h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is very interesting.

I found a clever discussion online where they're arguing about Handel's 'All We Like Sheep', maybe you'd enjoy it:

http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/23536/in-all-we-like-sheep-have-gone-astray-are-we-laughing-with-handel-or-at-him

"You're remembering the revised version" [Gnomon]

If revision resulted in a better version, I can hardly complain, can I?

Of course not. Mypoint was that Handel's original had a few language problems so people since his time have improved it.

That's exactly what should have happened.

Strangely enough, Beethoven did make seventy-two settings of songs in English. Like Haydn, he didn't have to decide the underlay of the words as he was setting existing melodies. In fact he didn't have the words at all, only the tunes and a general indication of tempo and mood.



The reason for that was that Robert Burns, who had suggested the project to the publisher, had upped and died at the age of 37 before he could write the promised lyrics. He had supplied the words for Haydn's and Kozeluch's Scottish songs, and proposed a set of Irish songs to continue the success.

Never heard of Kozeluch? His Scottish Songs were his biggest hit.



The publisher then asked a promising young graduate of Trinity College Dublin, who was making a name for himself as a poet in London, to write the lyrics to the newly-collected Irish songs, but the poet hemmed and hawed for two years and then decided to do his own publication of the songs with another composer writing the settings.

He got the first lot out in 1812, before Beethoven's were published, and spectacularly cleaned up. His name was Thomas Moore, and Moore's Irish Melodies were one of the greatest publishing hits of the nineteenth century.

Beethoven's 72 never really caught on. They are good settings, but the poets that were finally rounded up to supply the lyrics were simply not the best.



Within a century, people were suggesting that Moore's excellent lyrics should be married to Beethoven's excellent accompaniments. Another century on, this has finally been done! The father of a music-teacher friend of mine made a lifetime project of finding the best texts for the songs (not all by Thomas Moore) and I was given the job of setting up the scores for publication.



They are finally ready to go. We are looking for a publisher.

"Beethoven's 72 never really caught on. They are good settings, but the poets that were finally rounded up to supply the lyrics were simply not the best." [Recumbentman]

I have a lot of Beethoven's songs, and enjoy them. He arranged some of them for flute and other instruments. It's not easy to find recordings of them.

I've been meaning to get some recordings by Kozeluch
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Name/Leopold-Anton-Kozeluch/Composer/6568-1