Th<\/span>e village of Wengen perches high above the Lauterbr\u00fcnnen Valley in Switzerland\u2019s Bernese Oberland. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Looking left from our holiday flat\u2019s balcony, I can drink in the sight of the Jungfrau, bright with spring snow. Beneath it, sheer cliffs plunge to the flower-filled fields on the valley floor. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Classical music inspired by nature, weather, thunderstorms and wind<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Best pastoral music: 5 works inspired by the countryside<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Classical music inspired by nature: six of the best<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
How birds and animals have inspired classical music<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Classical music inspired by hatred<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
How the Swiss Alps inspired composers<\/span><\/h2>\n
JRR Tolkien travelled aged 19 to the Lauterbr\u00fcnnen Valley in 1911; he later told his son that it inspired Rivendell in Lord of the Rings<\/i>\u2019 Middle Earth (his 1937 painting of Rivendell bears an astonishing resemblance). But Tolkien\u2019s Ring was heavily influenced by another: Richard Wagner<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s. Not only did Wagner himself feel the impact of this landscape, but so did some of the poets and composers who influenced him, the impact ricocheting from words to music.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
A little way up the mountainside from Wengen, you will find a monument to the village\u2019s most beloved musical visitor: Felix Mendelssohn<\/a><\/strong>. At the monument\u2019s location on 21\u00a0August 1842, Mendelssohn drew an impression of the Jungfrau massif; it\u2019s thought to be the earliest extant sketch of the place. Wengen has held an annual Mendelssohn Week festival since 2005 and named a \u2018Mendelssohn Trail\u2019 after him; it takes in a breathtaking view of the trio of giant peaks, the Jungfrau, M\u00f6nch and Eiger (probably Tolkien\u2019s three peaks of Moria).\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\nMendelssohn first visited Switzerland aged 14, during his prodigy years. His String Symphony No. 9 in C, written in 1823, is nicknamed the \u2018Swiss\u2019, the lad\u2019s fascination with yodelling reflected in the <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/articles\/what-scherzo\/"\">Scherzo<\/i><\/a><\/strong>\u2019s trio. But it was in his last, most troubled year that the Jungfrau region provided him with badly needed solace and inspiration. <\/span><\/p>\nHis sister, <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/fanny-mendelssohn-5\/"\">Fanny Hensel<\/a><\/strong>, had died suddenly of a stroke, precipitating in Felix, aged 38, a trauma that proved fatal. His biographer Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius visited him, and later described a man whose nervous energy seemed to be driving him over an emotional cliff edge, leaving him unable to listen to music without weeping. <\/span><\/p>\nBesides his grief over Fanny, some sources suggest that Mendelssohn had fallen desperately in love with the soprano <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/artists\/jenny-lind\/"\">Jenny Lind<\/a><\/strong>. Staying at the Hotel Interlaken, he was regaining his balance, absorbed in work and walks; Lampadius related that the former included the F minor String Quartet and the opera he was planning for Lind, Lorelei<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<section class=\""highlight\"> <div class=\""highlight__content\" editor-content=\"\"> \n<ul>\n<li><a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/articles\/did-jenny-lind-have-an-affair-with-felix-mendelssohn\/"\">Did Jenny Lind have an affair with Felix Mendelssohn?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> The English critic Henry Chorley visited him in August, and went with him to the Staubbach Falls, \u2018its waters gleaming like a shower of rockets launched over the edge of the high cliff, their expended fires spreading and mingling as they fell and faded,\u2019 he wrote. \u2018Almost my last distinct remembrance of Mendelssohn is seeing him standing within the arch of the [waterfall\u2019s] rainbow \u2026 looking upward, rapt and serious, thoroughly enjoying the scene. My very last is the sight of him turning down the road to wend back to [Interlaken] alone, while we turned up to cross the Wengern Alp to Grindelwald.\u2019 Mendelssohn left Switzerland in mid September. On 4 November, he, like his sister, died of a series of strokes.<\/span><\/p>\nJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, visiting the same spot in 1779, declared the Staubbach Falls \u2018a most wonderful thing\u2019. The sight inspired his poem Gesang der Geister \u00fcber den Wassern<\/i> (Song of the Spirits over the Waters). \u2018The soul of man is like water,\u2019 he writes. \u2018From heaven it comes, to heaven it goes, and again to earth\u2026ever changing.\u2019 He describes the flow of the falls against the sheer rockface, and the billowing clouds of spray. Schubert set this text twice, once as a solo song and once for male choir.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIn 1816, George Gordon Byron also found his way to Lauterbr\u00fcnnen. The poet was on the run from an England that considered him an incestuous adulterer \u2013 he was thought to be the father of his half-sister Augusta Leigh\u2019s child, Elizabeth.<\/span><\/p>\n He spent some time on Lake Geneva with his lover Claire Clairmont, her stepsister Mary Shelley, the latter\u2019s husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and the physician John Polidori; they amused themselves during this \u2018year without a summer\u2019 (blighted by a soot cloud from an Indonesian volcano) by writing ghost stories. The long-term results included Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein <\/i>and Polidori\u2019s short story The Vampyre<\/i>, forerunner of Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/i>. After that, Byron headed for the Jungfrau region.<\/span><\/p>\nHe put up \u2013 as Mendelssohn did later \u2013 in the Hotel Interlaken. After standing beneath the Staubbach Falls, he wrote of his enchantment upon seeing the sun casting rainbows through the spray. His response to the Lauterbr\u00fcnnen Valley was Manfred<\/i>: a turbulent fantasy in verse, set out as a play yet, like Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/i>, essentially stageable only in the imagination. This is Byron at his most emotionally extravagant, rapturous in his new-found passion for the wonders of the natural world.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe action takes place on and beneath the Jungfrau, where Manfred, the troubled hero, considers plunging to his death. Saved by a hunter, he meets a series of spirits who bring him everything but death. Among them is the Witch of the Alps, who rises \u2018beneath the Arch of the sunbow of the torrent\u2019 after Manfred summons her under the waterfall:<\/span><\/p>\n<section class=\""highlight\"> <div class=\""highlight__content\" editor-content=\"\"> \nIt is not noon \u2013 the sunbow\u2019s rays still arch<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nThe torrent with the many hues of heaven,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nAnd roll the sheeted silver\u2019s waving column<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nO\u2019er the crag\u2019s headlong perpendicular,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nAnd fling its lines of foaming light along,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nAnd to and fro, like the pale courser\u2019s tail,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nThe Giant steed, to be bestrode by Death,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nAs told in the Apocalypse. No eyes<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nBut mine now drink this sight of loveliness;<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nI should be sole in this sweet solitude,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nAnd with the Spirit of the place divide<\/i><\/span><\/p>\nThe homage of these waters.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Mendelssohn\u2019s friend <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/robert-schumann\/"\">Robert Schumann<\/a><\/strong>, with his lifelong passion for literature, was entranced by Manfred<\/i>. When in 1852 Liszt held a reading of the poem, Schumann wrote an overture and incidental music for it, with some pieces underscoring the text, transforming it into \u2018melodrama\u2019. He told Liszt that he considered the overture one of his \u2018most powerful children\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThree decades later, however, his Manfred <\/i>was somewhat eclipsed. The Russian critic Vladimir Stasov had suggested to Mily Balakirev a scenario for a Manfred<\/i> symphony. Balakirev sent it to <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/pyotr-ilyich-tchaikovsky\/"\">Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.<\/a><\/strong> The latter was sceptical; but upon travelling to Switzerland in 1884 and reading the poem there, he began to identify his own tortured emotional life with that of Manfred. His <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/recordings\/best-recordings-tchaikovskys-manfred-symphony\/"\">Manfred Symphony<\/i><\/a><\/strong>\u2019s second movement depicts the Staubbach Falls and the sinuous \u2018witch\u2019 who emerges from its rainbows.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<iframe title=\""Tchaikovsky\" manfred=\"\" symphony=\"\" in=\"\" b=\"\" minor=\"\" op.=\"\" width=\""200"\" height=\""113"\" src=\""https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/b9No7Av6DSw?feature=oembed"\" frameborder=\""0"\" allow=\""accelerometer;\" autoplay=\"\" clipboard-write=\"\" encrypted-media=\"\" gyroscope=\"\" picture-in-picture=\"\" allowfullscreen=\"\"\/>\nTchaikovsky stayed at the Hotel Jungfrau at Wengernalp, a meadow above Wengen itself, now a \u2018request stop\u2019 on the train that continues up to Kleine Scheidegg and the Jungfraujoch. Mendelssohn had been there too, and among other guests the hotel\u2019s website proudly mentions Wordsworth, Daudet, Mark Twain, Marx, Engels, Flotow and Brahms, who composed his Double Concerto while on holiday at the nearby Lake Thun. Also on the hotel\u2019s list is Wagner.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nSwitzerland became the German composer\u2019s home twice \u2013 first from 1849-58. Wagner adored the Alps and there became a restless, inquisitive traveller and energetic hiker; his companions sometimes came croppers trying to keep up. <\/span><\/p>\nIn 1852, soon after drafting the libretto of <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/articles\/guide-wagners-die-walkure\/"\">Die Walk\u00fcre<\/i><\/a><\/strong>, he walked alone from Interlaken to Lauterbr\u00fcnnen, up to the Wengernalp \u2013 \u2018where you can touch the Jungfrau with your hands,\u2019 he wrote \u2013 and on to Kleine Scheidegg, then down the other side of the mountain to Grindelwald. (This is a demanding and spectacular walk, passing beneath the north face of the Eiger.) On later trips he would explore Swiss regions from Mont Blanc in the west to St\u00a0Moritz and Bernina in the south east.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nWagner\u2019s second sojourn in Switzerland occured when his patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was forced to send the composer into temporary exile in the light of\u00a0 <\/span>the scandal of Wagner\u2019s liaison with <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/franz-liszt\/"\">Liszt<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s already married daughter, Cosima. Wagner and Cosima settled at Tribschen near Lucerne \u2013 their home from 1866 -1872. <\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard not to feel that Wagner\u2019s aural landscapes are Alpine. Thunderstorms, glorious vistas, fearsome peaks, torrential rivers and the sheer awe-inspiring scale of it can be matched by few stages other than the mountains themselves. And the Rhine? Its source is in the Swiss Alps.<\/span><\/p>\nThe chronicle of visitors continued. <a href=\""https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/composers\/gabriel-faure\/"\">Gabriel Faur\u00e9<\/a><\/strong>, who loved lakes, mountains and waterfalls, came in 1907 with his much-younger mistress and a camera, with which he photographed the view of the Eiger from Kleine Scheidegg. Unlike Wagner, they travelled\u00a0by\u00a0train.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nSo do we. From Lauterbr\u00fcnnen station it\u2019s a short stroll up to the Staubbach Falls. We stand there in Goethe, Byron and Mendelssohn\u2019s footsteps, our faces spattered by the same billowing clouds of spray. Later, in the flat, we open a window and fall asleep to the song of the enchanted torrent.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nMain image: The Staubbach Falls above the village Lauterbrunnen in around 1907, \u00a9\u00a0 Getty Images<\/em><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n<hr class=\"no-tts wp-block-separator\"\/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jessica Duchen Published: Tuesday, 03 January 2023 at 12:00 am The village of Wengen perches high above the Lauterbr\u00fcnnen Valley in Switzerland\u2019s Bernese Oberland. Looking left from our holiday flat\u2019s balcony, I can drink in the sight of the Jungfrau, bright with spring snow. Beneath it, sheer cliffs plunge to the flower-filled fields on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":23251,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"8"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-scaled.jpg",2560,1820,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-300x213.jpg",300,213,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-768x546.jpg",768,546,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-1024x728.jpg",800,569,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-1536x1092.jpg",1536,1092,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2023\/01\/how-the-swiss-alps-inspired-composers-and-their-music-2048x1456.jpg",2048,1456,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Jessica Duchen Published: Tuesday, 03 January 2023 at 12:00 am The village of Wengen perches high above the Lauterbr\u00fcnnen Valley in Switzerland\u2019s Bernese Oberland. 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