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This 9/8-time jig is taken from Chicago Police captain Francis O'Neill's collection The Dance Music of Ireland, published in 1907. The tune had previously appeared, untitled, in the mid-19th century music manuscript collection by County Cork uilleann piper and Church of Ireland cleric James Goodman.
Today we present the ninth study from Italian composer Giuseppe Gariboldi's Etudes mignonnes (Dainty Studies), Op. 131.
This is the final movement of Georg Philipp Telemann's fifth Canonic Sonata for two flutes. As with all of these sonatas, the two players play the exact same melody, but (in this case) two measures apart.
The second suite derived from Bizet's incidental music for L'Arlésienne opens with a Pastorale, originally the prelude to Act 2 of the play, and the most complete bit of music Bizet had composed for L'Arlesienne that he hadn't already used in the first suite. This broad Andante evokes the rolling Provençal countryside with a simple theme subjected to several treatments and interspersed with gentle, rustic woodwind passages. The middle Andantino notably features the flute and the piccolo as the solo instruments.
Choosing a tempo is not an easy task here. Most editions of the incidental music and of the suite indicate quarter = 54, so this was probably originally marked by Bizet himself. Nonetheless, today the piece is commonly played much faster, at about 80 beats per minute.
In his 1905 book A History of Irish Music, W.H. Grattan Flood writes:
A favourite pipe tune in 1726 was “Moll Roe,” or “Sweet Molly Roe,” written in praise of Miss Molly Roe, the daughter of Mr. Andrew Roe, of Tipperary. The song consisted of ten verses, each of which was written impromptu by ten bucks one night at the County Tipperary Clubhouse, in 1726. I have a long manuscript account of the circumstances under which this once very popular ballad was written, and communicated to a long since defunct magazine, in July, 1773, by Thomas Amory, the last of the assembled guests on the occasion. [...]
The old Irish tune to which this song was set was introduced under the name “Moll Roe” in Henry Brooke's Jack the Giant Queller, in 1748, and it was also called “Moll Roe in the Morning.” O'Keeffe included it in his Poor Soldier, in 1783, and O'Farrell printed it in his now scarce work, A Pocket Companion for the Irish Pipes, in 1810.
A different source for the title is given by Paul de Grae:
The “Moll Roe” referred to was an actual historical person, a redoubtable 17th century lady called Máire Ruadh Ní Mahon, thrice-married chatelaine of Leamaneh Castle in County Clare, whose impressive remains stand beside the road from Ennis up to The Burren (the castle's remains, that is, not Máire Ruadh's). She was a formidable character, who lost her second husband, Conor O'Brien (who built Leamaneh Castle on the occasion of their wedding in 1639, grafting it on to an existing 15th century tower house), fighting Cromwell's invading army. When his grieving soldiers bore his body back to the castle, she shouted from the battlements, “We want no dead men here!”, and refused them entrance. She subsequently married one of Cromwell's lieutenants (thereby securing the castle and lands for her young son), Coronet John Cooper, but some time later when husband no. 2 made some disparaging remark about husband no. 1, she kicked him from an upstairs window and killed him. I don't know who husband no. 3 was, but he must have been a very brave (or foolish) man indeed.
Moll Roe is an anglicization of the Irish Mall (Máire) Ruadh, or Red (haired) Mary.
This is the tenth study from German flutist and composer Caspar Kummer's 32 Etudes amusantes et instructives, Op. 129, first published in 1858.
This Presto is the final movement of a Flute Duet in G major that the famous German flutist and composer Johann Joachim Quantz composed in 1759.