A slightly loosely-phrased presenter comment on In Tune tonight set me thinking(?). IIRC this rather implied that Beethoven made money out of publishing his Scottish folksong arrangements. Well, of course he got paid by his Edinburgh commissioner-publisher George Thomson, and Thomson surely pocketed the profits.
But how far did these arrangements reach? They were presumably intended for domestic music-making in Scotland, and in London where Grove says Thomson also published them, but did he shift copies to mainland Europe? Did they in any way latch onto, or even generate, a wider taste for Scottish folk music? (I see that LvB's Op 108 collection found a Berlin publisher in 1822, but for all I know this could have been a one-off attempt enjoying no particular success.)
I'm aware that Haydn and Weber had done similar arrangements somewhat earlier (Weber's apparently just for Leipzig publication), and In Tune told me that Barsanti had had a go at pushing Scottish folk music c.1742 (Edinburgh publisher again). Did any of this make a European splash that might perhaps connect with the wider literary impact of Burns and 'Ossian'? Schubert of course went pretty big (and often long) on Ossian just a few years later...
In short, how early and how deeply did Scottish folk music make its mark in mainland Europe?
[Roehre: thou shouldst be posting at this hour...] Mangerton???
But how far did these arrangements reach? They were presumably intended for domestic music-making in Scotland, and in London where Grove says Thomson also published them, but did he shift copies to mainland Europe? Did they in any way latch onto, or even generate, a wider taste for Scottish folk music? (I see that LvB's Op 108 collection found a Berlin publisher in 1822, but for all I know this could have been a one-off attempt enjoying no particular success.)
I'm aware that Haydn and Weber had done similar arrangements somewhat earlier (Weber's apparently just for Leipzig publication), and In Tune told me that Barsanti had had a go at pushing Scottish folk music c.1742 (Edinburgh publisher again). Did any of this make a European splash that might perhaps connect with the wider literary impact of Burns and 'Ossian'? Schubert of course went pretty big (and often long) on Ossian just a few years later...
In short, how early and how deeply did Scottish folk music make its mark in mainland Europe?
[Roehre: thou shouldst be posting at this hour...] Mangerton???
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