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chapter 11 Contrafacts from the British Isles

Vuk’s revision of Serbian orthography and his collection of Serbian folk songs were unique achievements, but song revivals occurred also elsewhere, not only in Eastern Europe, as Fauriel’s new-Greek folk-song collection shows, but even in the British Isles, where Macpherson’s provoked Irish, Scottish, and Welsh revivals. To what extent these revivals were merely poetic, or broadly cultural, or even political is still being debated. Though only few of the songs were directly political, they fortified minority cultures that were at that time bereft of political power and eager to recuperate a historical identity with its own vernacular and ethnic . This interest in songs manifested itself on both sides of the continent, but in very different forms of collection and distribution. Short of offering a full- scale comparison, the following discussion will concentrate on the transfor- mations that songs from the British Isles underwent, more specifically, on the repeated marriages and divorces of text and music that produced what experts call contrafacts: the grafting of new songs (texts or melodies) onto existing material. The ethnopolitical issues of songs had virtually no significance for the Scots- man George Thomson who became one of the most prominent publishers of national melodies, starting with his Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs of 1793. It included twenty-five new poems by Burns, arranged for piano, violin, and cello by the Austrian-born French composer and Haydn student Ignace Pleyel. Thomson was fond of old airs but he was neither an outright nationalist nor a purist, and so he published for amateur players and asked Viennese composers to arrange the songs. After Pleyel, he commissioned Haydn, who arranged close to four-hundred-and-fifty Irish, Scottish, and Welsh songs for several publishers, and, finally, Beethoven, whose Select Collection of Original Irish Airs he published in 1814. The most controversial ethnic songs emerging from Britain’s national song market, ’s and Isaac Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies (1815–16), originally claimed to revive ancient Jewish songs but were actually based on melodies sung at synagogue services in London. They came to be regarded as political and labeled “proto-Zionist,” for many of them expressed a yearning to overcome the diaspora. I shall analyze one song from the collection and one of its Byron poems for which Schumann com- posed new music later.

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Scott (Re)turns to Ulster

The British song market meant that James Power in Dublin, Thomas Preston in London, as well as William Napier, William Whyte, and George Thomson in selected original ethnic melodies and usually commissioned such as , , and to write poems to fit them (Slater, 1952: 76). They also commissioned composers to provide arrange- ments for the melodies. Haydn (who had earlier used East-European folk songs while at Esterháza) composed his first Scottish arrangements during his visit to London in order to rescue the violinist and music publisher Napier from go- ing bankrupt with his first Scottish-song collection (Geiringer, 1949). The enor- mous success of the new Haydn arrangements (1792) led to another volume with Napier in 1794. Haydn published his first volume with Thomson in 1802, and he completed finally altogether 445 arrangements of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh songs. They consisted of instrumental accompaniments, occasional ad- ditional voices, as well as introductory and concluding ritornellos.1 Thomson sent Haydn the tunes but no texts and titles. He added the headings and the words once he received the arrangements, using “either the original folksong or, mostly, a new poem by one of his collaborators” (Geiringer, 1949: 186). As Thomson relates in the preface to his first volume of Beethoven arrange- ments (1793), he was delighted that Beethoven was willing to continue Haydn’s work, and he sent him forty-three melodies on September 25, 1809.2 Beethoven immediately went to work but the scores he sent to Thomson in July 1810 were caught in Napoleon’s continent-wide blockade of Great Britain and reached Edinburgh only in the summer of 1812. Beethoven’s first twelve arrangements, titled Select Collection of Original Irish Airs … Composed by Beethoven appeared at end of 1814. The title acknowledges that the “Irish Airs” were united with characteristic English (sic) poetry. Beethoven was unhappy that he had to arrange the music “blindly,” without the actual poems. Thomson responded on December 21, 1812 that several of the texts were “still in the ’s brain,” needing much attention and reflection

1 I use the term “arrangement” for Haydn’s and Beethoven’s work, though Cooper finds it be- littling. Thomson specified that all these should be for piano, violin, and cello, though he recognized later that the strings complicated performances at home. Beethoven paid little attention to the strings and separated the piano more clearly from the voice than Pleyel and Haydn (Cooper, 1994: 108). Thomson accepted independent piano parts, but requested that Beethoven introduce the melody on the piano as well (144). 2 On Beethoven’s cooperation with Thomson, see Cooper, Hufstader, McCue (2006), MacArdle (1956), and Weber-Bockholdt (1994).

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