25 Scottish songs
Beethoven every Friday: to mark his 250th birthday, we take a look at one of his works every week. Today it's his 25 Scottish Songs.
"To Scotland! When are we leaving? Do I still have time to finish my cigar?" Yes, there was time, including a steamer for which the important composer Jonathan Savournon had been sponsored to write two ship passages. No musical works by Savournon have survived, as he was inspired by the wonderful imagination of Jules Verne. With his novel of the Journey with obstacles to England and Scotland he is still at the cutting edge today, especially with his wise conclusion: "They touched everything, but in reality they saw nothing!" Incidentally, Verne was not inspired by Mendelssohn's journey to the Highlands or his Scottish Symphonybut an excursion of his own in 1859, which he undertook together with the French composer Aristide Hignard (1822-1898).
And Beethoven? It is well known that he never saw the Seine or the Firth of Forth. But then George Thomson (1757-1851) from faraway Edinburgh contacted him in 1803 after he had already ordered chamber music arrangements and concise introductions to Scottish tunes from Haydn, Pleyel and Koželuh: for voice(s), piano, violin and cello. By 1820, Beethoven had made almost 170 arrangements of this kind, and it can be assumed that it was not just a lucrative bread-and-butter business for him. These arrangements replace the series of original piano trios in his oeuvre, which came to an end in 1811 with the large-scale work in B flat major op. 97. Thomson's desire for instrumental preludes and postludes opened up a compositional space for Beethoven - a space which, however, remained misunderstood in Edinburgh. It was all the more clearly understood by an anonymous reviewer of the German edition published by Schlesinger in Berlin in 1822: "No dormant bard is awakened here from the ruins of a misty past: it is Beethoven's independent spirit that walks here over the hills of slumber in a land of his own dreams, which he calls Scotland." (General musical newspaper, Vol. 30, 1828, p. 284)
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