Scottish Folksongs, Op. 108

Of all the composers listed on this weekend’s programs, Beethoven is by far the best known. Still, the works by him that we will hear are among his least familiar or performed. Beethoven produced more than 170 settings of folk melodies, mostly Scottish and Irish, supplied to him by the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson. Thomson had already made a similar offer to Haydn, and his dealings with Beethoven lasted from 1809 until (at least) 1820. That period cannot seem other than a relatively fallow one; it begins after the epochal Third and Fifth Symphonies, Appassionata Sonata and Violin Concerto, and it concludes before his sustained work on the Ninth Symphony, the late string quartets, and final piano sonatas. In general, Beethoven devoted considerable energy during the 1810s to “occasional” music, and the questionable merit of some of those compositions has unfortunately cast its pall over much surrounding music.
Beethoven’s knowledge of English was scant, yet there is evidence that he tried to learn the gist of the poem sitting before him. For instance, in 1812 he threatened to stop sending songs to Thomson unless the latter supplied him with the texts in advance (the typical procedure being: music first, text added by publisher later). Thomson began sending titles, then character indications, and finally texts. The autograph score of “The Elfin Fairies” contains a title sent from Thomson, Air des Fées (Fairies’ Air), which probably explains how Beethoven managed to create a wispy accompaniment so in line with the text. Some manuscripts even reveal short summaries of the texts in Beethoven’s notorious chicken scratch.
“The Highland Watch” presents a minor-key march with solo verses and choral refrain, a pattern repeated in most of the Scottish Folksongs, op. 108. “Behold my love…” is set as a lilting, rapturous duet in E-flat major celebrating the presence of love, whereas “The sweetest lad was Jamie” turns to G minor for a woman’s sad musing over her pride, which kept her from embracing love when it was presented to her. And no Scottish folksong set would be complete without at least one drinking song. “Come fill, fill, my good fellow” rushes past in a flurry of notes whose up-and-down contour and changes between major and minor modes help convey the heated emotions of soldiers taking one last leave of home.

Form is nearly always strophic, and within each strophe the tunes create strong parallelisms: two identical phrases, followed by a different third phrase, rounded off with a return to the first phrase. Since many of the melodies suggest non-tonal harmonization (particularly the touches of pentatonic and bi-tonal modality), Beethoven often took risks in his harmonization. In “Thy ship must sail” frequent pedal tones creates dissonances as the melody moves; it is possible to see the static bass as a kind of metaphorical anchor, the very kind wished for by the lover left behind on shore. The familiar trappings of his genius are never far from the scene; witness the instrumental preludes and postludes that reinforce the sense of tonic (in case it was in doubt) and recall primary thematic material. He was trying to match music to poetic meaning—even when given only a scrap to build on—and his efforts should convince us that we do wrong to ignore these apparent “trifles” among his vast oeuvre.

(c) Jason Stell