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This 9/8-time jig is taken from Francis O'Neill's collection The Dance Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1907. “The Swaggering Jig” is a member of a large family of melodies, which as a matter of fact includes a few other slip jigs sharing the same title. Various sets of words have also been set to these tunes over the years, for instance by the band Dervish from County Sligo.
This waltz-like étude is the twenty-first piece from Sigfried Karg-Elert's 30 Caprices: a “Gradus ad Parnassum” of the modern technique for flute solo.
Here is the relatively slow second movement of a Sonata in G for three flutes written by Johann Scherer in the 18th century.
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata (The Marriage of Figaro, or the Day of Madness) is a four-act opera buffa (comic opera) composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais. Although the play by Beaumarchais was at first banned in Vienna because of its satire of the aristocracy, considered dangerous in the decade before the French Revolution, the opera became one of Mozart's most successful works.
The overture is especially famous and is often played as a concert piece. This effervescent number does not make use of any thematic material from the opera itself, but captures the essence of the work superbly. Mozart is said to have intended to insert a slow interlude, in the old Italian tradition, just before the recapitulation, and to have omitted it only because he hadn't time to write it down; he thus reunited the two parts of the Allegro, giving the piece a lively, genial character throughout.
The earliest appearance of this slip jig under the name “Hardy Man the Fiddler” is found in Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1903. There are several tunes with the name “Hardiman” (of which “Hardiman the Fiddler” is probably the most famous). Collector David Taylor (1992) suggests that they honor the historian James Hardiman, author of Irish Minstrelsy (1831).
Similar slip jigs can be found in earlier manuscript copybooks, such as the one by Stephen Grier from County Leitrim, dating from around 1883.
This is étude No. 16 from Ernesto Köhler's 25 Romantic Studies, Op. 66. It's in ABA'C form, with a common-time main theme in C minor, a central 3/4-time interlude in A-flat major and a 2/4-time fast coda in C major.
Today's piece is duet No. 10 from the first volume of Ernesto Köhler's Twenty Easy Melodic Progressive Studies.