Sunday, March 25, 2007

"My name is O'Reilly,
I own a hotel"

On Radio 3, many years ago, a music quiz programme produced the couplet above as the scansion of Haydn minuets. Nearly all the 106 Haydn symphonies have a minuet as the third movement, to which the above words fit. It is said that this is a reliable way of telling Haydn from Mozart. Funnily enough, a Google search for this couplet (before this blog was posted) does not produce this interesting snippet of information.

Furthermore, it is true that for many J.Haydn minuets there is a rider, thus....

"My name is O'Reilly, I own a hotel - -

a five star hotel"
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