allegation that he was a fraud did little to stem the enthusiasm for Ossian. He had a huge influence on European literature and inspired a stream of creativity in visual arts and music that continued for more than a century and a half.

In recent decades there has been a renewed interest in Ossian among literary scholars, who have argued that the question of authenticity is too simplistic.Footnote ¹ Macpherson travelled in the Scottish Highlands and collected Gaelic folk poetry, which became the authentic source material for his published poems. Aside from the fact that he translated the poems into English and created a fictional poet, his method is not that different from the one that Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano employed in compiling Des Knaben Wunderhorn. They also collected folk poetry which they edited and expanded, and in some cases they included completely original poems.

Despite the attempt by modern-day literary scholars to rehabilitate Macpherson, musicologists have continued to refer to him as a fraud, as James Porter observes in his new book, Beyond Fingal's Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination (p. 2). The reason for this is presumably not so much a consensus of opinion as it is a general ignorance of recent literary scholarship on Ossian, which in turn results from the fact that he has been of only peripheral interest to musicians and musicologists. For despite the many vocal works that set or adapt texts from Ossian, and the programmatic instrumental music that is based on his poetry, the only piece in the modern-day canon that has any connection to the fictional Scottish bard, albeit tenuous, is Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture. When Mendelssohn published the parts to the overture in 1834, he titled it The Hebrides, but when he published the score the following year, he changed the name to Fingal's Cave. The latter title refers to a geological formation on the island of Staffa that was named for the Ossianic hero in 1772. The cave, which quickly became a popular tourist destination, was reputedly inhabited by the spirit of the ancient bard.

Porter is an emeritus professor of music and folklore at UCLA, and the former chair of the university's Department of Ethnomusicology. His intent in Beyond Fingal's Cave is not just to rehabilitate Macpherson for a musical audience, but to call attention to the largely forgotten repertory that his fictional poet inspired, and to advocate for a revival of the ‘masterpieces’ among them, which are ‘at times astounding in their originality and inventiveness’ (p. xiii). To this end, the book is intended ‘as much for a broadly-informed readership as for specialists in music’, and it ‘aims at clarity of exposition, and readability’ (p. xiv). Porter writes well, and his clear and straightforward style would likely make his book accessible to any reader with a basic understanding of music. He briefly lays out the case that literary critics have made in favour of Ossian, and he adds to it with an interesting chapter on the transition in Scottish folk music from oral to written transmission. Porter argues that the folk music of the Scottish Highlands may have been among the authentic sources that Macpherson relied upon in constructing his epic poems.

When Porter turns to the musical response to Ossian, which is the principal subject of his book, he provides what he calls ‘descriptive analyses’ of about two dozen works composed between 1780 and 2012, in a wide range of genres. These include operas, cantatas, songs, and choral settings, as well as a handful of instrumental pieces. He also provides extensive historical context for each of the pieces that he discusses. Porter's decisions about which works to include ‘were based partly on ease of access, partly on personal judgment’. He claims that ‘many musical works influenced by Ossian are accessible in published form’, while others are available in manuscript in various libraries (p. xiv). Porter also finds it ‘heartening that lesser-known works inspired by the poems have lately been revived, both in live performances and recordings’ (p. xv).

I teach at a major American conservatory, with an extensive collection of scores and recordings. I also have access to two databases of musical scores – Alexander Street's Classical Scores Library and IMSLP's Petrucci Music Library – as well as two databases that stream recordings – Spotify and the Naxos Music Library. The only lesser-known work in Porter's book for which I found both a recording and a score is Étienne-Nicolas Méhul's one-act opera Uthal. I also found just the scores for two compositions and just the recordings for two more. Perhaps with further research and interlibrary loan I would have found a few more, but it seems unlikely that anyone would go to that much effort just to read a book. In any case, I suspect that for most of the compositions in Porter's book there are no modern editions or recordings available. Which raises a critical question: who would be interested in reading a scholarly monograph that is mostly concerned with music he or she will never be able to hear or play?

Perhaps Porter's decision to employ descriptive analysis is intended as a solution to this problem. In a footnote intended to explain the concept, Porter acknowledges that description is ‘often understood in a pejorative sense by musicologists’. But he argues that ‘notation is merely a convenient shorthand to indicate structural and performative features that the composer has prescribed’. Thus, ‘the most practical way of describing music’, at least in the Western classical tradition, is to supplement the notation with ‘verbal commentary’ (p. 323, n. 1). But Porter's commentary acts as a substitute for musical notation, and not as a supplement (with the exception of some brief examples, generally a single phrase of music). And while the ‘convenient shorthand’ of musical notation may enable a skilled musician to bring a musical composition to life, either at the piano or in his or her imagination, it is not entirely clear what purpose verbal commentary serves in and of itself. Here, for example, is Porter's descriptive analysis of scene 2 from Lucien Hillemacher's Fingal, for which he provides no musical examples:

Hillemacher's scène lyrique won the Prix de Rome in 1880, and Porter describes it as ‘well deserving of its prize-winning status’. He points in particular to ‘the composer's imaginative treatment of the text’ and writes that the work ‘succeeds as a dramatic conception. Aesthetically accomplished, it is an entirely original contribution to the development’ of the genre (p. 170). I do not question Porter's enthusiasm for Hillemacher's Fingal, nor for the many other unknown works that he writes about. It may well be that this music is worthy of our attention, and that it deserves to be revived. But I cannot determine the quality of Hillemacher's work from Porter's descriptive analysis, since it does not give me any sense of what the music actually sounds like, and so it is hard for me to share his enthusiasm.

When Porter turns to music that is more familiar, his passionate advocacy of Ossian leads him to hear the fictional bard's influence in some unexpected places. Perhaps his most controversial claim is that Ossian was part of the ‘inspirational background’ for Beethoven's Eroica Symphony (p. 106). Porter's argument is primarily based on a reference that Beethoven made in an 1809 letter to his publisher, Breitkopf und Härtel. He was interested in buying the complete works of Goethe and Schiller, and he remarked that ‘these two poets are my favorites, as are Ossian and Homer’ (quoted on p. 103). This casual comment is Beethoven's only documented reference to Ossian, but Porter relies on a range of circumstantial and indirect evidence to argue that Ossian had an impact on Beethoven during much of his career, and in particular when he was composing the Eroica.

Porter begins in Bonn in the 1780s, a period when Beethoven studied with Christian Gottlob Neefe. Several years earlier Neefe had set three Ossianic poems in German translation, and ‘it is likely’ that Beethoven would have been familiar with these settings, and he ‘would most probably have read the poems’ of Ossian during these years (p. 104). Porter then turns to Goethe, Herder, and Schiller, three German poets with whom Beethoven was familiar, and who had various connections to Ossian's poetry. There are citations from Herder's writings in Beethoven's diary, and Herder in turn had written a ‘seminal essay’ on Ossian, as well as a poem about Darthula, an Ossianic heroine. Schiller, whose ‘Ode to Joy’ appears in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, also wrote about Ossian. And he married a woman who had translated three of Ossian's poems into German (pp. 109–11).

The Ossianic connection through Goethe is just as tenuous, but far more convoluted. In 1775 Goethe wrote a poem titled ‘Wonne der Wehmuth’, which Beethoven turned into a song in 1810. The poem itself has nothing to do with Ossian, but the title, a translation of the phrase ‘joy of grief’, comes from Michael Denis's German translation of Ossian. Assuming that Beethoven read Denis's translation at the time he was studying with Neefe, he would have come across this ‘plangent’ phrase, which then became the title of his song nearly 30 years later. And yet, ‘commentators on Beethoven's setting have missed the link with Ossian’ (p. 104).

Turning to the Eroica Symphony, Porter indulges in a bit of psychological speculation. Goethe included a translation of one of Ossian's poems in his 1774 novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, and thus ‘introduced Ossian to a whole generation of young writers and composers’. The poem comes at a point in the novel when the protagonist is contemplating suicide, which leads Porter to a comment by Thomas Mann, that ‘Goethe did not kill himself, because he still had Werther to write’. This comment, in turn, creates a striking parallel with the Heiligenstadt Testament, in which Beethoven claims that ‘I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back’. The parallel is strengthened by ‘passages in the Testament that seem to paraphrase’ Goethe's novel, and a significant ‘phrase reminiscent of the language of Ossian’ (pp. 108–9).

Biographers have frequently associated the Heiligenstadt Testament with the Eroica Symphony, which Beethoven began a few months later, and the talk of suicide naturally leads Porter to the second movement. He describes Beethoven's funeral march as ‘a universal kind that embraces not only the death of those known to him but also a vision of his own mortality’. Beethoven evokes ‘a “heroic type”, whether male or female, and suggests a Jungian archetype’. This leads Porter back to Ossian, whose heroic protagonists included women as well as men. This in turn leads to the heroine of Fidelio, Leonora, who represents ‘Beethoven's transformation of heroism into a female attribute’. For Porter, ‘the parallels to Ossian are not difficult to see’ (p. 109).

Returning to the Eroica, Porter argues that the funeral march and the symphony as a whole were inspired by a host of ‘real and legendary figures and real or imagined deaths’, and Beethoven's ‘conception’ cannot be narrowed to a ‘single rationale’, nor the funeral to a single person. But he argues that ‘the ethical core of Beethoven's composition mirrors to some extent the mores embedded in [Ossian's] poems, the nobility and generosity that readers came to admire in Ossianic heroes’, rather than the ‘heartlessness’ of the Homeric heroes whom earlier commentators, such as Arnold Schering, have seen as the inspiration for the symphony (p. 109). Of course, Beethoven mentions Homer alongside Ossian in the letter that Porter quotes, so if one takes that letter as evidence that Ossian influenced the Eroica, it will provide equally strong evidence that Homer did.

In fact, Porter's Ossianic programme for the Eroica is just as speculative as Schering's Homeric programme, and there is no concrete evidence that Beethoven intended either of them. The only evidence that Porter does cite in his chapter suggests that Beethoven had ample opportunity to become familiar with Ossian, and that he admired his poetry. Given the universal enthusiasm for the Scottish bard among the German artists and intellectuals of Beethoven's generation, this suggestion is hardly controversial. But it takes a conjectural leap to conclude from this that his music was influenced by Ossian.

Porter clearly has a passionate enthusiasm for his subject. He has researched it thoroughly and he writes about it in a clear and engaging style. But he does not adequately consider the audience he is writing for, who do not have the opportunity to become familiar with the lesser known music he discusses and are unlikely to be convinced by his wild speculations about the music that they do know. Perhaps his prodigious efforts would be better spent producing modern editions of the forgotten music he has rediscovered and collaborating with musicians to mount new performances and recordings.