In the late eighteenth century the composition of Lieder was principally an amateur pursuit, taken up by composers who concentrated their efforts on this genre alone. Composers of the more acclaimed public genres, whether instrumental music or opera, only occasionally turned to song as a diversion, which explains why there are so few truly distinguished songs by Mozart and Beethoven. Even the most memorable of their songs only marginally challenge the amateur status of the genre, or else, like Beethoven's Adelaide, they resemble Italian aria more than the simple folk manner of the German Lied. Beethoven's An die feme Geliebte, Op. 98, is the only attempt by a composer of stature to compose a more ambitious work from songs so deeply invested in the Volkston. Yet significantly, the immediate roots of Beethoven's only song cycle lie much less in the tradition of the north-German Lied, with which he had had contact from his earliest years in Bonn, than in his extensive confrontation with British folksong resulting from the arrangements he was commissioned to provide for the popular series of Irish, Scotch, and Welsh folksongs issued by the English publisher George Thomson. (Haydn, too, had been enlisted in this enterprise.) The deep association of Lied with the naive and heartfelt expression of folksong must have served as a form of restraint as well as inspiration for Beethoven, defining both the character and the outer limits of the genre.