Anne Home Hunter and her friends / [Jane M. Oppenheimer].

  • Jane M. Oppenheimer
Date:
[1946]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Anne Home Hunter and her friends / [Jane M. Oppenheimer]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    published works, since many were set to music. “Her well-known stanzas of ‘Queen Mary’s Lament,’ ” wrote Nares m 1811, “were produced so long ago that they are frequently thought to have belonged to a prior age. Her song, ‘In airy dreams,’ stands almost in the same predicament. The death song of Alknomook, the Indian warrior, was written before many of those who sing it now were born.”27 She wrote, too, one of the versions of the “Flowers of the Forest.” When George Thomson, the Scottish musician, was writing his Welsh airs in 1804, he sent seven of the melo¬ dies to Joanna Baillie for words and asked that Anne help in the task, since her volume “contains some charming songs”28 and the musician therefore has had in mind “soliciting verses from her for the other airs not yet pro¬ vided for.”29 Anne wrote three of the songs, “with which I flatter my¬ self,” wrote Joanna Baillie to Thomson, “you will be perfectly satisfied.”30 Some of her songs are still familiar today. “When Haydn passed a sea¬ son in London,” wrote Nares, “Mrs. Hunter became the Muse of that celebrated composer.”31 She wrote the words for six of his twelve English Canzonets, including “The mermaid song,” “Recollection,” and the familiar “My mother bids me bind my hair.” The remaining six were written by Charlotte Bertie, who perhaps was a friend of Anne’s, since in 1791 she married the fourth Earl (later first Marquis) of Cholmondeley, nephew of Anne’s friend Horace Walpole. Many of John Hunter’s recent biographers, following Stephen Paget, have claimed that Anne wrote the libretto for Haydn’s oratorio, the “Creation.” There is listed, furthermore, among the Hunter-Baillie MSS. at the Royal College of Surgeons among “Mrs. Ann Hunter’s MS. Poems” a “MS. Libretto of Haydn’s ‘Creation’.’ 32 The musician s biog¬ raphers, however, commonly attribute the English text of the libretto to Lindley, and describe how Lindley’s text was sent to Haydn by Salomon and subsequently translated into German by van Swieten. It is difficult to reconcile these diametrically opposed accounts without direct access to the Royal College manuscript. There may be a clue in a letter from George Thomson, later a friend of Haydn’s too, who wrote to Mrs. Hunter: “It is not the first time that your muse and Haydn’s have met, as we see from the beautiful canzonets. Would that he had been 27 Nares, op. cit. 7. 639. 10 Ibid. 28 Hadden, George Thomson, 227. 31 Nares, op. cit. 7. 639. 29 Hadden, op. cit. 228. Burns wrote the 32 Plarr, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the music for Thomson’s Select Collection of Scot- Royal College of Surgeons of England, 40. tish Airs.
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