Choix de mes Fleurs Cheries: Le Myrte
Mauro Giuliani
The Swede Carl Oscar Boije af Gennas (1849-1923) was a passionate amateur guitar player who gathered an enormous collection of guitar music. Part of this collection was a large part of the nineteenth century guitar literature plus a great number of guitar periodicals, which contained pieces for guitar and various ensembles of guitar with voice, violin and even piano.
Boie had stated in his last will that his collection was to be donated to the Statens Musikbibliotek, the central Swedish library for sheet music. All the music from the Boie collection presently is in the Public Domain.
That’s a nice invitation to an odyssey for new music. The collection contains a great deal, music from the classical period and the early romantic era. A large number of pieces is decently engraved, but quite a few are just hand written concepts.
I wanted to practice a bit with converting old material from manuscripts and engravings into a modern setting. It appeared to be an adventure, often the old scores are barely legible and they contain errors which you must try to correct by ear when you play back the score (my knowledge of music theory is not so extended that I can correct errors a prima vista!)
The test object is a work by Mauro Giuliani (1781 -1829), to be specific Opus 46, titled Choix de mes Fleurs Cheries, ou Le Bouquet Emblematique. Giuliani dedicated this work to Jules Giraud.
Choix de mes Fleurs Cheries consists of ten pieces, I have converted the first nine into modern notation. The last piece requires some more puzzling over some quite cryptically noted harmonics.
As the title of the work suggests, the pieces are named after flowers. It defenitely is no easy music, but it is a nice set of typically Giuliani-esque pieces, featuring some virtuoso passages at times.
Number one of the collection is named after the Myrte, a large bush with many small flowers which extensively grow in the Mediterranean. The piece has a march-like character.