Sporadically, as the nineteenth century progressed, the poems of Ossian continued to inspire musical works in Britain: a ballet, Mora's Love, or The Enchanted Harp (1809), and an unfinished opera, Fingallo (ca. 1810), by Henry Bishop; a ballad opera, Malvina, with music by the Irish composer Thomas Simpson Cooke (1826); an overture, Ossian (1882), written and performed in 1882 by the London-born composer Frederick Corder (1852–1932), curator of the Royal Academy of Music from 1889 (his planned opera on the topic, ca. 1905, was apparently never performed); and William Augustus Barratt's cantata The Death of Cuthullin (1897). As tensions mounted over colonial wars and European unrest at the beginning of the twentieth century, the association with loss of compatriots in battle found ready expression in works such as Stanford's Irish Rhapsody No. 2: Lament for the Son of Ossian (1903) and Liza Lehmann's cantata Leaves from Ossian, its disquiet and longing conveyed by solo voices, chorus, and orchestra (1909).

A handful of works based on Ossian survived the Great War, including Edgar Bainton's opera Oithona (1915), revisiting the protagonist of Barthelemon's effort in 1768. Bainton (1880–1956) wrote the work for the Glastonbury Festival of 1915, although at the time of production he was in a civilian detention camp in Ruhleben, Germany, where he was held from 1914 to 1918. The work received four performances at Glastonbury, along with the second act of Wagner's Tristan. The critic for The Times, writing on August 12, 1915, noted that “the composer has gone to early British legend for his subject, and that type of subject has unfortunately earned a reputation for unreality in opera … Of the two scenes, the second, which begins with the lament of Oithóona and ends with her self-sought death in the battle between her two lovers, is the better, because the emotion of the drama is stronger and the music rises to its opportunities.”

Ossian was much in the air at this time. For the second of a series of War Emergency Concerts in London, the promoter Isidore de Lara asked the composer Eugene Goossens (1893–1962) if he could supply an orchestral work at short notice.