The Tea-Table Miscellany, Gluck and the Well-Tempered Clavier: Claire's Music

If you'd like to listen to the music while reading about it, please click on the link to go to my playlist on YouTube.  

 

Claire's taste in music is unconventional only in its conservatism. No one could accuse her of "Too much Beethoven"! Nor does her familiarity with Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany suggest a Scottish bias: his work was published in the first half of the eighteenth century and has enjoyed enduring popularity all over Britain. While its collection of Scottish songs does not include “Tam Lin”, you may be familiar with another ballad, “The Bonny Earl of Moray”, if you’re Scottish – or a linguist, since it’s the origin of the term “mondegreen” for “a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song.“ (Oxford English Dictionary).

Ye Highlands, ye Lowlands, oh where hae ye been?

They’ve slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green.

The second line is often misheard as:

They’ve slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen.

(My friend Simon misheard a line in David Bowie’s "Ziggy Stardust" as “making love with his eagle”, conjuring up another Scottish writer, Dorothy Dunnett, and her wonderful Lymond Chronicles [see vol. 5, The Ringed Castle].) 

RandomScottish History offers some interesting sidelights on Ramsay, and a facsimile of the Miscellany's full text is available at the Internet Archive. The British Library shows facsimiles of some pages and explains the historical context.

 Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) is one of my favourite composers, and I’m glad to find him in Claire’s selection. I'm not sure if the piece I've chosen here had been transcribed for piano by the time I imagine Claire playing it – the version in my playlist is by the famous German pianist Wilhelm Kempff (1895–1991). For those of you who read German, the German-Austrian musicologists Renate and Gerhard Croll authored a highly recommendable biography about Gluck, written for a general audience.

(The Italians and Italophiles among you will know Gluck from Adriano Celentano's much-loved song "Il ragazzo della via Gluck" ("The boy from Gluck Street").)

 

Mozart, Handel, Bach – no surprises there. A piece that was frequently anthologized is the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s opera Rinaldo (1711), in which the heroine mourns her captivity. Long after the action of my novel, Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) wrote a piano version which I imagine Claire would have been well up to. The much-loved Pastorale from Corelli's Concerto Grosso in G minor was brought to keyboard by Leopold Godowsky (1870–1938) in a version that amply demonstrates the difficulties involved. My favourite interpreter for Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is still Glenn Gould, but the way Nathalie Matthys attacks the prelude and fugue in C minor in the performance in my playlist irresistibly reminded me of Claire. Both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier were widely circulated in manuscript, and printed copies published by Simrock (Germany), Nägeli (Switzerland), and Hoffmeister (Germany and Austria) were available from 1801.