In April 1815, weeks before Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, erupted. It was one of the largest volcanic incidents ever recorded and could be heard up to 1,600 miles off. Ash fell 800 miles away, and for two days following the explosion the 350 miles surrounding the mountain were in pitch darkness.

Many people feared that the world was facing its apocalyptic end

By the following year, a huge and dense dust cloud had entered the atmosphere and was moving across much of the globe, disrupting the weather systems of the northern hemisphere, in particular, during 1816 and the three years that followed. The fallout was a thousand times greater than the recent Icelandic volcanic activity which, almost 200 years later, caused considerable disruptions to air traffic. The sun’s frequent disappearances will have caused countless people to suffer the psychological effects of darkness as well as the physical consequences of extremely low temperatures during the volcanic winter that replaced the summer of 1816. It was the second coldest year on record since the middle ages and the 1810s were the coldest decade ever recorded. The change in climate gave rise to exceptional rainstorms and crop failure across the world. Famine, disease, poverty, civil unrest and mass migration ensued.

In 1816 Ireland suffered one of the worst of its recurring potato famines: typhus fever broke out, infecting 80,000 and killing 44,000. In the Chinese province of Yunnan, where harvests were ruined for three years, they planted poppies as a more robust and profitable alternative to rice, which became one of China’s main sources of opium, with devastating and enduring human consequences at home and abroad. The repeated crop failures over the same period in North America caused its economy, driven by arable farming, to crash in 1819, again with far-reaching repercussions. Disrupted monsoons in India were another aspect of the Tamboran climate change, giving rise to a new strain of cholera which almost wiped out the British army in the Bay of Bengal: the epidemic spread overseas, including to Indonesia, where many more people were killed by the disease than the 90,000 direct fatalities from the original volcanic eruptions of 1815.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Schubert’s presentiments found their ultimate expression in Winterreise.

If Napoleon had been the real-life hero of 19th-century Europe, then Prometheus – giver of fire – was its favourite mythical one. By the end of the 18th century, Goethe had penned his influential poem, Prometheus, and Aeschylus’s drama Prometheus Bound had been translated and enjoyed popular success. Beethoven’s only ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, provided material for his Eroica Symphony in the early 1800s: the initial dedication of this masterpiece to Napoleon was subsequently erased by its angry composer, disillusioned by the emperor’s abandonment of his republican (and democratic) ideals. Beethoven’s sentiments were echoed by Byron who, having admired Napoleon sufficiently to have travelled through Europe once in a replica of his imperial carriage, wrote Ode to Napoleon as a poetic diatribe against his erstwhile hero.

Byron left England in 1816 as a refugee from disgrace and humiliation, and the climatic consequences of Tambora’s eruptions enveloped him, physically and psychologically, when he reached Switzerland that missing summer. There he met up with Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin, soon to be Mrs Shelley, beside Lake Geneva where, confined indoors by the bad weather, they passed their time playing ghoulish games and writing scary stories by the fireside. Mary’s contribution was to create the uncontrollable monster of Frankenstein; or the modern Prometheus.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The modern Prometheus - Benedict Cumberbatch with Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature in Frankenstein by Nick Dear at London’s Olivier Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Mt Tambora fired up imaginations to interpret their environment, reflect the climate and capture the spirit of the age

Nobody at the time understood what was happening to the climate: it was only in the 1960s when scientists were able to explain the causal connections between volcanic activity and the weather. Many people feared that the world was facing its apocalyptic end, confidently prophesied for July 1816 by a Bolognese astronomer and depressively reflected in Byron’s poem, Darkness, conceived beside Lake Geneva during a particularly bad storm that same month.

The impact of what is now known as seasonal affective disorder is seldom identified and never analysed in artistic activity, particularly in music which tends to be more abstract than other art forms. Nevertheless our ears can tell us something about the states of mind of the world’s two greatest composers of the day, Beethoven and the younger Schubert, who were living in Vienna and affected in different ways during the year without a summer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ludwig Van Beethoven … influenced by gloomy atmospheric conditions? Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Life was not easy for either of them in 1816. Beethoven had been caught up in a lengthy legal battle with his widowed sister-in-law over the custody of his nephew; Schubert was upsettingly ignored by Goethe when he sent the great poet a beautiful present of his song-settings and, later in the year, his hopes for a regularly paid teaching post and his prospects of marriage were simultaneously dashed.



Beethoven had been going through a relatively fallow creative period in 1815-16, but by late springtime he had managed to overcome his demons and create the first great song-cycle in western music, the perfectly formed and sublimely romantic An die ferne Geliebte. The cycle depicts an arcadian landscape of lightness and gentle breezes that were a far cry from the climatic realities of mid-1816. Before the year was out, Beethoven had embarked upon his fabled “late period” of composition with his Piano Sonata No 28 Op 101. The gloomy atmospheric conditions that prevailed seem not to have influenced the great composer’s own moods.

Unlike the younger composer, the 19-year-old Schubert: in 1816, his prodigious output included two symphonies, choral music, chamber works and more than a hundred Lieder. Almost all of these songs reflected not only the wandering, wondering and passionate romanticism of the age but also the coldness and darkness of this mysterious period. In some of them we can clearly hear presentiments of what was to come much later in Winterreise, his great song cycle, in which Schubert captured the frosted landscapes that were a recurring feature during the year without a summer and the remainder of that uniquely cold decade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest SAD sufferer? An engraving of Schubert, circa 1820 Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images

In contrast to Beethoven, on the evidence of his choice of texts and our hearing of his musical moods, we can argue that Schubert may have suffered from SAD exacerbated by the appalling weather. We can say more surely that the volcanic winter had no negative effect on the quantities of their respective, very different outputs during this remarkable year.

It was in 1816 that Schubert received his first ever professional commission, for a tantalisingly long-lost cantata called Prometheus, and the only work for which he was actually paid all year. An amazing moment of creative synchronicity occurred during that missing summer: at exactly the same time when Schubert composed his cantata, Byron wrote his epic poem Prometheus, Frankenstein was born and the seeds of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound were sown. Something was in the air. Mt Tambora, in her cataclysmic self-destruction, put more than just a vast cloud of volcanic ash into the atmosphere: she fired up the imaginations of artists to interpret their environment, reflect the climate and capture the spirit of the age.

