I was going
to tell you, you see, about the weird fact that while Joseph
Haydn had written some 400
songs based on Scottish folk songs, nobody had bothered to publish them
until something like 2004. OK—my journalist father, grumbling down from his
celestial newsroom, forced me to look up the citation:
The reason
why the song arrangements have so far remained in the shadow of the other late
works and only very few of them have been performed, is largely because only a
very small number of them was available in new editions. Only since the year
2005 the song arrangements are available in the complete edition of Haydn’s
works, Joseph Haydn Werke, edited by the Joseph Haydn Institut in Cologne and published
by G. Henle in Munich.
What! Boys,
boys—Haydn died in 1809, after busily having composed over a hundred
symphonies, a zillion string quartets, umpteen masses, two MAJOR oratorios, as
well as troubling himself to invent the symphony and champion the string
quartet. In fact, in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, Haydn had
composed something and gone off to compose something else. And then you guys
take almost TWO centuries to get about publishing his stuff? There’s a word for
this—criminal neglect!
Well, I had
come upon these things because, in a self-satisfied moment on Monday
(self-satisfied because I was getting through it), I had decided to listen to Jean Redpath, and whatever
she cannot do for a Scottish song doesn’t need to be done. And since the news
on the island is horrendous and rapidly getting worse (today’s headline in El Vocero is Bomba de Tiempo, and yes, that does mean “Time Bomb”),
it was decidedly time to jump islands and centuries. And since I had met the
Redpath briefly, and found her funny and self-deprecating—she recounted how she
had met a fellow Scot at an intermission, and he had told her he was liking the
concert, so far—it was time to wander off to Wikipedia, to get the dope on Jean. And that’s
where I found: among all of the recordings, Redpath had recorded the Haydn
Scottish Songs.
Hunh?
Wikipedia to YouTube, YouTube to Wikipedia: that’s my life these days. OK—so I
clicked on the clip, and was treated to a minute or so of elegant, rococo
Haydn. And then? Auld
Lang Syne!
The worst
thing?
Nobody,
absolutely nobody pays the least attention anymore to Marc in his corner,
giggling to himself.
Oh well, at
least they know I’m harmless….
The cool
thing about these arrangements is that they’re for piano, violin and cello—a
piano trio—as well as voice, of course. And why was that?
There was a
time, Dear Reader, before our degenerate age of Internet and television, when
everybody—well, mostbody—could
play an instrument. Oh, and read music. And so what did people do, of an
evening, to whittle away the hours before bed? They sat down to the piano, and
played an air or tune. Think Jane
Austen!
So, from
the sound of the arrangements, they’re not all that technically challenging,
which means that, for a musician, they’d be totally fun to play. And an added
benefit? The music comes from the first years of the 19th century,
when Haydn was in his prime.
Right—so
that was interesting, as was the news that Beethoven had
gotten into the act, and had written—well, back to the same source:
What is
probably the most striking aspect of these folk song settings is that Beethoven
wrote far more of these than any other type of composition, having composed an
astounding 179 folk song arrangements spanning a period of eleven years from
1809 to 1820.
1809 to
1820? Given the fact that Beethoven died in 1827, this puts these works
respectably into the middle and late periods. And Beethoven follows the
practice of using a piano trio as accompaniment. The cool thing? The violin and
cello are optional—adding to the richness, but not necessary.
So Monday
had passed happily, listening to music I had never imagined existed! Every
musician’s dream!
Tuesday?
Stay tuned!
And for a seriously beautiful, almost haunting, song, click below:
