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Work

Scottish Fantasy

Composer

Max Bruch

At the time Bruch worked on the Scottish Fantasy, he had never in fact visited Scotland, though he would travel there soon after the premiere.

Composition and premiere: Bruch wrote his Scottish Fantasy in 1879-1880 for its dedicatee, the great Spanish virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate, but Joseph Joachim was soloist in the premiere, which took place in Liverpool, England, on February 22, 1881.* The first BSO performance took place in November 1888 with Wilhelm Gericke conducting and BSO violinist Charles Martin Loeffler as soloist. BSO concertmaster Joseph Silverstein was soloist with the orchestra in the first Tanglewood performance on August 17, 1973, Lawrence Foster conducting.

Were it not for the Scottish Fantasy, Max Bruch could easily be written off as a one-hit wonder, given how much his famous first violin concerto has overshadowed the rest of his vast output of operas, symphonies, choral works, and solo concertos. But this brilliant virtuoso work for solo violin and orchestra has grown to be another audience favorite. 

In fact, Bruch was unsure whether his large-scale Fantasy in four movements did not constitute a kind of concerto in its own right: in a few of the early performances it was actually billed as a violin concerto. (After this work finally entered the record as the Scottish Fantasy, Bruch was to write one more solo concerto for the violin in 1891, which became his official No. 3.)

Bruch composed the Scottish Fantasy in Berlin in 1879-1880, but by the time it was premiered in 1881, he had taken up a new position as music director in the English port of Liverpool, where the work was performed under Bruch’s direction with the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) taking on the solo part. After the premiere, Bruch was deeply unhappy with Joachim’s performance, saying he had “ruined the work.” Subsequent performances with Bruch conducting, in London and Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), therefore featured the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908), who is also the Fantasy’s dedicatee. 

Among Bruch’s solo works for violin, the Scottish Fantasy is unusual in that its themes are explicitly based on folk songs. This was a popular choice in the 19th century, which saw a whole range of national traditions, especially from the European periphery, entering the concert halls. In foregrounding a national flavor in art music, there was no sense that composers were limited to the folk music of their own background: French and Russian composers wrote Spanish music, Germans were inspired to write in the Hungarian style, Bohemians composed music invoking America. At the time Bruch worked on the Scottish Fantasy, he had never in fact visited Scotland, though he would travel there soon after the premiere while his home was conveniently located in the North of England.

But printed collections of folk songs were easy to get a hold of, and music from Scotland was a well-researched and popular repertoire—even Haydn and Beethoven had arranged some Scottish songs. Max Bruch familiarized himself with the tradition as early as 1864, when his arrangements of “Twelve Scottish Folksongs” were published. The source of these songs was the six-volume anthology The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803), which also served as a chief source for the songs on which his Scottish Fantasy was based. 

Scotland, with its long history, shrouded in legend, its stark windswept landscapes, and its distinct cultural traditions at the edge of European civilization, was clearly in fashion during the Romantic nineteenth century. The popular historical novels of Walter Scott (1771-1832) were devoured by readers, including Bruch, all over Europe, and the spectacular find of the epic poems of Ossian, a legendary Scottish bard, drew comparisons to the Homeric epics. It later turned out that the poems were not merely translated from the Gaelic by its finder James Macpherson (1736-1796), but had been written wholesale by him, in what remains to this day one of the most stunning cases of literary forgery.

According to tradition, Gaelic bards accompanied their tales of the heroic past with a harp. No wonder then that Bruch included a prominent harp part in his score. (The full title of the work even singles out the harp as a subsidiary solo instrument.) The Scottish Fantasy shares this feature with the Kol Nidre for cello, which Bruch was working on around the same time. 

The Scottish folk music on which Bruch based his Fantasy was exceptionally well studied, not least thanks to the significance that the 18th-century historian and chronicler of European musical life Charles Burney (1726–1814) had accorded to this tradition in his writings. Predominantly pentatonic, the scales on which most Scottish music was based, exhibited striking similarities to those of China and other distant ancient cultures—and while the geographic spread confused some, Burney was convinced these correspondences were testament to the ancient traditions on which this folk music could look back. 

The first movement is slow and brooding, opening in a ponderous E-flat minor, with rhapsodic solo passages for the violin. The main thematic material is based on the folksong “Thro’ the Woods Laddie.” In this setting, with its rich double stops (and ample harp accompaniment), the solo violin at times resembles a fiddle, such as is commonly found in Scottish folk music—though, admittedly, a highly refined and virtuosic one. 

The second movement is a boisterous allegro, based on the dance tune “The Dusty Miller,” on a poem by Scottish national poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). The martial opening of the movement rests on a long drone, invoking the sound of Scottish bagpipes. Just when we think the movement is over, the cellos throw in a wistful reminiscence to “Thro’ the woods,” raising the curtain to the contemplative third movement, which presents the Northern song “I’m A-Doun for Lack O’Johnnie,” as a set of virtuosic variations for the solo violin. 

The final movement presents the beloved tune “Hey Tuttie Tatie,” a joyful air that was also chosen in Berlioz’s Scots-themed overture to Rob Roy (1831), and which Bruch had included in his earlier arrangements of Twelve Scottish Folk Songs. The song rose to prominence when it was fitted with new patriotic lyrics “Scots Wha Ha’e” by Robert Burns, which became an unofficial Scottish anthem. The snappy melody features a characteristic rhythm, a short, accented note followed by a longer one, known as “Scotch snaps.”  In a polite bow to his great Romantic forebear, Bruch marked this movement with the tempo Allegro guerriero, meaning war-like, which is also a tempo marking Mendelssohn attached to his Scottish Symphony No. 3 (1842). There are no other instances of this unusual term in the repertoire beside these two. The movement ends with a pensive solo cadenza that invokes one final time the opening song “Thro’ the woods” as a distant memory, before concluding on a rousing tutti rendition of “Hey Tuttie Tatie.”

Alexander Rehding

Alexander Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. A scholar focusing on sound media and 19th-century music, he has authored books including Music and Monumentality, Alien Listening: The Voyager Golden Record and Music from Earth, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.