Annotation:Princess of Wales's Minuet
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PRINCESS OF WALES'S MINUET. English, Minuet (3/4 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The melody appears in James Aird’s 6th and Last Volume of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs (Glasgow, 1803). It also appears in the music manuscript collection of William Litten, who appears to have been a ship’s fiddler on one of the vessels of the British Far East fleet at the turn of the 19th century. His manuscript ended up on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, probably having been brought home by a shipmate named Allen Coffin. Unfortunately, nothing is known of Litten himself, or even what nationality he might have been.
The Princess of Wales in Aird and Litten's era was Augusta Frederika (1737-1813), sister of King George III of Great Britain, and daughter of Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707-1751) and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. On January 16, 1764 she married Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick-Lüneburg, with whom she had seven children. Her husband was killed in battle in 1806, and the panicked princess fled to England where she was received by her brother. King George granted her the Ranger's House in Greenwich, in close proximity to her daughter Caroline Amalie, who had married her cousin, the Prince of Wales, later to become King George IV. James Boswell, Scottish laird and Dr. Johnson's amanuensis, traveled to Utrecht soon after the Princess's wedding in 1764 and was received in the court of Augusta and Karl Wilhem. He dined with them and found her "excessively affable [talking] to me with the greatest ease of the Catch Club, Lord Eglinton, Lord March, and other English topics."
On August 13, 1764, Boswell had the pleasure and honor of dancing a minuet with the princess, at the court of Brunswick.
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Aird (Aird’s 6th and Last Volume of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs), c. 1803; No. 139, p. 56. Huntington (William Litten's Tune Book), 1977; p. 34.
Recorded sources: