The price of a job by Bill Kirton
This is just about a nice little job I had to do at the weekend, but one which had some surprising aspects. My daughter works for a film company in Glasgow and one of their current projects involves an exchange of letters between one George Thomson and a certain Louis (yes, Louis) van Beethoven. Thomson was a civil servant in Edinburgh who collected folk songs. In fact, when he saw that some of them were incomplete or not to contemporary tastes, he asked a few writers (including Walter Scott and Rabbie Burns) to tart them up and, when they’d done so, he sent the verses to musicians (including Haydn and Beethoven) asking them to set them to music. In fact, Beethoven composed over 120 melodies for him between 1803 and 1819. The job I had was to translate into English Beethoven’s reply to a letter from Thomson in 1809 asking if he’d provide accompaniments for 43 Welsh and Irish ballads. The reply, written in French, held a few surprises (one of which was that it ...