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The Stol'n Kiss The French Connection
The World Wide Web is a wonderful place, and can lead in you in interesting directions you never intended to follow. I chanced upon a connection between an obscure Oxford professor of music and the sex life of a leading American intellectual? Having discovered online a score by William Hayes (1798 – 1777), presented as part of his examination for the degree of bachelor of arts in music, of a short oratorio on the Orpheus and Eurydice theme, I set about realising it - it's surprisingly good actually, though no recording of it exists. I used the net to find out more about WIlliam Hayes, who turned out to be the first professor of music at Oxford, and has a small place in musical history as being the creator of the first ever purpose built public concert hall. Apart from that, he's a fairly obscure fellow, known from some church music, though his name occasionally turns up in footnotes of literary material, because he set poems to music – except that it's not always clear whether the references are to him or to his son Philip who was also a musician. I was curious, though, as to why Google was throwing up Benjamin Franklin's name in connection with him. It turns out that in 1777 Benjamin Franklin, who was living outside Paris at the time, wrote a letter of introduction for a French banker. This would have been of little interest were it not for that fact that Franklin re-used the back of the page on which he wrote the letter on to write out a short poem. (Maybe the letter itself was never sent or the version that remains was a draft.) This poem was not his own composition, but copied from a mag
[Note: "Reserve" and "starve" did actually rhyme in the 18th century, with "starve" as we pronounce it now. It is analogous to the pronunciation of "clerk", of which the 18th century version survives in modern English but not in American English, or the notorious rhyming slang twist which gives us "berk", meaning "idiot" from "Berkshire Hunt", whereas the county in question now has an 18th century pronunciation.] The connection with Hayes is that the poem was also one of the pieces he set to music. It was published in 1735. I have realised this here for you — you should be hearing it if you have sound switched on — as best I can from the score. It consists of a vocal line and a figured bass, that is a bass line with numerical symbols above it indicating the harmony to accompany it. You will see from the image that some of the symbols are a little difficult to make out, so there was some guesswork involved.
An interesting question is whether Franklin ever heard this musical setting of his favoured poem – but I guess we'll never know the answer to that.
© Robbie Langton 2006 |
azine called "The Spectator" (presumably Addison and Steele's literary journal). Franklin at the time was flirting with a
Madame Anne-Louise d'Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy and is known to have complained that she was "too stingy" with her "precious" kisses.
No doubt this, presumably anonymous, ditty was ammunition to be used in his campaign in pursuit of the lady's affections. You will see from the words how this might be the case:
