„Tiolemo su’el fagoto” i piosneczki Wojciecha Bogusławskiego. o weneckim pierwowzorze warszawskiej „Wenecjanki”
‘Tiolemo su’el fagoto’ and Wojciech Bogusławski’s Ditties, or About the Venetian Prototype of the Warsaw ‘Venetienne’

Summary/Abstract: A melody fashionable in Warsaw in the 1790s, known as ‘The Venetienne’, was popularised thanks to it being used to set the words of ‘Old Dominic’s Ditty’, included in Wojciech Bogusławski’s Polish adaptation of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s ‘La Brouette du vinaigrier’. Hitherto, this tune has only been known from a much later notation by Oskar Kolberg, and from an entry in the diary of Gustav Calixt Biron von Curland (discovered by Zbigniew Raszewski). We now know that the melody originally derives from the Venetian ‘canzone da battello’ ‘Tiolemo su’el fagoto’. This identification allows me to verify its Polish sources and suggest a reconstruction of the original form of ‘Old Dominic’s Ditty’. In this context, I also note the close similarity of the melodies of two other ‘ditties’ by Bogusławski, as well as the presence of elements borrowed from ‘The Venetienne’ and stylistically related operatic melodies in one of those two, namely, Bardos’s aria from ‘Cracovians and Highlanders’, which suggests that this melody may have been composed by Bogusławski himself.

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