Welsh Journals

known versions. Moreover, it is interesting to see how an old English melody might be preserved in Wales, with variants that are presum- ably of local origin, long after it had ceased to be used as an English ballad tune. Example 1 Other nominally 'Welsh' melodies on which one must cast the eye of suspicion are the five that were not included in the original batch of twenty-one, since they may not derive from Thomson's grand tour of Wales. There seems no evidence to undermine the claims of the three that Beethoven set in 1810. As for the one set in 1813, 'When Mortals all', Thomson noted down when he sent Beethoven the melody that it was a 'Welsh one called Mynachdy'.15Thus its Welsh pedigree seems assured ('mynachdy' is a Welsh word meaning 'monastery'). But the remaining melody, set by Beethoven in 1815 and published as 'The Parting Kiss', seems highly doubtful. In the manuscript that Beethoven sent, Thomson has inserted the heading 'Anna' above this setting. This name seems more characteristic of Scotland or Ireland than Wales, and indeed there was in Thomson's day a popular Irish song with that name, although its melody is unrelated to 'The Parting Kiss' (it had the text 'Shepherds, I have lost my love', and was even published by Thomson in a setting by Pleyel). There may, however, have been another non-Welsh melody with the same name. Another suspicious feature of 'The Parting Kiss' is that the melody was sent to Beethoven as the second in a batch of six tunes, the other five of which are all Scottish; Thomson actually referred to them as 'Six Airs Ecossois' in his covering letter of 17 August 1814. 16It is easy to imagine Thomson assembling his third volume of Welsh airs in 1817 and, finding himself one short of the desired thirty, slipping in an extraneous song, such as 'The Parting Kiss', that was not too obvi- ously non-Welsh. The suggestion that the melody is Scottish is corroborated by the fact that, in 1841, Thomson inserted it in a volume entitled The Melodies of Scotland, as if to correct his earlier error.17 None of the other Haydn or Beethoven settings of 'Welsh' airs was included in this 1841 volume. Thus, of the twenty-six supposedly Welsh melodies set by Beethoven, one is English, one probably Scottish, and some of the