The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, Op.3

• The Land of the Mountain and the Flood is a single-movement concert overture written in 1886, when the composer was 18 years old.
• The programmatic title and inspiration for the piece was Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto 6:
  • Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
    Who never to himself hath said,
    This is my own, my native land!
    Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
    As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
    From wandering on a foreign strand!
    If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
    For him no Minstrel raptures swell …
    O Caledonia! stern and wild,
    Meet nurse for a poetic child!
    Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
    Land of the mountain and the flood …¹
• This work is one of many that the composer wrote as a nod to the culture of his native Scotland and is often compared to Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture.

Read the synopsis of Scott’s poem here.
Read The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto 6 here.

1. John Purser, Notes in accompanying booklet, MacCunn: Land of the mountain and the flood & other orchestral works performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins, Hyperion 66815, 1995, compact disc.