Sir Walter Scott was the intellectual patron saint of the Quarterly Review, which his publisher John Murray founded in 1809 to take away the Edinburgh Review's monopoly on literary criticism.

In the magazine, seven years older, model students of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment demonstrated their sense of freedom by slating them under a Latin motto, according to which the judge who acquits the guilty is condemned.

For the anonymous reviewer of the "Quarterly Review", who received the latest novels by the prolific Scott on his desk in 1821, it must have been a matter of honor to work on these prose epics, which, according to a tried and tested scheme, took their material from the great course of British social history, on a small scale also something to say.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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In "The Bride of Lammermoor", published in 1819, the tragic love story from the civil war between supporters and opponents of the royal house of the Stuarts develops against the background of changing production conditions and political mores.

Lucy Ashton secretly becomes engaged to Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, whose lands have been taken from her ascendant family.

Edgar not only seeks to regain his inheritance through the modern avenue of an appeal to the House of Lords, but also consults three mourners who remind him of the witches of Macbeth.

They promptly predict a mysterious death for him.

The critic took offense at this metaphysical ornament in the historical novel: "It is not the business of ghosts to appear, mortgagors or mortgageees."

A solid ensemble of picturesque ruin motifs

When Salvadore Cammarano abridged the plot of Scott's novel for the libretto of Gaetano Donizetti's opera, which premiered in Naples in 1835, the result corresponded to this ominous economic mnemonic: he dispensed with the entire legal complex and put the pessimistic messengers in front of the opera door.

Simon Stone, the Basel-born, Australian-trained director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York has now moved the play from late seventeenth-century Scotland to early twenty-first-century America, more specifically to the declining industrial regions of the Northeastern United States, tied together with the poetic name of the Rust Belt.

Like two hundred years ago the Celtic fringe of Latin civilization,

Of what Lucy Ashton's wedding party heard after she stabbed the groom she had to marry instead of her self-chosen fiancé, only a single articulated sentence has survived in the novel, from which Cammarano and Donizetti wrote the most famous mad monologue of opera literature have knitted.

Death put an end to the convulsions, Scott writes, "without her being able to utter a word to explain the fatal scene."

Stone uses his means to add this word to the visual language, wanting to sociologically spell out the fatalism of the plot.