Classical Connections
by Finlay Forbes
Franz Joseph Haydn
B&F - June 2006
They say that confession is good for the sole. If that is so then I am about to confer considerable benefits upon my immortal remains or at least what I hope will be my immortal remains when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Yes I admit it; I am a compulsive classical CD buyer. No sooner do I resolve to arm myself against temptation than my Internet supplier sends me a newsletter laden with irresistible special offers. Failing that, some enterprising independent label is sure to release something that is just too fascinating to ignore. In the face of such forces, rampant recidivism is inevitable. Well it isn’t really but I have yet to find an effective cure. Such crude remedies as ‘just stop buying’ only bring about side effects indescribably more distressing than the original ailment.
Already, some readers will be asking why I am choosing the B&F as a substitute for the confessional in relation to a matter that seems to be at best only connected only tenuously to the magazine’s normal content. The answer is simple. There are some surprising and very enlightening links between the classical and Scots tradition as I discovered with one of my recent compulsive purchases – a ‘Brilliant Box’ of Scottish songs arranged for the Scots music publisher George Thomson by the great Joseph Haydn. (4 CDs for £11 was too much of a bargain for a North East loon to resist).
Brilliant Classics is a business that perhaps typifies more than anything, he cultural differences between Britain and its European neighbours. It is a super-bargain ‘no frills, pile high, sell cheap’ label designed to stimulate impulse buying in places like pharmacies and supermarkets. It is difficult to imaging your average British trolley pusher bunging in a box of Nielsen’s symphonies to go with the plastic cheddar and all-chemical bacon.
Brilliant’s target market means that it tends to concentrate on high-quality reissued recordings of core repertoire rather than the untrodden ways of the classical repertoire. (I can strongly recommend the Beethoven symphony cycle played by the Staatskapelle Dresden under Danish maestro Herbert Blomstedt – big band Beethoven at its very best).
Given the label’s background, the Haydn series is definitely something beyond its normal stock in trade. For a start, it is not a reissue. All recordings are being issued for the first time under a project funded by bodies as diverse as The University of Glasgow and Austrian Wind Power. It is a project that could so easily have misfired by allowing over-hyped big-name singers to murder the Scots language and let their egos get in the way of the music but this has not happened. Brilliant wisely chose two native Scots – Lorna Anderson and Jamie MacDougall to do the singing and the highly specialized and accomplished Haydn Trio Eisenstadt to play the instrumental parts. The results are well worth hearing. If you thought you knew about the wonders of the Scottish song repertoire – think again. There are discoveries aplenty in this series of recordings, including a very witty marital dispute set to the tune The East Neuk o’ Fife taken more like a schottische than the more familiar hornpipe. Lorna Anderson sounds particularly formidable as the aggrieved lady of the house. Then there are the familiar words of Ca’ the Yowes tae the Knowes sung to the not-so-familiar Gaelic air The Maid that Tends the Goats. It works!
Why did Haydn arrange so many songs (around 400 in all)? The short answer is quite simple – because someone paid him to do it. George Thomson was the main, but not the only, publisher who commissioned Haydn to do this work and the Brilliant series has thus far concentrated on the settings for Thomson.
Haydn composed these arrangements between 1791 and 1805, an era in which he was undisputed cock of the European musical roost. Up until 1791, he had shared domination of musical Europe with Mozart in a curious mutual admiration compact under which each believed the other to be the greater composer. After 1805, Haydn attempted, without too much success, to retire completely from composing by which time a new figure in the person of his erstwhile pupil Ludwig van Beethoven was beginning to catch the ears of Europe’s music-loving public.
Haydn’s arrangements for piano, violin and ‘cello, although clearly written in his own masterly style, show a remarkable sensitivity towards the character of the tunes. Such sensitivity is all the more remarkable when we consider that all he had to work on was an untitled melody line of each song. Haydn’s command of English was not particularly strong, and his knowledge of Scots probably non-existent, so it is unlikely that giving him the titles would have added much in the way of insight. In fact, he conducted his correspondence with Thomson in Italian, that being the one language with which both men were reasonably conversant. (As a point in passing, on of Haydn’s more remarkable settings of the Italian language is an operatic aria in praise of the laxative properties of rhubarb!)
Linguistic problems aside, Thomson may have had other reason for keeping Haydn in the dark about the subject matter of the tunes. In song making terms, Thomson was something of a matchmaker and would often attach a set of lyrics to a tune for which they were not originally intended – so be prepared for some surprises. Thomson always used the original tune titles, presumably because they were the ones that his potential buyers would recognize even if the words to which he eventually attached them bore little relationship to the title. His subscribers were unlikely to have been disappointed at the unfamiliar words since most of them were by high quality poets of the age, such as Allan Ramsay (1686 – 1758 from Leadhills / Edinburgh) and a certain Mr R. Burns from Ayrshire.
This is where the surprises begin. Any Doric speakers looking forward to hearing Lorna Anderson’s elegant soprano voice negotiating the intricacies of The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre will be surprised but probably not disappointed by the results. The song in question has nothing to do with the ongyauns at a lea rig craft upon a hill and everything to do with the sisterly request for relationship counseling so wittily reflected in Burn’s ‘Tam Glen’. Yes, there are two tunes called The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre and this is the other one! It is also the one with the more legitimate claim to the title. The tune that most of us recognize as The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre is a variant of the old air Taymouth. In a slower form it becomes Bonnie Strathyre and with a bit of West Highland tweaking turns into the first strain of Westering Home. Some listeners will be equally surprised to hear the Jacobite words of Up and Waur them a’ Willie supplanted by the poetically superior and more enduring sentiments of ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. Any melodic similarities between Up and Waur them a’ Willie and There’s nae Luck aboot the Hoose are not due entirely to coincidence. Once upon a time, they were the same tune!
One of the more revealing aspects of these releases is that it gives us access to the tunes as they were before the army of Victorian editors and ‘improvers’ stuck their editors’ pens into them. The Flowers of Edinburgh set to Burn’s ‘Here is the Glen and here the Bower’ recasts the now familiar hornpipe/reel as a slow Scots Measure of great beauty and elegance.
Do Haydn’s arrangements work? Doubtless the corduroy-breeked ranks of the pithead and midden school of fake campus folkery will object to the imagined gentrification of the Scots tradition but that’s predictability for you. In fact the wheelwright’s son from Rohrau in Austria shows astonishing sensitivity to the subtle nuances of these glorious melodies and sets them very much as a master jeweler would set a fine gemstone. To anyone familiar with Haydn’s large-scale works, this should come as no surprise. The Austro-German symphonic school that Haydn fathered is more strongly rooted in central European folk idioms than many classical experts in the United Kingdom are willing to admit. In no sense does Haydn attempt to sacrifice the music’s native beauty on the alter of his own stylistic ego. In a sense, Haydn was to classical music what Robert Burns was to poetry. Both had the genius to blend everyday items into more complex structures without creating any sense of incongruity.
One of the less obvious benefits of these CDs is that they offer us the chance to hear some of our current dance tunes like, Muirland Willie, Maggie Lauder and Jenny’s Bawbee in something approaching their original form and in arrangements that capture the spirit of the age.
They are a ‘must have’ for anyone interested in the history of Scottish music but that is not all. These performances are worth hearing on their musical merits alone. I can hardly wait for Volume 3.
Disc details :-
Joseph Haydn : Scottish Songs for George Thomson Vol 1 (27 tracks) Brilliant Classics 92278 1 CD
Joseph Haydn : Scottish Songs for George Thomson Vol 2 (91 tracks) Brilliant Classics 92542 4 CD Boxed Set
Already, some readers will be asking why I am choosing the B&F as a substitute for the confessional in relation to a matter that seems to be at best only connected only tenuously to the magazine’s normal content. The answer is simple. There are some surprising and very enlightening links between the classical and Scots tradition as I discovered with one of my recent compulsive purchases – a ‘Brilliant Box’ of Scottish songs arranged for the Scots music publisher George Thomson by the great Joseph Haydn. (4 CDs for £11 was too much of a bargain for a North East loon to resist).
Brilliant Classics is a business that perhaps typifies more than anything, he cultural differences between Britain and its European neighbours. It is a super-bargain ‘no frills, pile high, sell cheap’ label designed to stimulate impulse buying in places like pharmacies and supermarkets. It is difficult to imaging your average British trolley pusher bunging in a box of Nielsen’s symphonies to go with the plastic cheddar and all-chemical bacon.
Brilliant’s target market means that it tends to concentrate on high-quality reissued recordings of core repertoire rather than the untrodden ways of the classical repertoire. (I can strongly recommend the Beethoven symphony cycle played by the Staatskapelle Dresden under Danish maestro Herbert Blomstedt – big band Beethoven at its very best).
Given the label’s background, the Haydn series is definitely something beyond its normal stock in trade. For a start, it is not a reissue. All recordings are being issued for the first time under a project funded by bodies as diverse as The University of Glasgow and Austrian Wind Power. It is a project that could so easily have misfired by allowing over-hyped big-name singers to murder the Scots language and let their egos get in the way of the music but this has not happened. Brilliant wisely chose two native Scots – Lorna Anderson and Jamie MacDougall to do the singing and the highly specialized and accomplished Haydn Trio Eisenstadt to play the instrumental parts. The results are well worth hearing. If you thought you knew about the wonders of the Scottish song repertoire – think again. There are discoveries aplenty in this series of recordings, including a very witty marital dispute set to the tune The East Neuk o’ Fife taken more like a schottische than the more familiar hornpipe. Lorna Anderson sounds particularly formidable as the aggrieved lady of the house. Then there are the familiar words of Ca’ the Yowes tae the Knowes sung to the not-so-familiar Gaelic air The Maid that Tends the Goats. It works!
Why did Haydn arrange so many songs (around 400 in all)? The short answer is quite simple – because someone paid him to do it. George Thomson was the main, but not the only, publisher who commissioned Haydn to do this work and the Brilliant series has thus far concentrated on the settings for Thomson.
Haydn composed these arrangements between 1791 and 1805, an era in which he was undisputed cock of the European musical roost. Up until 1791, he had shared domination of musical Europe with Mozart in a curious mutual admiration compact under which each believed the other to be the greater composer. After 1805, Haydn attempted, without too much success, to retire completely from composing by which time a new figure in the person of his erstwhile pupil Ludwig van Beethoven was beginning to catch the ears of Europe’s music-loving public.
Haydn’s arrangements for piano, violin and ‘cello, although clearly written in his own masterly style, show a remarkable sensitivity towards the character of the tunes. Such sensitivity is all the more remarkable when we consider that all he had to work on was an untitled melody line of each song. Haydn’s command of English was not particularly strong, and his knowledge of Scots probably non-existent, so it is unlikely that giving him the titles would have added much in the way of insight. In fact, he conducted his correspondence with Thomson in Italian, that being the one language with which both men were reasonably conversant. (As a point in passing, on of Haydn’s more remarkable settings of the Italian language is an operatic aria in praise of the laxative properties of rhubarb!)
Linguistic problems aside, Thomson may have had other reason for keeping Haydn in the dark about the subject matter of the tunes. In song making terms, Thomson was something of a matchmaker and would often attach a set of lyrics to a tune for which they were not originally intended – so be prepared for some surprises. Thomson always used the original tune titles, presumably because they were the ones that his potential buyers would recognize even if the words to which he eventually attached them bore little relationship to the title. His subscribers were unlikely to have been disappointed at the unfamiliar words since most of them were by high quality poets of the age, such as Allan Ramsay (1686 – 1758 from Leadhills / Edinburgh) and a certain Mr R. Burns from Ayrshire.
This is where the surprises begin. Any Doric speakers looking forward to hearing Lorna Anderson’s elegant soprano voice negotiating the intricacies of The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre will be surprised but probably not disappointed by the results. The song in question has nothing to do with the ongyauns at a lea rig craft upon a hill and everything to do with the sisterly request for relationship counseling so wittily reflected in Burn’s ‘Tam Glen’. Yes, there are two tunes called The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre and this is the other one! It is also the one with the more legitimate claim to the title. The tune that most of us recognize as The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre is a variant of the old air Taymouth. In a slower form it becomes Bonnie Strathyre and with a bit of West Highland tweaking turns into the first strain of Westering Home. Some listeners will be equally surprised to hear the Jacobite words of Up and Waur them a’ Willie supplanted by the poetically superior and more enduring sentiments of ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. Any melodic similarities between Up and Waur them a’ Willie and There’s nae Luck aboot the Hoose are not due entirely to coincidence. Once upon a time, they were the same tune!
One of the more revealing aspects of these releases is that it gives us access to the tunes as they were before the army of Victorian editors and ‘improvers’ stuck their editors’ pens into them. The Flowers of Edinburgh set to Burn’s ‘Here is the Glen and here the Bower’ recasts the now familiar hornpipe/reel as a slow Scots Measure of great beauty and elegance.
Do Haydn’s arrangements work? Doubtless the corduroy-breeked ranks of the pithead and midden school of fake campus folkery will object to the imagined gentrification of the Scots tradition but that’s predictability for you. In fact the wheelwright’s son from Rohrau in Austria shows astonishing sensitivity to the subtle nuances of these glorious melodies and sets them very much as a master jeweler would set a fine gemstone. To anyone familiar with Haydn’s large-scale works, this should come as no surprise. The Austro-German symphonic school that Haydn fathered is more strongly rooted in central European folk idioms than many classical experts in the United Kingdom are willing to admit. In no sense does Haydn attempt to sacrifice the music’s native beauty on the alter of his own stylistic ego. In a sense, Haydn was to classical music what Robert Burns was to poetry. Both had the genius to blend everyday items into more complex structures without creating any sense of incongruity.
One of the less obvious benefits of these CDs is that they offer us the chance to hear some of our current dance tunes like, Muirland Willie, Maggie Lauder and Jenny’s Bawbee in something approaching their original form and in arrangements that capture the spirit of the age.
They are a ‘must have’ for anyone interested in the history of Scottish music but that is not all. These performances are worth hearing on their musical merits alone. I can hardly wait for Volume 3.
Disc details :-
Joseph Haydn : Scottish Songs for George Thomson Vol 1 (27 tracks) Brilliant Classics 92278 1 CD
Joseph Haydn : Scottish Songs for George Thomson Vol 2 (91 tracks) Brilliant Classics 92542 4 CD Boxed Set