Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🦉 🦉 🦉 three wise owls for Superb Owl Day, an annual American Sunday holiday devoted to the relaxed enjoyment of uncrowded public places — (weather permitting) in sight-seeing, strolling on city streets, visiting parks and zoos; or (indoors) shopping in stores, exploring museums, attending concerts and theatrical performances (when I was much younger, Superb Owl Day was an excellent occasion for a visit to the gay baths; no doubt you have your own spots that can provide relaxing pleasures)

Meanwhile, back at Ramona St. …

Playing on the Apple Music in my bedroom during my 2:30 whizz break: a ravishingly joyous soprano concert aria, or (as it turned out) Lied (with a warm and playful piano trio accompaniment), with some vocal figures worthy of the Queen of the Night. I thought of it as the Queen of the Day’s Song. In some Germanic language I couldn’t quite comprehend.

Ah, obviously one of Beethoven’s folksong compositions; when I actually got up, at 3:30, I went to my computer to track the song down:

“Wann i in der Früh aufsteh” (‘When I arise in the early morning” — celebrating morning on a Tyrolean dairy farm), Beethoven WoO 158a/ 4 — that is, #4 in his 23 Lieder Verschiedener Völker (‘Songs of Different Peoples / Various Nationalities’); from a 1997 Deutsche Grammophon recording; Janice Watson is the soprano; and the language is Tyrolean, a High German variety spoken in the western Austrian state of Tyrol (where it’s the majority language) and areas of northern Italy (in any case, in a region south of Bavaria and east of the part of Switzerland where the Zwickys come from)

You can listen to this very recording here.

An authority. Not well known, but Beethoven’s folksong arrangements — he did 179 of them — are full of delights. Back in 1997 Deutsche Grammophon issued a multi-disc album of the whole set, in attractive performances; and I have the whole megillah on my Apple Music. However, I lacked information about the circumstances that involved Beethoven, of all people, in the project of setting a slew of British folksongs, plus a lot of other stuff, as Lieder.

But a lot of rooting around brought me eventually to the Graham’s Music website and the excellent “Beethoven’s Folksongs” by Graham Abbott on 7/22/20. The full essay is way too much for my purposes here, but it’s worth reading, and it has a ton of examples to listen to. Some highlights from it:

In 1806, the Edinburgh-based music publisher George Thomson wrote to Beethoven (who lived in Vienna) and asked him if he would make some arrangements of Scottish folksongs. Capitalising on the popularity of such arrangements in Scotland for domestic use, Thomson had since 1790 commissioned and published such arrangements by Ignaz Pleyel, Leopold Kozeluch and Joseph Haydn, all popular composers of the day. Thomson was determined to publish arrangements by composers with an international reputation, so it was natural that at some stage he would approach Beethoven.

Thomson sent Beethoven a collection of 21 untexted traditional melodies in 1806 but Beethoven did not set these to music at that time. In 1809 Thomson sent Beethoven 43 melodies, including duplicates of the earlier 21, and requested that they be arranged for one or more voices with accompaniment for piano or pedal harp, with optional parts for violin and cello. Moreover, the songs were to have preludes and postludes and be able to be played by amateurs.

So began a long and fascinating professional relationship between Thomson and Beethoven which lasted for a decade. Their correspondence was carried out mostly in French, and the translations used here are drawn from Barry Cooper’s thorough and ground-breaking study of Beethoven’s folksongs published in 1994. This fascinating book, called Beethoven’s Folksong Settings, has been my primary source in researching this corner of Beethoven’s output, about which I had known so little [AMZ: the book is still being sold by OUP, for $205; and for upwards of $100 for used copies, from various sources, ouch].

Over the next ten years Beethoven composed no less that 179 folksong arrangements for Thomson, and there is ample evidence that the composer enjoyed carrying out this work. The melodies sent by Thomson included songs of Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English origin

… Despite the light-hearted nature of much of the songs, some of them drew from Beethoven settings of great depth. One of the Irish songs, Return to Ulster, is among the earliest of Beethoven’s settings for Thomson. It’s almost impossible to believe that Beethoven didn’t have the text for this song in front of him when he wrote this; the setting is dark and evocative, and so appropriate for the Walter Scott text put to it by Thomson for publication. Here again Beethoven is confronted with a melody which doesn’t fit easily into classical harmony, and the result is a song which transcends mere folksong. This is in the realm of Lieder; it could almost have been written by Schubert or Schumann. [“The Return to Ulster” here]

While the vast majority of Beethoven’s folksong settings are of British melodies (and this term in Beethoven’s day included Ireland), there are around 25 songs which are arrangements of melodies from the Continent, and some of these melodies were sourced by Beethoven himself.

… Beethoven’s Continental songs include arrangements of Danish, Polish, Tyrolese, Swiss, Austrian, Cossack, Venetian, Russian and Hungarian songs as well, all as clearly individual as these. The Tyrolese songs are especially fun, full of knee-slapping alpine Gemütlichkeit. [AMZ: yes! “Wann i in der Früh aufsteh” here]

As you can imagine, given the fact that Beethoven wrote 179 folksong settings, I’ve only scratched the surface here, but I hope it’s helped you to discover a new facet to Beethoven’s character, and his skill as a composer. To finish, I thought I’d let you hear Beethoven’s 1817 take on an English song which possibly needs no introduction. [“God Save the King” here]

This entry was posted on February 9, 2025 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Dialects, Events and occasions, German, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.