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102 Youth's Golden Gleam |
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in Schubert's posthumous 'Rosemonde' [sic]"* This charge has been disposed of by John Tasker Howard: "There is in the 'Rosamunde' score a slight rhythmic suggestion of 'Old Folks at Home/ but the melodic intervals are so different that any claim that the two melodies are at all alike is thoroughly absurd."9
That the notes of the line 'Weep no more my lady" in "My Old Kentucky Home" appear in the tenor solo "Dalla sua pace" in Mozart's opera Don Giovani was recently pointed out to the present writer by an opera singer. Here is the comment of Dr. Sigmund Spaeth, the "Tune Detective" who has uncovered so many borrowings from the classics by present-day composers: "The chances are that Foster was not familiar with Don Giovani. . . . The reminiscent phrases in his music are all based on common patterns of melody which inevitably occur in tunes of such general appeal."10
The latter generalization would seem to apply to the similarities indicated by George Pullen Jackson in an article in The Musical Quarterly for April 1936, based upon a very interesting comparison of "the entire two-hundred Foster compositions . . . with a thousand or more contemporary tunes":
Twenty-one of the Foster tunes used for comparison have been found related to melodies drawn from the store of Cel tic-English-American folk- |
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