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Birdsong and the Origins of Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Matthew Head
Matthew Head*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
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Extract

How old is music, and what are its most ancient forms? What is its origin, its source, and to whom shall we attribute its invention? Is music from man, from nature, or from God? Whom does it serve, in whose name is it sung? These are the questions that eighteenth-century writers asked themselves as they embarked on their histories of music; these are the questions they felt it necessary to answer on the first pages of their manuscripts. Today we have consigned the questions to comedy. Who but Barbra Streisand could fall in love with the professor who arrived at the congress of American musicologists with a suitcase filled with rocks that he claimed to be the earliest musical instruments? Innocent and unanswerable, the question ‘How did music begin?’ strikes us as childlike; it has fallen out of currency. In journalism, fiction, the testimony of musicians and composers, and in psychological and psychoanalytical literature, music's origin is still touched upon obliquely. Roland Barthes, inviting the postmodern reader ‘not [to] reject the delirium of origins’, proposes his own theory concerning certain ‘rhythmic incisions … on cave walls of the Mousterian epoch’ that point to ‘the intentional reproduction of a [musical] rhythm’. But the question of music's origin has vanished from histories of music. This being so, we might ask under what intellectual, institutional or professional circumstances the question was withdrawn: for a discourse on the origins of music continued to the middle of this century with the revised edition of the New Oxford History of Music.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 122 , Issue 1 , 1997 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Oxford University Press

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References

My research towards this article was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the School of Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Southampton

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2 Barthes, Roland, ‘Listening’, The Responsibility of Forms, ed and trans Richard Howard (Oxford, 1985), 245–60 (p 248) Barthes's musical criticism also engages with the question of music's origin from a psychoanalytical perspective For Barthes, music is a sign of maternal presence/absence, because the voice is the means through which the gap between mother and infant is mediated after the dissolution of symbiosis See Susan McClary's introduction to Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988), xv, with reference to Barthes in n 10 (p 186) Recent references to music's origin occasionally echo the eighteenth-century theories examined here For example, an article by Hilary Finch, ‘Babes in Arms in Harmony’, The Times, 25 October 1995, Arts Section, concerning the musical instruction of infants, implicitly upholds a view of music (not just musical talent or genius) as innate in humankind – a view first met at the end of the eighteenth century. Composer Pauline Oliveros's notion of environmental sound echoes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century concepts of music as an objet trouvé See Oliveros, Pauline, Software for People Collected Writings 1963–80 (Baltimore, 1984), 27Google Scholar

3 Schneider, Marius, ‘The Origin of Music’, Ancient and Oriental Music, ed. Egon Wellesz, The New Oxford History of Music, 1 (London, 1957), 5–8 For a sample of early twentieth-century theories of music's origin see also Robert Lach, ‘Die Musik der Natur – und orientalischen Kulturvölker’, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, ed Guido Adler, 2 vols (2nd edn, Berlin, 1930), 1, 3–34Google Scholar

4 The term is admittedly overused and is perhaps too deeply embroiled in the rhetoric of the ‘traditional’ versus ‘new’ musicologies to be useful here To some extent, I understand positivism in the common methodological sense, an upholding of standards of documentary proof and evidence And yet I do not ultimately conceive of positivism as a methodology so much as (1) a particular style of writing, and (2) a particular range of approved subject-matters The question is not then simply of standards of evidence Indeed, musicological positivism embraced highly conjectural scholarship on questions such as attribution, performance practice, the biography of composers, etc The disappearance of the question of music's origin from histories of music can thus be explained only in part by the impossibility of an answer based upon written documents The nature of the question (a ‘nature’ constituted in large part by the history of the answers) was also a factor, and it is clear from the remarks of Eggebrecht and Fubini, discussed in the conclusion below, that the question was considered too mythological for consideration in official histories of music Thus the disappearance of the question of music's origin was itself a defining feature of musicological positivism.Google Scholar

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6 Ibid., ch 9, ‘The Quest for Origins'.Google Scholar

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9 'Gleichwie nun aber alle Dinge, welche das menschliche Geschlecht besitzet, eintzig und allein der unermeßlichen Gutigkeit des allerhochsten Gottes zuzuschreiben seyn, also soll man auch die Erfindung der edlen Music demselben allein zueignen, welches nicht nur alle Christen erkennen; sondern auch die Heyden selbst haben solches zugestanden (Plutarch in Libr. de Musica), wenn auch gleich Plinius dem Amphion (Plin Hist VII, 56), und andere dem Orpheus solche Erfindung beylegen, so geschicht es doch in eben dem Verstande, als wenn dem Jubal solches beygeleget wird Die anleitenden Anreitzungen, die Music zu erfinden, sind gewesen (a) die unterschiedlichen Accente der menschlichen Stimme, welche das Gehör belustiget (b) der Vogel Singen, davon gar glaublich ist, daß die Menschen bey mußigen Stunden, dasselbige durch eine Nachahmung vorstellen wollen (c) das Pfeiffen der von denen Winden bewegten Bäume’ Anon., Kurtzgefaßtes musicalisches Lexicon … nebst einer historischen Beschreibung von der Music Rahmen, Eintheilung, Ursprung, Erfindung, Vermehrung und Verbesserung (new edn, Ehemnitz, 1749), 13–15. This is drawn from Wolfgang Caspar Printz, Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst aus denen vornehmsten Autortbus abgefasset (Dresden, 1690) All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.Google Scholar

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14 Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans Alan Mark Sheridan Smith (London, 1972), introductionGoogle Scholar

15 'He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them.’ Aristotle, The Politics, ed Stephen Everson (Cambridge, 1988), 1–2Google Scholar

16 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans Smith, and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974)Google Scholar

17 'Wenn wir uns von dem Wesen und der wahren Natur dieser reizenden Kunst eine richtige Vorstellung machen wollen, so mussen wir versuchen, ihren Ursprung in der Natur auszuforschen ‘Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Künste, 2 vols (2nd edn, Leipzig, 1779), 11, 264Google Scholar

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20 Ibid., 287. The connection between music and loss is treated in Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans Arthur Denner (Ithaca and London, 1992), passim The connection can be traced back to myths of Orpheus, in which song, granting access to Hades, is a means to both the recovery and the repetition of Euridice's lossGoogle Scholar

21 Marpurg, FriedrichWilhelm, Kritische Einleitung in die Geschichte und Lehrsätze der alten und neuen Musik (Berlin, 1759), 3Google Scholar

22 Downing A Thomas, Music and the Origins of Languages Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), 49 The erudite Hawkins, however, offered a philological qualification, cautioning that ‘the translators of those passages of the Old Testament where the names of musical instruments occur found themselves reduced to the necessity of rendering those names by such terms as would go the nearest to excite a correspondent idea in their readers so that they would be grossly mistaken who should imagine that the organ, handled by those of whom Jubal is said to have been the father, [in] any way resembled the instrument now known among us by that name’ John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1776, cited from 1853 edn), 4, col 2Google Scholar

23 'Galilée ajoute Dioclès se trouvant dans la boutique d'un potier-de-terre, il frapa par hasard quelques vases avec une baguete, et observant que, suivant la différence de leur grandeur, ils rendaient des sons différents, il s'appliqua à rechercher les proportions musicales ’ Jean Benjamin de Laborde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, 4 vols (Paris, 1780), i, ch 4, 8–9 Laborde's source was Vin cenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (Florence, 1581), 127 Classical writings on music were available in an anthology by Marcus Meibom, Antiquae musicae (Amsterdam, 1652), and Laborde was probably familiar with writings on Greek music by Pierre Jean Burette, published in Mémoires de littérature de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris, 1717–48) Classical anecdotes concerning music were also collected in L'abbé Bourdelot and Jacques Bonnet, Histoire de la musique et de ses effets depuis son origine jusqu'à présent (Paris, 1715)Google Scholar

24 'It is possible, however, to reconcile the different theories by attributing the division of tones – and thus the invention of song – to Jubal, and the theory of musical proportions to Pythagoras’ ('On peut cependant concilier ces différents systèmes, en accordant la division des sons, & par conséquent l'invention du chant, à Jubal, & la théorie de leurs proportions à Pythagore') Laborde, Essai, 1, 9Google Scholar

25 Mattheson is a rare exception. According to scripture, Mattheson argued, angels both play instruments and sing ‘thus it is misleading to assume that song is actually older than instrumental music’ ('also fallt es weg, daß die singende Musik eigentlich und ursprünglich älter sein sollte denn die spielende') Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739), ed Margaret Reimann (Kassel, 1954), Vorrede, III ('Ursprung des Gesanges'), 12Google Scholar

26 'Einer von diesen darff deswegen wol gar schreiben, daß die ersten Erfinder der Vocal-Musik Affen gewesen sind, well sie dieselbe Kunst den Vogeln nachgeaffet haben’ Ibid., 11, with reference to Jacob Friedrich Reimmann, Versuch einer Einleitung in die historiam literariam antediluvianam (Halle, 1708–13).Google Scholar

27 'Ein gantz neuer, ungenannter Verfasser scheinet beide angefuhrte Meinungen von Menschen und Vögeln solchergestalt zu vergleichen, daß er zwar die Eva, als eine Erfinderin der ersten abgemessenen Klänge vorstellet, doch dabei gleichwol nicht unterlassen kann, die lieben Vöglein, als anmuthige Vorgänger, anzugeben, deren holdseeliges Gepfeiffe bei der Mutter des menschlichen Geschlechts eine solche Eifersucht erreget haben soll, daß sie dadurch zum Versuch ihres Kehlgens bewogen worden ’ Ibid., with reference to [Jean Baptiste Louis Cresset], Discours sur l'harmonie (Paris, 1737).Google Scholar

28 'Je reiner und dünner die Lufft ist, Je heller klingt alles’ Ibid., 13.Google Scholar

29 For a useful but highly repetitive introduction to Luther on music see Schalk, Carl, Luther on Music: Paradigms of Praise (St Louis, 1988)Google Scholar

30 Anon., Kurtzgefaßtes musicalisches Lexicon, 17Google Scholar

31 'Die vornehmsten Contenta aber sind folgende (1) Wie Gott der Allmachtige Schopffer der Music Autorselber ist/ da Er in der Erschopffung/ die Sternen/ und dero Lauf in die Musicalischen Proportiones geordnet/ wie die Heil. Schrifft meldet Job 38 7 Und nach denen demonstrationibus des vortreflichen Keppleri, die Astronomi bezeugen konnen (2) Hat auch Gott fast alle Gebaude in der Heil. Schrifft nach denen Musicalischen Proportionen zu bauen befohlen (3) Den Menschen selber nach seiner Seel/ und auserlichen Gliedern harmonisch erschaffen (4) Sind auch allerdinges die Zeiten nach der Biblischen Chronologia in harmonische Zahlen geordnet/ wie insonderheit bey den Jean d'Espange zu sehen. Aus diesen allen sehen wir/ daß Gott selber der Anfänger der Music ist/ und an derselben einen Wohlgefallen habe’ Andrea Werckmeister, Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse (Quedlinburg, 1707), 4Google Scholar

32 'Es soll aber der Schöpffer Himmels und der Erden-billig der Urheber der Music genennet werden, nicht nur, weil er die wunderbare Zusammenstimmung-Himmels und der Erden componiret, sondern auch, weil er der die Lufft, den Schall zu empfangen und fort zu pflantzen, und die Ohren, denselben zu vernehmen, und davon zu urtheilen, geschickt und bequem erschaffen ’ Anon., Kurtzgefaßtes musicalisches Lexicon, 13–14Google Scholar

33 Cited in Daniel, Glyn, The Idea of Prehistory (Harmondsworth, 1964), 19 The remark was made in John Lightfoot, A Few, and New, Observations upon the Book of Genesis (London, 1642). Not all authorities agreed upon the exact time of day at which the world was created, but there was consensus on the date of 4004 BCGoogle Scholar

34 'L'attrait du plaisir donna aux hommes la premiere idée de Musique, idée que le Chant et la Danse acheverent de développer Quelques airs champětres durent suffire à charmer les loisirs de leur vie rustique’ Charles Blainville, Histoire général critique et philologique de la musique (Paris, 1767), vGoogle Scholar

35 Hawkins, A General History, 2, cols 1–2Google Scholar

36 Dryden's lyric ‘Music for a while’, from the tragedy Oedipus, was set to music by Henry Purcell in 1692, from which it is cited hereGoogle Scholar

37 Hawkins, A General History, 2, col 2 Hawkins may have known Kircher either in the original Latin or in German translation, the latter consulted here See Kircher, Athanasius, Philosophischer Extract und Auszug aus dess welt-berühmten teutschen Jesuiten Athanasii Kircheri von Fulda Musurgia universali, ed and trans Andrea Hirschen (Schwäbisch-Hall, 1662, repr Kassel, 1988), 67–71Google Scholar

38 Hawkins, A General History, 2, col 2, note Hawkins cites Lucretius in the translation by Thomas Creech, T Lucretius Carus, the Epicurean Philosopher, his Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English Verse, with Notes (Oxford, 1682) – the volume went through many reprints and editions in the eighteenth centuryGoogle Scholar

39 Luther's Works, ed Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, liii: Liturgy and Hymns (Philadelphia, 1965), 320Google Scholar

40 Hawkins, A General History, 2, col. 2, note.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 3, col. 1, note.Google Scholar

42 'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.Google Scholar

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.Google Scholar

Sometimes a thousand twangling instrumentsGoogle Scholar

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices.Google Scholar

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,Google Scholar

Will make me sleep again, and then, in dreaming,Google Scholar

The clouds, methought, would open and show richesGoogle Scholar

Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,Google Scholar

I cried to dream again.'Google Scholar

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 3, scene iiGoogle Scholar

43 ‘“O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping’ Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”Google Scholar

The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed “I hear nothing, myself”, he said, “but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers”Google Scholar

The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant, in a strong sustaining grasp'Google Scholar

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York, 1989), 132–3Google Scholar

44 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Complete Dictionary of Music, trans. William Waring (2nd edn, London, 1779), s v ‘Music’ Cf Kircher, Philosophischer Extract, 69, and Anon, Kurtzgefaßtes musicalisches Lexicon, 17Google Scholar

45 This was already the case with Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Vorrede, 11; and the objections he reports from Gresset, Discours sur l'harmonie, 85, concerning the lack of variety in birdsong furnished C F D Schubart with the material of his critique, cited belowGoogle Scholar

46 'A l'égard de son origine, c'est une opinion extravagante que celle de Caméléon Pontique, de vouloir l'attribuer au chant des oiseaux Le chant plait sans doubte à l'oreille’ il est měme assez varié pour faire plaisir aux sens; mais sans en faire à l'intelligence humaine, que ne peut porter aucun jugement, ni par théorie, ni par pratique, sur la plus grande partie des intervalles formés par le chant des oiseaux’ Laborde, Essai, i, ch. 4, 8. It has hot been possible to establish the identity of ‘Caméléon Pontique’, possibly a nom de plume, or perhaps a personal acquaintance of Laborde's This is hardly significant, however, since Laborde's attribution to Pontique of the theory that melody was learnt from the birds is idiosyncratic – this was a commonplace by the time Laborde was writing, and dates back at least as far as Lucretius.Google Scholar

47 'Die Tonkunst ist so alt als die Welt Man konnte ebenso wohl den Menschen ein singendes Geschopf als mit Aristoteles ein redendes Geschopf nennen Alle Menschen werden mit einer Anlage zum Gesang geboren. Es ist also kindisch und ganz und gar gegen die Wurde der Menschheit, wenn man mit einigen alten musikalischen Geschichtsschreibern annehmen wollte, der Mensch hatte das Singen von den Vögeln gelernt oder Musik sei nachahmende Kunst. Das ewige Einerlei des Vogelgesanges ist zu ermüdend, als daß die Menschen anders als in gewissen launigen Stunden auf die Nachahmung desselben verfallen könnten Die Schwalbe auf unserer Dachrinne zwitschert noch heute wie zu Adams Zeiten; … Hingegen welche unendliche Veränderung hat die Tonkunst unter dem Menschengeschlechte erlitten!’ Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1806, repr Leipzig, 1977), 35Google Scholar

48 Eximeno, Antonio, Dell’ origine e delle regole della musica (Rome, 1774; repr Hildesheim, 1983), cited from Ladson John Saylor, ‘Antonio Eximeno's “Del origen y reglas de la música” Introduction, Commentary, and Translation’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1992), 114. On the development in France of this theory of music as a natural language of the passions see Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language, ch. 2 An early appearance of this theory in Germany was in Marpurg, Kritische Einleitung, 3Google Scholar

49 'Die Musik … ist die Sprache unsers Herzens, und den Keim derselben bringt jeder Mensch, bey seinem Eintritt in diese Welt, mit sich’ Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1788), i, 69.Google Scholar

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51 Translated in Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven, 1989), 56–77 (p. 57). I am grateful to Claude Palisca for drawing my attention to this letter.Google Scholar

52 'Er liegt also schon von Anbeginn in der Seele oder in der Natur des Menschen.’ Cited from Johann Adolph Scheibe's later discussion of music's origin, Abhandlung vom Ursprunge und Alter der Musik, insonderheit der Vokalmusik (Altona and Flensburg, repr. 1754; repr. Leipzig, 1987), 5.Google Scholar

53 Cf. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language, where discourse on music's origin is set primarily in the context of linguistic and anthropological theorizing Yet discussions of music's origin were also acted out against traditions of music theory This is particularly clear with Eximeno, who bolstered his theory of music as instinct, language, expression, through a twofold critique of music as number. On the one hand he pointed to computational and inductive errors in the discourse on music and mathematics On the other, he questioned that mathematical ratios were anything more than ‘accidental’ to music because they ‘do not serve as a norm by which perfection for that object is achieved’ (Eximeno, Dell’ origine e delle regole della musica, trans Saylor, ‘Antonio Eximeno's “Del origen y reglas de la música“’, 114) Mathematics, then, was inadequate to explain why music pleases, moves, and is beautiful Discourse on the origins of music had thus belatedly registered music's historical movement from the quadrivium to the trivium, as Thomas also notes (Music and the Origins of Language, 23)Google Scholar

54 Jean-Philippe Rameau, Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels, 4 vols (Paris, 1722), ch 3.Google Scholar

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58 'Erste Erfundung ist nichts als erste Entdeckung dieses angebornen Triebes gewesene. Die sogenannten ersten Erfinder sind nur erste Ausüber der Künste gewesen.’ Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte, table of contents, ch. 1, sections 2 and 6Google Scholar

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61 'Die sieben Töne liegen zwar auch in der Kehle der Vögel; aber was hat der Mensch aus diesen sieben Tönen gemacht!’ Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik, 35–6.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., 35 (see above, n. 47).Google Scholar

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64 Ibid., 167 Kant's use of the term ‘laboured’ introduces, as anathema, the vocabulary of work or labour into aesthetic discourse. This may tie in with his rejection of mechanical form in art, at a time when production was increasingly subject to mechanical manufacturing processes.Google Scholar

65 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Nightingale’, Stories and Fairy Tales, trans H Oskar Sommer, 2 vols. (London, 1893), i, 1–11.Google Scholar

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My bodily form from any natural thing,Google Scholar

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeGoogle Scholar

Of hammered gold and gold enamellingGoogle Scholar

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;Google Scholar

Or set upon a golden bough to singGoogle Scholar

To lords and ladies of ByzantiumGoogle Scholar

Of what is past, or passing, or to come'Google Scholar

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'Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,Google Scholar

More miracle than bird or handiwork,Google Scholar

Planted on the starlit golden bough,Google Scholar

Can like the cocks of Hades crow.'Google Scholar

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67 'Trope’, Poetry, 159 (1991–2), 339.Google Scholar

68 Eggebrecht, HansHeinrich, ‘Historiography’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), viii, 595.Google Scholar

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70 Fubini, Enrico, Music and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book, trans Wolfgang Freis, Lisa Gasbarrone and Michael Louis Leone, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn (Chicago, 1994), 30Google Scholar

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72 See Griesinger, GeorgAugust, ‘Biographical Notes concerning Joseph Haydn’, Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits, trans and ed. Vernon Gotwals (Madison, 1968), 53–4.Google Scholar

73 Haydn, Joseph, L'incontro improvviso, ed. Helmut Wirth, Joseph Haydn: Werke, xv/6 (Munich, 1963) This detail does not appear in the original version of the libretto by Louis Hurtaut Dancourt, set by Christoph Willibald Gluck in 1763 as La rencontre imprévue, ou les pèlerins de la Mecque, and is thus attributable to the Eszterháza tenor Carl Friberth, who translated and adapted the libretto for Haydn's setting of 1775Google Scholar

74 Handel, GeorgFriedrich, Orlando, ed Siegfried Flesch, Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, ii/28 (Kassel, 1969), ‘Amor è qual vento’, Act 3, scene v.Google Scholar

75 Beethoven Naturally, CD recording by Northsound (Minocqua, WI, 1994), NSCD 26242. ‘Pure sounds of nature – rumbling thunder, lapping waves, wailing loons – complement the familiar, moving piano selections’ (liner notes).Google Scholar