With their high peaks and cascading waterfalls, the Swiss Alps have inspired a swathe of Romantic poetry, literature and, in turn, composers from Wagner to Tchaikovsky, as Jessica Duchen explores
The village of Wengen perches high above the Lauterbrünnen Valley in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Looking left from our holiday flat’s 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. Opposite, beyond the little town of Lauterbrünnen, a waterfall juts out from a high rock, pouring forth at a startling angle. The waterfall’s sound is constant, along with birdsong and little else. Wengen does not permit cars – you can only get there by a cog railway up the mountain from Lauterbrünnen (or if energetic, on foot). For a whole week, it seems almost criminal to miss a moment of it.
We are far from the first to feel that way: artistically minded visitors have been drawn to this dramatic cleft in the Alpine scenery for some 250 years. Path upon path of Romanticism, fantasy, poetry and music seem to have collided right here – at that same waterfall with its 274m drop, known as the Staubbach Falls.
JRR Tolkien travelled aged 19 to the Lauterbrünnen Valley in 1911; he later told his son that it inspired Rivendell in Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth (his 1937 painting of Rivendell bears an astonishing resemblance). But Tolkien’s Ring was heavily influenced by another: Richard Wagner’s. 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.
A little way up the mountainside from Wengen, you will find a monument to the village’s most beloved musical visitor: Felix Mendelssohn. At the monument’s location on 21 August 1842, Mendelssohn drew an impression of the Jungfrau massif; it’s thought to be the earliest extant sketch of the place. Wengen has held an annual Mendelssohn Week festival since 2005 and named a ‘Mendelssohn Trail’ after him; it takes in a breathtaking view of the trio of giant peaks, the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger (probably Tolkien’s three peaks of Moria).
Mendelssohn first visited Switzerland aged 14, during his prodigy years. His String Symphony No. 9 in C, written in 1823, is nicknamed the ‘Swiss’, the lad’s fascination with yodelling reflected in the Scherzo’s trio. But
