Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the most influential novelist of his time. His works inspired such disparate artists as the Brontë sisters, Victor Hugo and Alexander Pushkin. It seems that during his lifetime, everyone was reading his novels. Scott was so prolific and so universally read in his own time that he made quite a living for himself. From his teenage years he was fascinated with the lore, ballads and legends of his native Scotland and he, like his contemporaries the Grimm Brothers in Germany, collected these materials with great enthusiasm. He was especially drawn to stories of the Middle Ages, stories of knights in shining armor, ladies in distress and tales of the crusades. He was also fascinated by the Reformation era in Scotland, the deposing of the last Stuart King, James II and the accession of William and Mary in the 17th century. The bloody feuds of this period, the attempt by James to force England back to Catholicism and the last gasp attempt of Scotland to have its own identity apart from England were all part of the history and atmosphere of The Bride of Lammermoor, published in 1819.
In this novel Scott seems to have made a conscious effort to write something quite different from other of his novels like Ivanhoe, published at about the same time. The Bride of Lammermoor is dark and Gothic with supernatural elements and bizarre turns of events that stimulated the imaginations of 19th century readers. Scott is at his best dealing with these more grotesque elements of the novel, especially in his descriptions of the brooding Scottish landscape and the ruined family castle of the Ravenswoods, Wolf’s Crag. These elements are all part and parcel of the Romantic spirit, of which Scott was both purveyor and wide-eyed consumer. Here is the description of the funeral of the Lord of Ravenswood at the moment that his son Edgar, the hero of the novel, gives his father over to the grave:
In the countenance of the young man alone, resentment seemed for the moment overpowered by the deep agony with which he beheld his nearest, and almost his only, friend consigned to the tomb of his ancestry. A relative observed him turn deadly pale, when, all rites being now duly observed, it became the duty of the chief mourner to lower down into the charnel vault, where mouldering coffins showed their tattered velvet and decayed plating, the head of the corpse which was to be their partner in corruption. He stept to the youth and offered his assistance, which, by a mute motion, Edgar Ravenswood rejected. Firmly, and without a tear, he performed that last duty. The stone was laid on the sepulchre, the door of the aisle was locked, and the youth took possession of its massive key.
Such atmospherics weren’t lost on contemporary readers and not just in the British Isles. The whole of Europe was reading Scott’s novels in translation and he was particularly inspiring to Italian composers of opera, whose essentially Romantic art form was starving for such scenarios. Other works by Scott which have been used as a source for opera are: The Lady of the Lake (Rossini, 1819), Guy Mannering (Boildieu, 1825, as La dame blanche), Rob Roy (Flotow, 1836), The Heart of Midlothian (Carafa, 1829), Ivanhoe (Marschner, 1829; Pacini, 1832; Nicolai, 1840; Sullivan, 1891), Kenilworth (Auber, 1823; Donizetti, 1829) and The Fair Maid of Perth (Bizet, 1867).