1. First published in the second volume of Johnson’s Museum, the poem was written ‘out of compliment to a Mrs McLachlan, whose husband is an officer in the East Indies’.
1. Burns refers to Bonnie Prince Charlie, Schumann to himself! Though Burns had scant sympathy for the Catholic Church, as a Scotsman he was deeply affected by the British troops’ defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden Moor in 1746.
2. sore.
3. every.
1. not so.
2. kine.
3. ewes.
4. knolls.
5. wool.
6. sorely.
7. pick of the clan.
1. Albert Dietrich, in Recollections of Johannes Brahms (Alfred Lengnick & Co. Ltd., 1899), writes that Brahms told him how, when composing, ‘he liked to think of the words of folk-songs, these seeming to suggest musical themes to his mind. Thus, in the finale of his Sonata in C major, the words “My heart’s in the Highlands” had been in his mind.’
2. flat land by a river.
1. lullaby.
2. finely.
3. blessings on thy pretty throat.
4. pony.
5. prosper.
6. harry the varlets.
7. lowlands.
8. then.
1. handsome.
2. And he gave me two silken bandeaux.
3. and Spring will clothe the birch-wood.
4. The narrator is none other than Jean Armour, who in the winter of 1788 had been driven from the family home by her parents, when they discovered that she had resumed her relationship with Burns, who had made her pregnant. She in fact gave birth to twins, who died after a few days.
5. Burns did indeed return to Jean, arranging for food and shelter.
1. The ballad is traditionally assigned to 1788, immediately after Burns’s marriage to Jean Armour.
2. blows.
1. An amalgam of several old ballads, skilfully reworked by Burns
1. go your way.
2. you shall not.
3. indeed I must!
4. if.
1. This is a very much sanitized version of a bawdy ballad of the same name that Burns included in The Merry Muses of Caledonia.
2. sweetheart.
3. smooth.
4. bald.
5. pate.
6. jolly.
1. slopes.
2. every.
1. Written in honour of the famous fiddler Niel Gow (1727–1807), whom Burns met during his northern tour in 1787. Burns described him as ‘a short, stout-built Highland figure, with his greyish hair shed on his honest social brow – an interesting face, marking strong common sense, kind openheartedness mixed with unmistrusting simplicity’.
2. rang.
3. knocked her upside down.
4. our ears grow apprehensive.
5. the hungry crowd fidgeted and fussed.
6. sad.
7. King James I was imprisoned from 1406 to 1424.
1. ‘O, wert thou in the cauld blast’, written by Burns as he lay dying, commemorates Jessie Lewars, after she had played ‘The wren’ to him on the piano. She was the sister of John Lewars, a fellow exciseman, who nursed Burns through his final illness and took care of his four sons for some time after his death. Significantly, Shostakovich dedicated the song to his wife, Nina, during his final illness. Mendelssohn set the poem twice to a translation by Ferdinand Freiligrath, once as a solo song and once as a duet – both are intensely moving.
2. quarter, direction.
3. shelter.
1. Composed by Britten, for voice and harp, at the express wish of HM The Queen for her mother’s seventy-fifth birthday, 4 August 1975.
2. John Maxwell was a Dumfries joiner who became wealthy enough to buy back the family estate of Terraughty, which had been sold because of financial difficulties. He celebrated his seventy-first birthday on 7 February 1791.
3. proof.
4. every.
5. lease.
6. youngsters.
7. brimstone dust.
8. may comfortable Fortune, kind and frugal.
9. fellow.
10. and then the devil dare not touch thee.
11. if next to my heart I did not wear thee.
1. Jean Cruickshank was only twelve years old when Burns wrote this poem to her. She was the daughter of William Cruickshank, Latin master at the High School of Edinburgh; despite her young age she was musically mature enough to sing Burns’s songs to her own accompaniment.
2. footpath.
3. awake.
4. guards.
1. According to James Johnson, this nursery jingle is not by Burns, but merely revised by him.
2. shirt and necktie.
1. The poem, according to Dr Walker, Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh (1791), is based on a traditional ballad, sung by an old lady in Liddesdale.
2. if my lamb dies.
3. vain.
4. We watched the fold throughout the night.
5. We heard nothing but the roaring waterfall.
6. Among the scrubby slopes.
7. owl.
8. snipe.
9. fox.
10. a strange dog.
11. almost.
1. Burns sent the poem to Mrs Dunlop with the comment: ‘There is a small river, Afton, that falls into the Nith, near New Cumnock, which has some charming wild, romantic scenery on its banks …’
2. slopes.
3. cottage.
4. birch.
5. wash.
6. It seems likely that Burns used the name ‘Mary’ for the sake of euphony. There is no connection with Margaret Campbell, the ‘Highland Mary’ of many of his poems.
1. These two stanzas, much revised by Burns, come from a longer traditional ballad about the Irish highwayman Johnson who was hanged in 1750 for armed robbery – Burns omitted the two stanzas referring to the incident.
1. This fragment, not by Burns, was collected by him and sent to James Johnson to be included in his Scots Musical Museum.
1. Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop on 7 December 1788: ‘Light be the turf on the breast of the heaven-inspired Poet who composed this glorious Fragment’; and in a note to George Thomson of 1793 he describes the poem as ‘the old song of the olden times […] which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing’. Thomson, in Scottish Airs, wrote that Burns claimed such things ‘merely in a playful humour’. Whether ‘Auld lang syne’ was written by Burns or was a reworking of a traditional ballad has exercised scholars for many years.
2. old long ago.
3. And surely ye’ll pay for your pint.
4. hillsides.
5. And pulled the fine daisies.
6. dinner-time.
7. broad.
8. companion.
9. good-will drink.
10. The folk melody was quoted by the English composer William Shield in his opera Rosina, and the song is sung at midnight on New Year’s Eve not only in Scotland (Hogmanay) and throughout the United Kingdom, but also in many other countries where English is spoken. Since the 1970s the melody has been very popular in Italian football, being adopted by many clubs and adapted to fit their teams’ chants.