Beethoven's Irish and Scottish songs
"It is a little known fact that Beethoven composed more folksong settings than he did works of any other genre, and that he arranged more traditional airs from Ireland than from any other country."
Oh my God, this album is scratching a deep itch.
I’ve listened to it twice now, and on this second time I am rushing to the computer to find out more about them, and also to pour out my enthusiasm here
Here are the reasons I like them
They’re in English, for goodness sake — I just don’t know much other classical/early romantic music in English. The only antique stuff that comes to mind is Messiah, and that’s all biblical texts. Hearing Beethoven in English makes the idiom come alive in a way it just doesn’t when the language is foreign. Also, it helps give an immediate impression of how dated the text is.
They’re at the intersection of folk and classical music, which is right where I want to be right now. The tunes are folkish, which means they don’t have development sections and they don’t make complex structural demands. So they’ve got classical techniques but not classical structures. This makes them easier to interpret, so the playing is nice and vigorous (on the recording I’m hearing — I’m extrapolating a bit here). It also makes the musical/emotional role of the classical techniques totally apparent, less esoteric.
They are so raw. The famous quote about them is by Barry someone who says that these settings have ‘a kind of sophisticated artlessness that no ordinary composer could achieve’. That is accurate. I’m not going to speak about the “ordinary composer” bit because I’m not gagged about elevating our favorite geniuses above everyone else but they are great for their artlessness. There’s a lot of … raw instrumental slamming. This is a wish I have had for a long time that’s something like “What if Beethoven sounded like Weezer?” … It’s a lot more sophisticated than Weezer but Beethoven is absolutely not shy about slamming chords in a simple way when that’s called for.
This recording is interpretively immaculate, in my opinion. I say that rarely. Of course as I said it isn’t difficult to interpret this music. I’m not saying that to praise the performers — although I am happy to praise them. I’m saying this to invite the listener into an experience I can assure them will be coherent and not schizoid like so much classical music out there. I really like how they play and sing. The instrumentalists play accurately, vigorously, in tune, but with a satisfying rawness. The singers are enthusiastic and vibrant and present with the music and the words. One of the female singers is vibrato-heavy for my taste. That’s my only complaint.
Beethoven is sort of known to not be a “great” melodist, so this album also kind of fulfills the question “What if Beethoven worked with some great melodies?” because these melodies are really wonderful.
There’s a lot of nice swashbuckling stuff in here. Other moods too.
Substack is a medium that really lends itself to polished writing but I’m not producing polished writing *shrug*
I’ve now skimmed the amazon reviews and one person complains that it doesn’t work as folk music. I’ll agree with that. It’s folk tunes rendered through classical language, and it’s more on the classical side. That must be why I kept being reminded of the violin pedagogy method I’ve been trained in, Kaleidoscopes, which treats folk tunes in a classical way. Anyway, the reviewer mourns that it removes many of the folk qualities from the songs. Whatever! Who cares.
Okay, so what’s the story?
The Story
He was commissioned by an enthusiastic commissioner of settings of English texts, George Thomason. He didn’t love it. I don’t care, I love it.
https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/beethoven-30 : “Shavings from the master’s workshop, no doubt. In fact the composer protested to the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson in 1809 that setting folksongs gave a true artist no real pleasure.”
The quote in the subtitle is from here: http://beethovensirishsongs.ie/about-the-songs/
From there and also the page called “Why revisit” I have distilled this summary
The tunes were from the folk world (except for a few which may have been by Thomason); Thomason gathered texts from them from various poets after they had been set. This means that one is free to replace the texts if one finds them uninteresting. They were written for piano and voice, with optional violin and cello. One might find that it’s sometimes better to leave out the strings. I admit at times I feel like they are not really necessary except just adding some arpeggios and making things noisy … but … I still think it’s kind of nice because it’s buddies making music, maybe the music is a little unbalanced but everyone sounds very Present to me.
The year was 1809
Okay, smashing. I feel weird about putting this on substack. Like if I wanted I could actually edit this and make it nice and not a thoughtdump, but, I think thoughtdumps are valid. They’re just more valid on tumblr and wordpress than substack, but whatever.