25 Irish Songs (WoO 152) were composed by
Ludwig van Beethoven. The folk song collector
George Thomson commissioned Beethoven to arrange a series of folk melodies that he had collected. The songs were composed between the years 1810 and 1813. After Beethoven arranged the melodies Thomson added the lyrics. His original choice to write the lyrics, the Irish poet
Thomas Moore turned his down however. They were published in 1814 in A Select Collection of Original Irish Airs and later reissued in Thomson's Select Melodies of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Barry Cooper said of Beethoven's Irish folk song arrangements that they have ‘a kind of sophisticated artlessness that no ordinary composer could achieve’.
