Byron

As I’ll be talking about “national songs” in my conference paper at Cecil Sharp House next weekend, I’ll be making the most fleeting of references to the poet Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, set to music by Isaac Nathan.  Fleeting, because despite Nathan’s claims, very few of the melodies (and it’s a very fat vocal score!) have the remotest connection with Jewish music.  There’s a long and well-referenced article about them on the Newstead Abbey Byron Society website, so there’s no need for me to summarise it all here.  The most pertinent sentences from my point of view are those giving lie to all Nathan’s claims of authenticity.  As I know only too well from my Scottish song-collections doctoral research, authenticity was frequently claimed but seldom genuine.*

I don’t know the name of the author who wrote the Society’s essay, but I’m happy to quote the link here, along with the extracts that I’ve selected to share:-

“There was nothing new in the project. Nathan, and to an extent Byron, were cashing in on a vogue for nationalist airs from minority cultures or oppressed peoples in all corners of the globe. The market was flooded with Scottish, Welsh, Indian, and of course, from Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies. The ethnic authenticity of none of such scores could be relied on.” (p.2)

““Wildness and pathos” are a long way off. Only seven of them have been identified as
having Jewish music in them. They are: She Walks in Beauty, Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty’s Bloom, The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept, My Soul is Dark, Jephtha’s Daughter, On Jordan’s Banks, Thy Days are Done.” (p.4)

Source (49 pages, published later than 2002, accessed 1 November 2018):-

http://www.newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/hebrew_melodies.pdf 

I have also found a pdf of Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies, in a rather poor reproduction, but it’s better than nothing! There are 262 pages – I don’t think I’ll be printing them out!

http://ks.imslp.net/files/imglnks/usimg/0/08/IMSLP221262-PMLP365149-Nathan-HebrewMelodiesBW.pdf

If you’d like to read my own writing about authenticity in the Scottish song context, you can find my doctoral thesis online at the University of Glasgow, or read the augmented and improved book that followed a few years later!  (It’s available in paperback, hardback and as an e-book.)

• Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song-Collecting from 1760-1888 (Thesis, 2009)
• Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song-Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era (Routledge, 2013)