Technological University Dublin Technological University Dublin

ARROW@TU Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin

Books AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies) Publications

2015

France and Ireland: Notes and Narratives France and Ireland: Notes and Narratives

Una Hunt Technological University Dublin, una.hunt@tudublin.ie

Mary Pierse

Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/afisbo

Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Hunt, Una and Pierse, Mary, "France and Ireland: Notes and Narratives" (2015). Books. 8. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/afisbo/8

This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies) Publications at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Books by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact arrow.admin@tudublin.ie, aisling.coyne@tudublin.ie.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License

France and Ireland

Reimagining IrelandVolume 66

Edited by Dr Eamon Maher Institute of Technology, Tallaght

PETER LANGOxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Notes and Narratives

FRANCE AND IRELAND

Una Hunt and Mary Pierse (eds)

PETER LANGOxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

ISSN 1662-9094ISBN 978-3-0343-1914-0 (print)ISBN 978-3-0353-0743-6 (eBook)

Cover image: Mike Stilkey, ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking’, 2010. Acrylic on discarded books, courtesy of the artist: mikestilkey.com.

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerlandinfo@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

All rights reserved.All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, withoutthe permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Printed in Germany

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939710

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I

Centre Stage 13

Una Hunt

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 15

Joanne Burns

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 39

David Mooney

‘De la musique avant toute chose’: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry 53

Part II

Operatic Engagements 63

Eamon Maher

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 65

Axel Klein

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement 79

vi

Laura Watson

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 91

Part III

Fruitful Encounters 111

Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 113

Mary Pierse

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 127

Brian Murphy

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 143

Benjamin Keatinge

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause in Richard Murphy’s The Battle of Aughrim 159

Arun Rao

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 177

Part IV

Dublin à la française? 197

Joe Kehoe

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 199

vii

Cathy McGlynn

‘Play it in the original’: Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 217

Sarah Balen

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’: Reading Hélène Cixous in the ‘Breath’ of Paula Meehan’s Poetry 231

Notes on Contributors 247

Index 251

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to all who inspired and enabled the orchestration of France and Ireland: Notes and Narratives. Particular thanks are due to the contributors, to our colleagues for their expertise and careful reading, and to the publishers for kind assistance and efficiency. We wish also to acknowledge the generous publication grants from AFIS and from DIT.

Cork & Dublin, April 2015

Introduction

This collection of essays presents a beguiling selection of themes and vari-ations, all unfolding through multiple notes and narratives. The notes are musical, literary, historical and sensory; the narratives progress through music, picture, prose, poetry and good wine. The wide variety of topic and treatment delivers unusual nuggets and affords insights and opportu-nities for enhanced appreciation and understanding of art and life, both French and Irish. A feature of the volume is that reciprocal influences are recognised in contributions to literary accounts, musical composition and performance, to social mores and the psychology of consumption. There is an underlying purpose to the approach: rather than embrace Brunelleschi’s perspectiva artificialis1 with the inherent deficiencies that arise from con-centrated focus on a narrow field, these chapters seek to furnish multi-dimensional pictures wherein Cartesian certainty and limits are rejected in favour of expanded horizons and productive linkages. The intention here is to introduce external disciplinary interpretation into topics, and to highlight the effects, thereby revealing how this results in additional layers of understanding, gives meaningful colour and texture, and avoids the limitations of frozen portraiture and fixed-angle viewpoints.

While examples of ‘correspondences’ between the arts were reflected in the titles of nineteenth-century paintings such as ‘Symphony in White No.3’,2 in Théophile Gautier’s 1852 poem ‘Symphonie en blanc majeur’, and

1 Filippo Brunelleschi’s identification of linear perspective in 1425 was given the name of perspectiva artificialis by Leon Battista Alberti a decade later.

2 This painting and others with titles in similar vein in the 1860s and 1870s were by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Gautier could be said to be the nine-teenth-century trailblazer of this fashion. Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘Impression du Matin’ (1880), with its foregrounding of colour and shade, transposes back into poetry the colour of Whistler paintings such as Nocturne in Blue and Gold and Harmony in Grey.

2 Introduction

in the musicality of Stéphane Mallarmé’s avant-garde poem L’après-midi d’un faune3 such associations have sometimes been regarded merely as inter-esting engagements typical of a specific period rather than as intrinsic to any comprehensive understanding of work, time and place. To re-emphasise the riches, and even the essential nature of synaesthetic insights – and particularly where Franco-Irish connections are involved – the chapters of this book feature diverse portraiture of people, places and situations in a live demonstration of the New Historicist dictum that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably. As is evident in this volume, words, music and art are never divorced from reality, and the manner of their bonding, intersections and relationships supplies both intriguing inside stories and a key to necessary expansion of interpretative approaches to music, literature and history.

Music, art and creative writing embody vital elements of the rich associations between Ireland and France. Moreover, the links can involve significant interaction and reciprocal influences, either within a single art form, or from one to another. Whether viewed as creative or purely imita-tive, whether serious or frivolous, almost all furnish insights into the social, political and cultural environment of the time. Some constitute a reaction to contemporary developments; others represent a determined interven-tion for change. Many cast new light on the circumstances contributing to ephemeral trends or notable events. In the chapters of this book, a variety of cause and effect emerges and the diversity has prompted a grouping of the essays under the headings of ‘Centre Stage’, ‘Operatic Engagements’, ‘Fruitful Encounters’ and ‘Dublin à la française’. Although those divisions may be arbitrary and sometimes interchangeable, they hint at the impor-tance of certain ingredients and participants, both French and Irish, at home and abroad. Their contents can inform, startle and intrigue.

3 The poem was in composition between 1865 and its publication in 1876. In turn, it inspired Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) to which music Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed his ballet (1912).The cover illustration for the first publication of Mallarmé’s poem was by Édouard Manet.

Introduction 3

Centre Stage

Centre stage in Paris is one place where one would not be surprised to encoun-ter the illustrious name of Fréderic Chopin. The son of a Frenchman, Chopin is certainly present in Paris in the 1830s but he is definitely more in the wings and playing second fiddle to Limerick-born George Alexander Osborne. The tale of George Osborne, attractively presented by Una Hunt (in ‘George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles’), delivers dramatic proof of changing views, tastes, and interpretations and how they can reflect an age, how they feed into and explain historical events and movements. This is true not just in the field of music composition and performance but is also valid and pertinent in every sphere of human activity. As Osborne may have briefly eclipsed Chopin, so time and reception history has reversed that order. While telling the story of this Irish pianist-composer and his links with William of Orange, Hector Berlioz, Harriet Smithson, Maréchal MacMahon, Charles Hallé, Thomas Moore and so many other luminaries of the artistic world in several countries, Hunt remarks that nineteenth-century musicians sometimes led very exciting lives. It seems an understatement in the case of Osborne whose adventures and achievements would translate well into vivid filmic form – just as some of his compositions might be appropriate as background music for more romantic scenarios. In the informative picture that Hunt paints of ‘the piano’s golden age in Paris’, it is very apparent how national beliefs and prejudices influence presentation and reception, both positively and negatively. If the name of Osborne has not been recognised for many decades, this account must surely redress that situation and will encourage exploration of his Pluie de perles.

Today, the identification of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is most likely to be as a philosopher, a political theorist, an encyclopédiste, and as author of books such as Émile and Du Contrat social [The Social Contract]. However, Rousseau’s early interests were in music and he would go on to devise a system of musical notation, write several operas, and elaborate music theo-ries. Joanne Burns (in ‘The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore’) has investigated the influence of Rousseau on Thomas Moore’s

4 Introduction

musical views and she traces Moore’s mirroring of Rousseau’s fascination with music and emotion, and the close connection between music and words. The sway of Rousseau romanticism is clearly discernible in Moore’s performance style but the underlying theoretical basis is effectively linked to Rousseau by the presence of his books in Moore’s library, by Moore’s annotations in those volumes and in his prefatory writings. The expressed views of both men coincided with regard to the position of harmony and melody and also on the goals and nature of national music. While Moore believes that music was more powerful than words, that one feels music, he would nonetheless reinforce its potency by extolling its might in his lyrics. In the age of sensibility, this was an attractive proposition. It is perhaps ironic that while both Rousseau and Moore identified the memorative power of national music, Moore could still successfully charm English drawing-rooms by renditions of songs that connected directly to Irish sensibility, Irish woes and the cruelty of ‘the invader’.

They were once very much centre stage but just as George Osborne’s life story and musical achievements faded from view, just as there is scant common recognition of Rousseau as a musical theorist, and as the fashion for the melodies of Thomas Moore has waned, so too the very existence and compositions of Irène Dean Paul (1879–1932), vanished from public memory and from the music radar. Surprisingly, her professional name of Poldowski conceals an unexpected Franco-Irish connection and David Mooney’s research (in ‘“De la musique avant toute chose”: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry’) has uncovered her considerable achieve-ment as ‘the most prolific creator of musical settings’ for Paul Verlaine’s poetry, ones for which she earned notable critical acclaim. Drawing parallels between the tempestuous life of the poète maudit and that of Dean Paul, Mooney proposes that her attraction to the French poet was magnetic and predestined. A fusion of the arts – of music, painting and philosophy – is conveyed in Dean Paul’s own essay on Verlaine, and as Mooney points out, she chose Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes collection (wherein poems relate to paintings by Watteau and Fragonard) for many musical settings. Thus, the closely interwoven and circular relationship of words, music and imagery is once more underscored and emphasised.

Introduction 5

Operatic Engagements

Shades of John Millington Synge hover very near to two unusual twenti-eth-century French operas, Henri Rabaud’s L’Appel de la mer (1924) and Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) and the composers of each work, to greater and lesser extents, were inspired by Synge’s plays, especially by Riders to the Sea. Thus, the musical composition owes its origins to literature and to words. Conversely, Kate O’Brien’s novel As Music and Splendour (1958) addresses music and an operatic world through the prism of lit-erature, starting from Shelley’s lines.4 Both approaches are truly operatic engagements and novel endeavours and they form the subject matter of this section, providing ample proof of the potent mix of note and narra-tive. In each case, the stories divulge layers of musical history and reveal vacillations in popular taste; in addition, the depictions of operatic and social milieux, of political understanding and public expectation, and of love and loss, weave in and out of France and Ireland. While Eamon Maher notes O’Brien’s significant deployment of music in three novels (in ‘Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime’), his study here focuses on As Music and Splendour where music is central and its role is thus doubly underlined. Maher’s choice of subtitle ‘When words and music chime’ could not be more apt for the concept, for its treatment and for the specific circumstances of episode and overall bildungsroman. Is this a music novel? If so, Maher has found a myriad of other features entwined and orchestrated: the influence of French nuns in Ireland, con-trasting Catholic scruples, the possibility of an artistic career for women, and above all the heady excitement and hard work required for the opera stage. The protagonists, Claire and Rose, are Irish; their path to stardom

4 The title of Kate O’Brien’s novel is taken from the second stanza of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Lines: “When the Lamp is Shattered”’. The stanza reads ‘As music and splendour/Survive not the lamp and the lute/The heart’s echoes render/ No song when the spirit is mute: -/No song but sad dirges,/Like the wind through a ruined cell,/Or the mournful surges/That ring the dead seaman’s knell.’

6 Introduction

must lead through Paris but Ireland is ever-present and celebrations of operatic triumph include those ubiquitous Moore’s Melodies.

Axel Klein’s painstaking pursuit of the origins, subsequent performances and fate of L’Opéra d’Aran (in ‘Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement’) has turned up the unexpected story of that opera, one that he rightly views as conjoining the Aran Islands, twentieth-century opera and Irish cultural history viewed through a French prism. Gilbert Bécaud, composer of the opera, was internationally known as a singer/songwriter so that his venture into operatic spheres was in no way predictable. The plot has the atmospheric tinges of Synge’s Aran Islands or possibly of Emily Lawless’s Grania: the story of an island (1892) but no source text has been claimed. Nonetheless, the romantic aura pertaining to Aran was what impelled Bécaud to compose an opera that met with wildly conflicting critical reception, drew new audiences to the opera house, and which ultimately cost him dearly in financial terms. Klein remarks the real emotional power of the work but identifies what probably determined the opera’s commercial and artistic failure: an anachronistic musical style. Despite Bécaud’s endeavours, French enthusiasm and Irish inspiration were ultimately insufficient and L’Opéra d’Aran has been given few performances in the intervening decades.

Definitely owing its theme to Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Henri Rabaud’s L’Appel de la mer is an opera about Ireland, viewed from France, and Laura Watson (in ‘Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France’) places its reception in the context of ‘cultural politics of Third Republic France’ with its controversies concerning operatic repertoire and its resist-ance to modernism. Tracing construction of ‘Ireland’ in the French musical imagination, Watson charts the interlocking concepts and agendas in France as images of Ireland are melded into French social conflict and arguments about the nature of French music. Citing the probable impact of previous Franco-Irish music (settings of Thomas Moore songs by Hector Berlioz, original compositions by Augusta Holmès and Swan Hennessy), and subse-quently of the Celtic theme for the Prix de Rome competition in 1903, Watson then sees a changing outlook in France resulting from the Celtic Revival in Ireland and its newspaper coverage in France. At a period when France was relishing the exotic, Ireland, with its language and mythology, seemed to fit into an exotic mould. However, by the time Rabaud’s opera was staged in

Introduction 7

1924, the realistic staging and faithful rendering of Synge’s dialogue were not in keeping with escapism, yet an evolving sympathy and understanding of the new state in Ireland ensured staging at the important location of the Opéra-Comique. Clearly, Third Republic France kept an eye on Ireland.

Fruitful Encounters

In ancient Greece, the word music designated all arts and sciences under the goddess Muses. In this collection, it has seemed logical and productive to follow that distinguished precedent. The stimulation of intermedial and cross-cultural meetings uncovers much that is Muse-related, with the grace, beauty and joyfulness that they enjoin, and with the artistry that in turn encourages further inspiration. In that spirit, this section of the book ranges widely through possible treasures and pleasures, from novel to poem, from painting to wine, from music to memories. In so doing, the chapters move in time between the Battle of Aughrim in 1691 and the present day, and possibly into the future: art travels into the personal spheres of composer, reader, viewer and œnophile, and via fictional characters and vicarious sip-ping, reaches out to a wide public.

In a study that compares the treatment of grief and loss in recent novels by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre, Maguy Pernot-Deschamps (in ‘Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre’) identifies the authors’ common solution to what their fictional protagonists perceive as the irreparable damage done to them in two different forms of bereave-ment. Both the French and Irish writers decide to ground their protagonists’ recovery in the consolation of art. The characters find solace in words, music and visual imagery and Pernot-Deschamps charts the paths to recovery from desperate clinging to fading memories, from nightmare images, to comfort in music, and to later acceptance and serenity, assisted by positive visual images and by words. Particular artistic preferences suggest sound, pictures and memory to the readers: Chopin and Schubert, Rachmaninov, and Thomas Moore’s ‘The Harp that once’; Turner and Vermeer; poetry and silence. As

8 Introduction

two contemporary writers, Lefèvre and Jordan, depict the contribution of art and words to anguish and to healing, this would seem to encourage further exploration of texts for similar authorial practice.

The close ties of diverse forms of creative endeavour are apparent too in the links between the title of Françoise Lefèvre’s book, Un album de silence [A Book of Silence], and Mary Pierse’s chapter (‘Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine?’) wherein she considers silence and memory in poetry by three contemporary Irish poets, Bernard O’Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Dennis O’Driscoll. Viewing their purposeful silences and soundless pictures as neither quite Wordsworthian nor Proustian in their relationship to memory and literature, she judges them to be particularly conducive to stimulation of reflections and memories in the reader. The silences invite encounter with palpable stimuli, they enhance other sense experience, with the effect of augmenting reflection and under-standing. Pierse argues that the many and remarkable silences in the poetry are especially generative of multifaceted pictures in the mind.

In contrast to remembered delicacies of childhood – the ‘liquorice whip’ and ‘cream pie’ from a Dennis O’Driscoll poem mentioned by Pierse – Brian Murphy (in ‘Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship’) tantalises with the prospect of sampling Château Margaux 2004 to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No 1 in D major as back-ground music. Murphy’s review of the emerging relationships between wine and the arts delves into wine’s capacity to intersect with broad cultural areas, whether art, architecture or music, and the resultant combination then constitutes a new cultural entity. There are affinities between tasting wine and appreciating music, and one can influence the other – a fact not ignored by commercial interests. As experiments have discovered that cer-tain wines go well with particular music, business interests will surely use those findings to influence consumers. However, Murphy reassures that lovers of wine and music will still be free to conduct their own pleasurable tests, and of course to repeat them at will.

The ambitions and culture of Ireland and France met memorably – albeit relatively briefly – and with momentous consequences at the Battle of Aughrim, Co. Galway, in 1691. The names that linger in public memory would be those of French commander the Marquis de St Ruth and of Irish

Introduction 9

commander Patrick Sarsfield. In analysis of Richard Murphy’s historical poem The Battle of Aughrim (1968), Benjamin Keatinge (in ‘France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause in Richard Murphy’s The Battle of Aughrim’) calls it a kaleido-scopic view of the battle which delivers much in artistic and social terms, and from differing temporal and sectarian perspectives. He deems the poem ‘an architectonic whole’. In Richard Murphy’s own words ‘the poem is a complex equation of people, ideas, myths, legends, facts – all mixed up’. The scope is remarkable, as is Keatinge’s scholarly location of poem and poet in terms of history, myth, historiography, identity crisis, memory studies and cultural tourism. Keatinge quotes J.G. Simms’s belief that history and poetry need one another. It is certainly appropriate for the theme and subject of this volume that Murphy’s poem furnishes such a ‘Musical’ alliance between Calliope and Clio.

Battles and war do not usually prompt association with Claude Debussy or with his music – but such confrontations of a century ago were actually decisive in determining the nature of his multiple compositions, particu-larly in 1915. Arun Rao (in ‘“Claude de France”’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915’) paints a fascinating picture of Debussy’s reaction to World War I, his particular nationalism, his place in the French music scene, the responses of his peers, his literary endeavours, and his own ‘warpath’. The 1914–15 works included Berceuse Héroïque, Caprices entitled En blanc et noir, several sonatas for different instruments, and Élégie (for piano). Rao sees Debussy’s war-time compositions as capturing the dichotomy of French character and pointing French music towards the future, thereby affirming Debussy in the pantheon of French composers. Debussy is not only recognised as an innovator, Rao’s chapter sparks questions relating to creative ‘warpaths’.

Dublin à la française?

The concluding section of this volume has many roots in Dublin but they are intermingled with blends and impacts from the hexagon. Those French influences have come by invitation – to conduct an orchestra, and to supply critical lenses through which to read the prose of James Joyce and the poetry

10 Introduction

of Paula Meehan. In each case, the merging of French and Irish talent delivers enrichment. However, as might be expected, the paths were not always smooth. This is especially the case in the story of Jean Martinon, the backdrop to which incidentally supplies valuable pictures of Irish society in the mid-twentieth century.

If Claude Debussy had been affected by World War I, the consequences of World War II impinged on music in Dublin, and again the effect was positive. Joe Kehoe (in ‘Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin’) recounts how post-war conditions had a bearing on the founda-tion of a permanent symphony orchestra in the city and how much its success owed to the central and enormous contribution of Jean Martinon who also played an important role with Our Lady’s Choral Society and in the education of Irish musicians in composition and conducting. It is a tale that, in the years between 1946 and 1951, includes bureaucratic dis-putes, artistic sensitivity, collateral damage, and an arresting image of the archbishop of Dublin making entrances to the strains of ‘Ecce Sacerdos Magnus’. However, Martinon’s legacy continues: the orchestra has expanded and is now the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida declared that the history of music was parallel to the history of language. Cathy McGlynn (in ‘“Play it in the original”: Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s “Sirens”’) high-lights how the part played by music in the ‘Sirens’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses accords with, but predates, the Derridean assessment of logocentric bias – and Derrida would acknowledge Joyce’s influence on him. For Joyce, music and language have the same differentials. Recalling Joyce’s interest in music, and his possibly mischievous description of his technique in ‘Sirens’ as fugal, McGlynn also cites the recognition by composer Otto Luening that ‘Joyce enjoyed giving literary interpretations of contrapuntal techniques in music’. She illustrates that style and the original sound effects, noting how the opening passage of the ‘Sirens’ episode mimics a prelude, and how Joyce aligns the logic of music and language, thereby making fixed meaning impossible. McGlynn’s illustration of disruption of speech and writing in the closing part of ‘Sirens’ is revealing and memorable.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ might seem to reflect an element of Joycean methodology but it is in fact part of Paula Meehan’s description

Introduction 11

of how, for her, writing is a transcription of that music. Sarah Balen (in ‘“The music you’re carrying in your head”: Reading Hélène Cixous in the “Breath” of Paula Meehan’s Poetry’) identifies close links between Meehan’s poetry and the feminist philosophy of Hélène Cixous (whose doctoral thesis had been on James Joyce). The Cixousian theory of writing encourages the ‘anguish of submersion’, the risky route of letting the inspirational surge take precedence over poetic structure. Balen asserts that, in accordance with Cixous’s theory of écriture feminine, Meehan makes the sounds of the body – breath, pulse, tears – into word music. Breath is particularly important: it challenges, it is threatened, it can be lost and broken, and the Dublin poet employs it in a fresh way, with searing honesty, and in search of music.

The Ensemble

The music and words, the notes and narratives of France and Ireland, have been inseparable, not just in this collection of essays, but in life and in art. Bound together, the sounds, visual images, verbal pictures, memories, and suggestive powers of taste, aroma and tactile awareness are what expand and extend human experience and appreciation to the point where it can achieve greater meaning. To exclude colour from a painting is to impover-ish the viewer; to be blind to a contemporary crisis can only limit under-standing of its impact on the creative community; to completely restrict critical appraisal to the lens of one discipline or genre could well deprive the wider audience of the enriching ripples of escalating connections. It is with those firm beliefs that the chapters of this book have sought to avoid sealed compartmentalisation of prose and poetry, music and visual art. It is worthy of note that the name of Thomas Moore emerges not just concern-ing the influence of Rousseau on the Irishman but also in connection with Berlioz’s settings of Moore songs, and in the fictional celebration of La Scala success: it is but one example of the threads of artistry and stimulation as they cross and re-cross national boundaries and traditions.

12 Introduction

Taste and predilections alter over time, reputations are made and undone, and stereotypes may abound and persist. Art will constantly be selective in its representations, whether reflective, imitative or ground-breaking, but it will always furnish material for thought. This is evident in Debussy’s ‘war’, in Sarsfield’s battles, and in the fictional depiction of traumatic loss; it is manifest in the relative popularity of George Osborne and Frédéric Chopin in different centuries; it casts its magical spell over the pleasures of wine tasting; it decorates and explains in literature. In choosing to ponder the work and lives of distinguished creators in several fields, the contributors to this collection have implicitly acknowledged the shifting sands of reception and reputation, knowing that interpretations of past and present are immeasurably enhanced by recourse to the artistic eye, ear and pen, and to imagination.

Part I

Centre Stage

Una Hunt

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles

George Alexander Osborne (1806–1893) is not likely to be a familiar name. This Irish pianist-composer lived through most of the nineteenth century and had a long and productive career as a musician. Unusually, Osborne carved out an illustrious career as a pianist in Paris, one of the first perform-ers from Ireland to do so, before later making a significant contribution to London’s musical life. The influences that came to bear on his pianistic style and compositions were dominated by trends in France rather than England, particularly in the earlier part of his professional career. This fact would in turn have a bearing on his musical achievements in later life and on his relative lack of success in Britain at a time when German music held sway.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that no Irish pianist had made his or her mark in France before Osborne, except possibly John Field (1782–1837), but then only by reputation. Field left Ireland around the age of 10 and spent his entire adult life in Russia. A few years before his death, he visited Europe and performed in Paris, but it seems that Frédéric Chopin (1810–1839) who was living in the French capital and who had admired Field’s music back in his native Poland, was deeply disappointed with his performance considering it to be crude and lacking in fluency.1 Field was, by then, probably quite ill and certainly past his best, but it is also likely that fashions in piano playing and piano compositions had progressed in continental Europe while they may well have stood still in Russia.2 And at

1 Adam Zamoyski, Chopin, Prince of the Romantics (London: Harper Press, 2010), 95.2 Una Hunt and Julian Horton, ‘Field, John’, The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland

(Dublin, UCD Press, 2013), 378–81; 379.

16 Una Hunt

this time, Paris was considered a centre for pianists and piano playing and would certainly have been at the forefront of new trends on the instrument.

Highlighting John Field’s success or lack of it in Paris at a time when the piano was still a developing instrument helps to pinpoint the vagaries of nineteenth-century fashions in music, something that is not fully under-stood today. A composer’s legacy could be adversely affected by relatively transient trends or indeed, by critiques, either in the press or by other prominent musicians. Osborne is, of course, even less well-known than Field, and being an Irish composer appears to have had added drawbacks. He, like Field, left Ireland at a young age; this was not unusual for there were few opportunities for musicians at home in the early years of the nineteenth century.

One question seems to arise constantly regarding the fact that Osborne’s music has disappeared virtually without trace. The issues surrounding this are complex, particularly as his achievement cannot be valued by today’s parameters. In addition to the piano being a developing instrument in Osborne’s day, the virtuoso pianist-composer was a phenomenon peculiar to the era, a musician who wrote and performed his own brilliant com-positions. While this type of musician really no longer exists, the pianist-composers of the early to mid-nineteenth century were pushing out the boundaries and incorporating new performance methods and pianistic tricks on a regular basis. In Osborne’s day, it would have been impossible to be taken seriously as a pianist without performing one’s own music.3 Concert programmes attest to this and the names of many composers on a typical programme of the period are not familiar ones. The scenario is quite different today: in almost every case, performers now play music written by others, and usually those composers are dead. The music of dead composers began to assume a higher status than the living and this sea-change occurred during Osborne’s lifetime. Furthermore, the fantasias

3 It is worth noting that pianist-composers were almost exclusively male in the nine-teenth century. While there were a few notable female pianists who performed in public, very few of them composed or performed their own music.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 17

and transcriptions which were all the rage at the time, and the mainstay of any pianist’s repertoire, came into disrepute.

One such work, a fantasia based on themes from the opera The Rose of Castile written by Osborne’s friend and fellow Irishman, Michael William Balfe (1808–1870), is a good illustration of the kind of popular fantasy-type piece that was in vogue. Balfe had a successful career, firstly on the opera stage and then as a composer of operas in the English language, although he also wrote in French and Italian, and had his operas performed in con-tinental Europe. Balfe’s best-known opera was The Bohemian Girl but another, entitled The Rose of Castile, was also popular. The name will be familiar to readers of Ulysses where the work receives more mentions than the Bohemian Girl or any other Balfe opera. On one occasion in Ulysses, the character Matt Lenehan cracks a joke while answering his own ques-tion: ‘What opera is like a railway line?’ followed by the pun – ‘Rows of cast steel’.4

It is of interest to note how fantasias on popular opera themes were promoted and sold in Osborne’s day. Balfe’s opera was premiered in the autumn of 1857 (29 October) at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Osborne’s fantasia was also published in 1857, sometime after the première. Given the prominence of the London production, Osborne had an eye to the market in producing a fantasia consisting of the opera’s most important solos and choruses. Country dwellers, who perhaps had little opportunity to see the opera itself, might have appreciated Osborne’s piece as a way of becoming acquainted with Balfe’s new music. So, Osborne’s fantasia can be seen as fulfilling a dual function: providing sheet music for the domestic market by which Balfe’s opera might be promulgated and as a vehicle for Osborne’s own playing. Such repertoire was of a transient nature, rather akin to popu-lar music today which comes and goes in a rapidly-changing marketplace.

While his music may have become unfashionable in the latter part of his life, Osborne’s professional activities, his friends and associates con-stitute a celebrity list of musical talent. Most notably, he collaborated with Charles de Bériot (1802–1870), the founder of the Franco-Belgian

4 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), 170.

18 Una Hunt

school of violin playing and with the legendary mezzo soprano, Maria Malibran (1808–1836), one of the world’s most famous singers; both de Bériot and Malibran were among the Irishman’s closest friends. Osborne also performed with Chopin at his famous Paris début in 1832; the Polish pianist referred to Osborne as an ‘excellent’ friend and recognised him as ‘an Irishman’.5 In addition to the Chopin début, Osborne played with other noted pianists including Franz Liszt, and with many famous singers, such as Marietta Alboni, Joseph Tagliafico, Fanny Persiani, Henriette Sontag, and Pauline Garcia (later Viardot).6 He knew the composers Gioachino Rossini and Luigi Cherubini, and was a particularly close friend of Hector Berlioz. Osborne also performed with famous performers such as Ferdinand Hiller and Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, and alongside Clara Wieck shortly before her marriage to Robert Schumann. He also partnered the violinist Alexandre Joseph Artôt and the cellists Alfredo Piatti and Auguste Franchomme.7 During his years in Paris, Osborne also furthered the career of Catherine Hayes, the young soprano from his home town of Limerick. Later, he was associated with the two brothers, Josef and Heinrich Wieniawski, the latter married Osborne’s niece, Isabella Hampton at St Andrew’s church in Paris.8

Despite the now-outmoded nature of his music, Osborne has almost by default assumed an interesting status in musicological circles, mainly

5 Adam Zamoyski bizarrely identifies Osborne as ‘English’ in the up-dated version of his biography on Chopin; see Zamoyski, Chopin, Prince of the Romantics, 84. Chopin referred to Osborne in a letter to Auguste Franchomme in 1848, the year before his death. See Arthur Hedley, transl. and ed., Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin (London: Heinemann, 1962), 327.

6 Pauline Garcia-Viardot (1821–1910) was a famous French mezzo soprano, teacher and composer and the younger sister of Maria Malibran. She sang at Chopin’s funeral in L’église de la Madeleine in Paris, hidden from view behind a black curtain.

7 Chopin dedicated his cello sonata, op. 65 to Auguste Franchomme.8 Wladyslaw Duleba, Wieniawski (New Jersey: Paganiniana, 1984), 99. The Polish vio-

linist and composer Heinrich (Henryk) Wieniawski (1835–1880) had an enormously successful career but died young at the age of 44. His daughter, Irene Wieniawska Paul (1880–1932) was born in Brussels after her father’s death and composed music under the pseudonym of Poldowski. Her settings of Verlaine’s poetry are the subject of Chapter III in this volume.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 19

because of a number of papers he delivered to The Musical Association in London.9 Among these are reminiscences of his early years in Paris, docu-menting in particular his relationships with Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) and Frédéric Chopin at a time when the status of both composers was very high, and both were already dead. As personal accounts of two stellar musical figures of the early- to mid-nineteenth century, Osborne’s writings have become important documents.

Early Life

George Alexander Osborne was born in Limerick on 24 September 1806. His father, George William, was Limerick city organist and organist and lay-vicar of St Mary’s cathedral, a building of ancient origin which still stands in the oldest part of the city.10 From the age of fourteen, the young Osborne played the organ at St Mary’s but his progression into the musical profession appears to have been unplanned, for he had intended entering the church. However, he went to stay with an aunt in Brussels at the age of eighteen, and his life took a different turn.11 At some point over the next

9 See Proceedings of the Musical Association (London: Stanley, Lucas, Weber): 1880, 91–105; 1883, 95–113; 1885, 81–98.

10 The family had musical connections to Limerick cathedral over several genera-tions and there is also evidence of family members active at other Church of Ireland cathedrals, including Christ Church in Dublin and St Canice’s in Kilkenny. These include Anthony Sampson (c1725–1748), Charles Graydon Osborne I (1771–1823) and Rev. C. W. Osborne (d. 1853). The family grave where Osborne’s father is buried at St Mary’s was restored in 2006 to mark the bicentenary of the pianist’s birth.

11 G.A. Osborne, ‘Musical Coincidences and Reminiscences’, Proceedings of the Musical Association (London: Stanley Lucas, Weber, 2 April 1883), 96. Richard Pine and Charles Acton state that Osborne was organist of St John’s Catholic Cathedral in Limerick at the age of nineteen while his father continued at St Mary’s: see Richard Pine and Charles Acton, eds, To Talent Alone: the Royal Irish Academy of Music, 1848–1998 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998), 496. If this is true, he cannot have

20 Una Hunt

couple of years, he adopted music as his profession12 and was appointed as instructor to the eldest son of William of Orange, King of Holland (1772–1843).13 Later, when his pupil became King William III of the Netherlands (1817–1890) he decorated Osborne with the Order of the Oak-Crown.14

Osborne also spent time at the Chateau de Chimay, where his career as a musician was encouraged and furthered by the prince. Chimay, not far from Brussels, was a principality created in 1486 by Maximillian I of Austria.15 There is a small theatre at the chateau where, in Osborne’s day, operas, concerts and vaudevilles were presented.16 Although the Princes of Chimay had been patrons of music since the sixteenth century, their influence reached its height around the time Osborne came into contact with them. The sixteenth prince, Francois-Joseph de Riquet, and his wife, Theresia Cabarrus,17 were passionately interested in music. The couple invited a number of famous musicians to the chateau, including Luigi Cherubini who in 1809 composed his Mass in F there. Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber wrote a mass for the prince’s private chapel and an opera entitled Jean de Chimay.18 Before long Auber’s music would ignite revo-lutionary fervour in Belgium to which Osborne responded.

stayed long at St John’s. No details are provided as to the source of Pine and Acton’s information.

12 The details of Osborne’s first years abroad are difficult to ascertain. About half the existing sources suggest that he remained in Brussels for some time, attending at first the Prince’s classical academy. See Robert Herbert ed., Worthies of Thomond (Limerick: Robert Herbert, 1944), 23.

13 Osborne: ‘Musical Coincidences’, PMA, 97.14 William H. Husk, ‘Osborne, George Alexander’ in H. C. Colles ed., Grove’s Dictionary

of Music and Musicians, iii (London: Macmillan, 1928), 775–6; 776.15 Since the French Revolution, Chimay’s power and influence has been in decline.

However, the family still live at the chateau today and maintain several hundred acres of parkland to the north of the adjoining city. See <http://www.oocities.org/bourbonstreet/1781/chimay/Chimay.html> accessed 22 January 2015.

16 An international festival of Baroque singing was started in the year 2000 at Chimay.17 Theresia Cabarrus was better known as Madame Tallien and was associated with the

French Revolution. 18 Also known as Le Chateau de Couvain, the opera was performed at the Chateau de

Chimay, September 1812 (unpublished).

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 21

Charles de Bériot whom Osborne had initially met in Brussels was another musician who visited Chimay. He was a prodigious player; in one review of the fantasia on William Tell which he wrote in 1829 in collabora-tion with Osborne, de Bériot received high praise for his playing, described as ‘tender, graceful and astonishing’ [… tendre, gracieux, surprenant].19 He was likened to Paganini, with whom, it was claimed, he shared the attention of the musical world.20 Osborne and de Bériot soon began a long period of collaboration on thirty-three violin and piano duos on themes from Rossini, Auber and others, many of which remained popular for several decades.

The Prince de Chimay was himself an excellent violinist and had an orchestra comprising of the inhabitants of the nearby town, for which he had a resident professor.21 Osborne often conducted the orchestra in com-positions of his own, Cherubini’s or the great masters, and he benefited greatly from studying these works in the prince’s library at the chateau.22 He also enjoyed sports of all kinds at the Chateau during the autumn where Maria Malibran was also a frequent visitor. A fearless cross-country rider, she caused considerable anxiety to the prince and his family. Osborne recalls a day spent hunting with Malibran, when she rode his horse instead of her own, and he had to put up with an animal whose attempts to jump walls invariably failed.23 Malibran married de Bériot in 1836, but their marriage was short-lived. She died tragically some months later during the Manchester Festival as a result of a riding accident.

In 1830, Belgium was in turmoil with a revolution which led to its proc-lamation of independence on 4 October. Sometime later, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was dissolved and in January 1831 the separation of Belgium was formalised with Leopold of Saxe-Coburg elected as king. The following August, a ten-day campaign took place; the Dutch army initially defeated

19 Revue musicale, Paris (22 December 1829), 517–18 (my translation). 20 Ibid.21 Osborne, ‘Musical Coincidences’, PMA, 98.22 Herbert, Worthies of Thomond, 23; Robin Humphrey Legge, ‘Osborne, George

Alexander’, Dictionary of National Biography, xiv (London: OUP, 1921–2), 1183–4; 1184.

23 Osborne, ‘Musical Coincidences’, PMA, 97.

22 Una Hunt

the Belgians, but was forced to retreat when the French intervened. A truce was finally concluded in 1833.24 Since the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the Prince of Chimay had supported the King of Holland and, Osborne had been the music instructor to that king’s son. Possibly out of loyalty to both the king and Chimay, he volunteered for the royalists in the 1830 revolution; taken prisoner, he was released at the request of one of his royal patrons, probably Chimay.25 Intriguingly, a putative cousin of Osborne’s had been fighting on the Belgian side for the French: Osborne’s mother was born Elizabeth MacMahon and was allegedly a cousin of Marshal MacMahon, a French hero and later President of the Republic.26

Paris

Nineteenth-century musicians sometimes led very exciting lives! Osborne’s career as a performer and composer had only just begun and, after his combat experience in the Belgian conflict, that career was consolidated in Paris where Osborne lived for more than a decade, pursuing his studies with renewed interest.27 He benefited from lessons in harmony and coun-terpoint with François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871),28 and soon perfected his piano technique under the renowned teacher and pianist Frédéric

24 P. J. A. N. Rietbergen, A Short History of the Netherlands (Amersfoort: Bekking, 2004), 78–81.

25 Herbert, Worthies of Thomond, 23.26 Basil Walsh, Catherine Hayes, the Hibernian Prima Donna (Dublin: Irish Academic

Press, 2000), 6.27 W. H. Grattan Flood, A History of Irish Music (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1913),

330–1.28 The Court Journal (23 Jan. 1836), 51. Some professors showed great kindness towards

students in Paris. Balfe apparently studied under Cherubini ‘en ami’, and enjoyed the advantage of free accommodation during the winter months. Both Robin Humphrey Legge (DNB, 1921–2, xiv, 1184) and Rosemary Firman in her revision of the article (DNB, xlii (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 12–13; 13) have included the Bohemian-born

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 23

Kalkbrenner (1788–1849). Osborne was to become one of the finest expo-nents of Kalkbrenner’s playing style in France. The Prince de Chimay had given him letters of introduction to Cherubini and Auber who received him kindly and his happy-go-lucky attitude to life and affable personality ensured that Osborne made many friends in the French capital. By the time Chopin appeared in Paris in 1831, Osborne was well settled and already had something of a reputation as a pianist. By then too, he had given several successful concerts and had commenced publication of his duos with de Bériot in 1829.29

As luck would have it, Osborne arrived in Paris at the start of a golden age for the piano. Virtuosi were flooding into the city, each one flaunting ever more exciting, and ostentatious showmanship than the last. Chopin observed a ‘thunder and lightning’ piano style that was quite different to his own refined mode of playing.30 This was no idle observation – this new, more flamboyant style was widespread and added dramatically to the attrac-tion of its possessors. The talents of the virtuosi were greatly admired and the capacity of concert halls increased to keep up with public demand for concerts. Naturally, the power and mechanical capabilities of the instrument itself needed to meet the growing needs of pianists. The piano was in the final phase of its development with adjustments and refinements being made to the frame and mechanism. The leading French pianos of the time – Érard and Pleyel – were much sought after as performance instruments; Frédéric Chopin favoured the Pleyel and gave his first and last Paris performances at the Salle Pleyel, a concert hall run by the manufacturing company. He was almost certainly introduced to the Pleyel piano by Kalkbrenner who

composer Anton Reicha (1770–1836) as a teacher of Osborne’s in Paris, although no additional evidence has been found to support this theory.

29 As already mentioned, Fétis taught Osborne harmony and counterpoint and states that he arrived in Paris in 1826. He also studied piano initially with Johann Peter Pixis (1788–1874). See Biographie universelle des musiciens, vi (Paris: Firmin-Didot Frères, second edition 1866), 383–4; 384.

30 Osborne, ‘Frederick Chopin’, PMA, 105.

24 Una Hunt

joined the firm in 1824.31 It was through Kalkbrenner that Osborne and Chopin were destined to become friends.

Chopin

Chopin’s arrival in Paris at the age of twenty-two and his establishment as the pianist of choice in the most fashionable salons was not a smooth progression. He was very celebrated in his native land and, having already composed a number of his defining works, his name had preceded him on his travels in Europe. However, his concerts in Vienna had been virtually ignored, and he was clearly hoping for more success in Paris. On meeting the young Chopin, Kalkbrenner proposed that he should study with him for three years.32 Such a suggestion may seem strange today but, in the musical landscape of Paris at that time, Kalkbrenner was an enormously powerful figure. Furthermore, Chopin thought that Kalkbrenner might impart a particular skill that he lacked.33 While Chopin was admired as a composer, Osborne often remarked that ‘as a player in large rooms he was nowhere’.34 In the end, Chopin did not study with Kalkbrenner but he took the politically astute step of dedicating his Concerto in E minor to him and Kalkbrenner was very much involved in the Pole’s Paris début.35

Chopin’s début, held on the 26 February 1832 at the Salle Pleyel, was believed to have been a financial failure as scarcely any tickets had been paid for and the audience was almost entirely made up of well-to-do Poles

31 M. L. Pereyra, ‘Pleyel and Co.’, Grove’s Dictionary of music and musicians, iv (London: Macmillan, 1928), 209–10.

32 Edward Dannreuther, ‘Kalkbrenner, Friedrich Wilhelm Michael’ in GD, 1928, iii, 2.33 Zamoyski, Chopin, Prince of the Romantics, 83.34 Osborne, ‘Frederick Chopin’, PMA, 105.35 GD 1928, iii, 3. The concerto in E minor op.11 is known as no. 1 but was actually

composed second. The dedication reads A Monsieur Fr. Kalkbrenner.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 25

who attended gratis.36 As well as Chopin’s own compositions, a work by Kalkbrenner was presented – a polonaise for six pianos played by Chopin and Kalkbrenner along with Osborne, Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885), Camille Stamaty (1811–1870) and Chopin’s countryman, Wojciech Sowinski (1803–1880).37 While the instrumentation is odd by today’s standards, it seems that Kalkbrenner’s work was appreciated by the audience and had also given much pleasure on a previous occasion at Pleyel’s rooms.38 This was not Osborne’s first involvement in performing a work for six pianists. Four years earlier, he had played an arrangement (by J. Payer) of the over-ture to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Among the pianists were Franz Liszt, and once again, Sowinski. The reviewer decided, not surprisingly, that there was ‘bien du bruit pour peu d’effet’ [these gentlemen made a lot of noise to little effect] although he concluded that it was not their fault.39

In these early years in Paris, Osborne lived close to Chopin’s residence. He was a frequent visitor and heard many of Chopin’s compositions while they were still in manuscript. He recalled that when Chopin played for him, he varied his compositions with new and different ‘embroideries’ on each occasion.40 This statement corroborates the practice of performer-com-posers of the period as ever-changing and evolving. No two performances were quite the same and editions of a work might also differ, especially if the composer did not have a chance to check proofs before publication. A copyright loophole existed when a musical work was not published on the same day in each European city, as a composer was in danger of having his music pirated and passed off as the work of someone else. Therefore, a release date had to be agreed with publishers in advance.41 Such a scenario leaves potential for inaccuracies between the copies emanating from each

36 Osborne, ‘Frederick Chopin’, PMA, 95.37 Chopin performed his E minor concerto on this occasion as a solo (see Zamoyski,

Chopin, Prince of the Romantics, 87). 38 Revue musicale (3 March 1832), 38–9.39 Revue musicale (30 March 1828), 232 (my translation). 40 Osborne, ‘Frederick Chopin’, PMA, 95.41 Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Harvard

University Press, 1998), 162–4.

26 Una Hunt

publisher. In the case of Chopin’s music, there are frequent discrepancies to be seen between one edition and another, and given Osborne’s first-hand experience, it is debatable whether Chopin really had definitive versions in mind.

Osborne’s intimacy with Chopin appears confined to those early days in Paris when he described the Polish pianist as ‘the life and soul of the party’. It is likely that their friendship diminished over the following decade. Chopin never enjoyed good health and, after the initial period of his life in Paris, he rarely went out socially except to play at private salons in the city.42 Osborne was present at Chopin’s second public concert in Paris in 1834, which was a financial success. Among the works presented was a repeat of his E minor concerto, this time with orchestral accompani-ment, but his refined playing was not heard to advantage in the theatre.43 Chopin was disappointed at having failed to garner enthusiasm, and for a long time afterwards was not happy to perform in a large public hall.44 Ultimately, while his elegant playing made him the king of Parisian salons, he had relatively little success in the ever-evolving milieu of the concert hall. Nonetheless, Osborne retained a deep respect for Chopin’s unique genius as a composer and Chopin’s style seems to have exerted as great an influence on Osborne’s own piano works as it did on many others.

A final meeting between Osborne and Chopin took place in Manchester. Chopin visited England and Scotland in 1848, partly to escape the unrest in Paris at the time. He found the travelling on this tour par-ticularly onerous, increased no doubt by his illness which was probably

42 This was especially true during the period of his relationship with George Sand. He was a frequent guest at some of the most fashionable salons in Paris where he preferred to perform, rather than in public.

43 The pianist-composer Ignaz Moscheles used the analogy ‘delicate fairy fingers’ glid-ing over the keys to describe Chopin’s performances of his own compositions (see Osborne, ‘Frederick Chopin’, PMA, 97). This confirms that Chopin would have experienced some difficulties in having his playing heard in a public hall.

44 Ibid., 97.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 27

well advanced.45 The Pole was announced to play at a ‘dress concert’ with orchestra on 28 August in Manchester, for which he was paid a handsome fee of £60, but despite the presence of an orchestra, Chopin played only solo items.46 Osborne also appeared at this concert as accompanist with the young mezzo soprano Marietta Alboni (1822–1894) and probably also accompanied the other singers, Salvi and Corbari, in their solo numbers.47 Chopin begged Osborne not to listen to his playing:

You, my dear Osborne, who have heard me so often in Paris, remain with those impressions. My playing will be lost in such a large room, and my compositions will be ineffective. Your presence at the concert will be painful both to you and me.

Despite the plea, Osborne witnessed the performance from a corner of the room, applauding his friend while hidden from sight, and recorded his impressions:

I heard him then for the last time, when his prediction was fulfilled in part, for his playing was too delicate to create enthusiasm, and I felt truly sorry for him.48

The local papers carried mixed reviews but the performance at that Manchester concert did not change Osborne’s pleasurable and vivid rec-ollections of Chopin’s genius, nor the memories of their years of friendship in Paris which he retained all his life.

45 Letters to friends such as Mlle Rozières, Auguste Franchomme and Wojciech Grzymala in Paris describe his exhaustion during the visit.

46 Frederick Niecks, Life of Chopin, ii (London: Novello, 1890), 289. An advertisement appeared in the Manchester Guardian on 19 August announcing the concert with a review in the same newspaper on 30 August (cited in Niecks, Life of Chopin, ii, 294–5).

47 Marietta Alboni was one of the female operatic stars in London at this period. At the time she was about 25 years old and was said to have been a rather large person with a phenomenal vocal range. In July of the same year, Salvi and Corbari had appeared at Mrs Hampton’s concert (Osborne’s sister), and in September they sang with Alboni in Carlisle. As Osborne states that he was on tour with Alboni at this time, it is likely that all three singers accompanied Osborne on the tour.

48 Osborne, ‘Frederick Chopin’, PMA, 101.

28 Una Hunt

Osborne’s Fantasias on National Airs

During the 1830s, Osborne established a name for himself as one of the foremost pianists in Paris and every year he gave a concert where his own compositions were heard.49 Venues included Salons Pleyel and Érard as well as Salons Dietz, Salons Pape, Salle Taitbout, Salle Sainte-Jean, and Salle Chantereine; many of these halls were attached to piano manufacturing companies such as the Salle Pleyel where Chopin’s début had been held. Fantasias and transcriptions were the order of the day at Osborne’s concerts and the mainstay of his repertoire and publications, particularly in his early career. He produced a few notable fantasias on Irish themes – no doubt he was keen to establish his profile as an Irish pianist living in France and to please his pupils from the British Isles. It seems, however, while these works were undoubtedly performed during his Paris years, they were mostly published in London after Osborne had taken up residence there.50

Irish music enjoyed popularity all over Europe at this time, particu-larly in Paris where the trend was certainly fuelled by the arrival of Thomas Moore (1779–1852) who lived in the French capital from 1819 to 1822. Moore continued to perform his popular Irish Melodies in Parisian salons as he had done for many years in England where his appearances in the homes of the aristocracy helped to sell his song collections.51 Osborne could not have produced a more marketable product than fantasias on national airs. His works in this genre include Ireland (1853), incorporating two popular airs also used by Moore, the well-known Last Rose of Summer and The Girl I Left Behind Me.52 This fantasia was preceded by a number of others such

49 Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens, vi, 384.50 The existing sources disagree on the year Osborne left Paris for London but, as the

young soprano Catherine Hayes and her mother came to stay in Paris with Osborne and his wife between October 1842 and March 1844, the move must have occurred after this date (See Walsh: Catherine Hayes, 42). In any case, Osborne continued to visit Paris for performances in subsequent years.

51 The Irish melodies consisted of songs written to pre-existing Irish airs.52 The Irish melodies, V, iv and VII, ii.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 29

as the Fantasia on Irish and Scottish airs (1845) and A brilliant fantasia on Irish airs (1851) featuring Moore’s The minstrel boy and Silent, oh Moyle! 53 The latter piece provided an opportunity to showcase Osborne’s virtuoso ability as it concludes with a crashing coda à la Liszt.54 In addition, he composed a fantasia on a Welsh air (1852) and a further Scottish-inspired work (1857), along with England and France (both 1858).

The publication dates for these works, ranging from 1845 to around 1860, are probably at variance with the dates of their composition. There is every likelihood that the works were performed in advance of their pub-lication – this practice was not unusual. As they were used as vehicles for virtuoso display, the works were sometimes not written down for a number of years. The Fantasia on Irish and Scottish Airs (1845) seems to have been given a public airing at Osborne’s Paris concert around the beginning of April 1843 but was not published for another two years.55 Furthermore, there appears to be no way of telling if the work received salon performances in advance of either or both of these dates.

The Piano and the Salon

Salons were private affairs and, in line with other performers of his day, Osborne would certainly have participated at many. Client relationships existed between musicians and the female sponsors of salons as they, or their daughters, were often students. Musical gatherings provided a social

53 The minstrel boy comes from the fifth collection of The Irish melodies (1813); the air is named as The moreen. Silent, oh Moyle! (also known as The song of Fionnuala) is from the second collection (1808) with the air Arrah, my dear Eveleen.

54 All of these Celtic fantasias were published by Chappell in London. Osborne was twice-related through marriage to the Chappell family (through his brother-in-law and his second wife) and Chappell became his most frequent publisher.

55 See Revue et gazette musicale, 9 April 1843, where a fantasia on Scottish and Irish airs by Osborne is named as one of the works performed.

30 Una Hunt

outlet for the younger generation and perfecting skills on an instrument was believed to impart discipline and middle-class values as well as facilitat-ing social interaction between family members. At the salons, the hostess generally took charge by leading conversation and introducing her guests.56 In many cases, she also performed and took a keen interest in her daugh-ters’ musical education. Playing music or singing songs was not viewed as a frivolous pursuit at the salons. In the nineteenth century, the traditional hobby for girls of playing a keyboard instrument was subtly transformed into a social skill by which young ladies had the opportunity of shining in the salons and achieving a good match.57

In Paris, aristocratic and noted guests were received by their hosts with personal attention, a practice which was sometimes not apparent at similar gatherings in England. However, one writer in The Musical World described the proliferation of musical soirées towards the end of the season in Paris as overwhelming and disordered:

The Parisians seem to take a pride in leaving half their guests to accommodate them-selves as they can, outside the door. Inside the heat is overpowering. If a room will contain fifty persons, they invite three hundred! Happily one hundred … do not accept the invitation, but one hundred and fifty must set up their tents outside the door.58

As salons continued to multiply, a Parisian journalist in 1846 estimated that about 850 salons from the previous season had musical interludes substantial enough to be called private concerts. A similar development had taken place in England; one London performer indicated that he would usually appear at about three musical gatherings every night of the spring social calendar.59

As an entertainer for such events, Osborne was clearly sought-after. In 1838, he was named among those most appreciated at the salons, along

56 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 35.

57 Ibid., 30–2. 58 ‘The Winter in Paris’, The Musical World (7 June 1838), 103.59 Cited in Weber, Music and the Middle Class, 31. In England these gatherings were

known as ‘at homes’.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 31

with virtuosi such as Sigismund Thalberg (1812–1871), Jakob Rosenhain (1813–1894), and Theodor Doehler (1814–1856).60 There is relatively little information available on the music performed in the salon for two reasons. Firstly, private performances did not normally receive notice in musical periodicals, and secondly, domestic music was aimed primarily at women and generally ignored by the musical elite. As the piano played an increas-ingly central role at home, the market for sheet music expanded exponen-tially. Here, Osborne excelled by writing many successful pieces in a simple but engaging style, especially for the amateur. Osborne’s virtuoso pieces, such as the fantasias on national airs, were probably as popular with the ladies in the drawing room as less-demanding repertoire. It would seem hard to believe that these relatively difficult pieces were within the grasp of the myriads of young women who entertained themselves and guests at private soirees. The fascinating thing is that amateurs were keen to emulate the pyrotechnical displays of the virtuosi in the concert halls and they were prepared to ‘have a go’ at a difficult piece of music, even if their chances of mastering it were slight.

In addition to the more demanding repertoire, there was also music designed to sound as impressive as possible without placing huge tech-nical demands on the performer.61 One such piece by Osborne, a salon waltz called Isabella valse, was exactly the kind of piece that had universal appeal. Although it seems that the Isabella Valse appeared for the first time in London in 1845, it is likely that it dates from Osborne’s Paris years and may have been performed often by him in the salons. The salon waltz, a hybrid form much in vogue in the Parisian salon, was intended to be lis-tened to rather than danced. Osborne’s valse displays an infectious gaiety and elegance reminiscent of Weber’s Invitation to the dance (Aufforderung Zum Tanz, op. 65) as well as a marked Chopin influence. Chopin was, after all, the greatest exponent of the salon waltz in Paris.

60 ‘The Winter in Paris’, The Musical World (7 June 1838), 103–4.61 Nicholas Temperley, The Romantic Age: 1800–1914 (London: The Athlone Press,

1981), 121. Temperley quotes Barclay Squire’s adage concerning the preference of the amateur pianist for ‘a maximum of brilliancy combined with a minimum of difficulty.’

32 Una Hunt

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was another personal friend of Osborne’s during his years in Paris (a number of letters among Berlioz’s large correspondence testify to that fact) and Osborne often gave advice when the French composer was writing for the piano, as Berlioz had not learnt to play the instrument early in life. Apparently, Berlioz was not allowed to play the piano as his father feared he would augment by one the 40,000 celebrated pianists supposed to exist in France at that time.62 As critic for the Revue et gazette musicale, Berlioz spoke enthusiastically of Osborne’s concerts in Paris and described his compositions as having ‘le feu et la grace brillante de l’esprit Irlandais’ [the fire and sparkling grace of the Irish spirit].63 Their relationship was particularly close, as Berlioz often confided in Osborne, and at times they discussed some intimate issues. While Osborne would have liked to divulge the composer’s secrets after his death, Berlioz had not done so in his own account so the Irishman therefore felt it best, in his own words: ‘not [to] draw aside a veil which he has kept closed.’64 Undoubtedly, Berlioz was attracted to Osborne’s Irishness and had romantic notions about Ireland, its race and its culture; his particular admiration for Moore’s Irish Melodies is well-known and he was full of praise for the singing of Irish songs by Osborne’s sister, Bessie, who though an amateur had carved out a reputation for herself in Paris. Berlioz noted that there was always demand for Bessie to sing at social events, even when there were more famous singers present.65

The Irish-born actress Harriet Smithson (Henrietta Constance Smithson, 1800–1854) who married Berlioz in 1833 was possibly intro-duced to her future husband by Osborne. In one of his papers to the Musical Association, Osborne remarks how Shakespeare’s writings had a profound effect on Berlioz, even though he knew them only in a poor

62 Osborne, ‘Berlioz’, PMA (3 February 1879), 60–75; 62.63 Revue et gazette musicale, Paris (3 April 1836), 111 (my translation).64 Osborne, ‘Berlioz’, PMA, 60.65 A. W. Ganz, Berlioz in London (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 88.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 33

French translation. Berlioz attended a production of Hamlet in the French capital when Smithson played Ophelia and Osborne was a backstage helper. The production was a great success both among the public and in the press. Despite his lack of English, Berlioz was obsessed with Smithson’s dramatic genius which ignited his love.66

Harriet Smithson was much admired and sought after. Osborne recalls being at a public ball and parading up and down with Harriet on one arm and the great tragic actress Mlle George on the other. With comical atten-tion to detail, he describes looking like an urn with two handles delighting in the winks and nods he received. One gentleman loudly remarked ‘Look at that monopoliser of tragedy’.67 Berlioz eventually won Smithson’s heart and they married in the British Embassy chapel in Paris on 3 October 1833. Osborne was possibly present at the wedding and mentions how Berlioz had to make himself responsible for the debts of Smithson’s latest theatri-cal venture, leaving him with only £12, a loan from a friend, to begin their honeymoon. But marital bliss broke down a few years later, the situation complicated by the jealousy of Marie Recio who would eventually become Berlioz’s second wife.68 One evening after dinner, Osborne conversed with Berlioz on the subject advising that the only course of action was to break off relations with this new love. Much to Osborne’s surprise, Berlioz wrote Marie a valedictory letter and left it at her lodgings. However, the follow-ing day he changed his mind and, returning to the house, removed the letter and tore it up.69

There can be no doubt as to the closeness of their personal friendship. Osborne spoke touchingly of Berlioz’s final illness and death in his lecture to the Musical Association but refrained from discussing the composer’s works, claiming ‘men more competent than I […] are constantly review-ing them’.70

66 Osborne, ‘Berlioz’, PMA, 65. Initially, Smithson’s reaction was undecided and his letters remained unanswered.

67 Ibid.68 Ibid., 67.69 Osborne, ‘Berlioz’, PMA, 67.70 Osborne, ‘Berlioz’, PMA, 71.

34 Una Hunt

Osborne’s Marriage

On 18 August 1840, Osborne married Lucy South Adams at the British Embassy Chapel in Paris where Hector Berlioz had married Harriet Smithson seven years previously.71 Osborne’s younger sister Maria Dorinda married John Cramer Chappell, a member of the prominent music pub-lishing family, at the same venue in 1842.72 The family attachment to the chapel is noteworthy because almost two decades later his niece Isabella Hampton married the famous violinist Heinrich Wieniawski at the same church.73 It is not known how Osborne met his wife but her background was English and perhaps this influenced their subsequent decision to move to London within the next few years. Osborne’s career had reached a high level in Paris and it appears he was reluctant to leave the French capital as he kept up his house there until 1847 or 1848 and returned frequently for concerts.74 The sources are confused on this period of his life, offering differing stories as to when the household left Paris. Some say 1843 and others 1844, although the latter is more likely, as Catherine Hayes and her mother came to stay with Osborne and his wife for an extended period

71 See <http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/igi/old_individual_record.asp> accessed 9 March 2009.

72 1 September 1842 (reported in Limerick Chronicle, 10 September 1842). It has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that John Cramer Chappell with an address at George Street, Hanover Square, London was a member of the Chappell publishing family who also ran sister companies of piano manufacturing and concert agents. Chappell was Osborne’s most frequent publisher in London. John Cramer Chappell’s middle name must have come from the pianist and composer Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858) who was a founder partner in the publishing business, Cramer and Chappell.

73 Isabella Hampton’s marriage took place on 8 August 1860.74 James D. Brown and Stephen S. Stratton, British Musical Biography (London: William

Reeves, 1897), 304. Brown and Stratton suggest that Osborne settled in London in 1848 and not 1843 or 1844 as is stated in other sources.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 35

from October 1842 until March of 1844.75 Probably through a suggestion from Osborne it was decided that Catherine should go for training to Manuel Garcia who lived just a short distance from Osborne’s abode at Rue St Georges.76

La Pluie de Perles

In 1848, Paris was in the grip of revolution. This had a disastrous effect on artistic life. In July, Berlioz wrote: ‘[…] all the theatres [are] closed, all the artists ruined, all the professors idle […] poor pianists [are] playing sonatas in public squares’.77 Many musicians left Paris during the unrest; undoubt-edly this was one reason why Osborne gave up his Parisian home at that time. His most famous pupil, Charles Hallé, conductor and founder of the Manchester orchestra bearing his name, was one of the many who migrated to London in that year. Hallé wrote:

I have been here in London three weeks, striving hard to make a new position, and I hope I shall succeed; pupils I already have, although as yet they are not many. The competition is very keen, for, besides the native musicians, there are at present here – Thalberg, Chopin, Kalkbrenner, Pixis, Osborne, Prudent, Pillet, and a lot of other pianists besides myself who have all, through necessity, been driven to England, and we shall probably all end up by devouring one another.78

75 Basil Walsh states that Catherine Hayes set off for Milan towards the end of March 1844 just as the Osbornes departed for London (Walsh, Catherine Hayes, 42).

76 Walsh, Catherine Hayes, 32. Manuel Patricio Rodriguez Garcia (1805–1906) was the brother of Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot.

77 From a letter dated 26 July; cited in Jeffrey Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris 1828–1871 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 15.

78 C. E. Hallé and Marie Hallé, eds, Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé (London: Smith Elder and Co., 1896), 229.

36 Una Hunt

It must have seemed as if many of those 40,000 odd pianists to whom Berlioz’s father had alluded were now living in London! It is interesting to note that Hallé did not consider Osborne a ‘native’ musician in England, probably because of his long residency in Paris and the influences he responded to during that time. Osborne, by now a Francophile, brought with him from Paris a delicious piece of salon music that helped establish his reputation in London as a fashionable teacher.79 The year before the unrest, La pluie de perles [The Shower of Pearls] was published in Paris, where it received its first performance.80 The piece received an excellent review in Revue et gazette musicale which must have enhanced its selling power in France. When released in London a year later, it was said to have earned Osborne several thousand pounds. It then became one of the most popular and enduring pieces of the Victorian era, being widely available across Europe and the United States, and remaining in vogue for almost forty years.

The fame of the pluie de perles proved a double-edged sword for it came to define Osborne’s compositional achievements. Despite compos-ing chamber music of a more serious nature and even two operas,81 neither of which appears to have been performed, the pluie de perles was to haunt him for the rest of his life. An amusing anecdote recounted in his obituary in the Musical Times serves to demonstrate the work’s lasting popularity:

At a fashionable afternoon party, to which he came very late, [… Osborne] was invited to play […] and began the piece in question. To his surprise and indignation the whole audience burst out laughing; but he was easily appeased on learning that four other pianists had already performed the same composition.82

79 Legge, ‘Osborne, George Alexander’, DNB, xiv, 1184.80 Revue et gazette musicale (28 Mar. 1847), 107–8. The exact date of performance is

unknown. Robin Humphrey Legge states that Osborne had already published the piece before his move to London in 1844 although evidence of this earlier publica-tion has not been found. See Legge, ‘Osborne, George Alexander’, DNB, xiv, 1184.

81 The operas were named Sylvia and The Forest Maiden. 82 Obituary, The Musical Times (1 January 1894), 17.

George Alexander Osborne, Paris and the Pluie de Perles 37

No time was lost in capitalising on its success because La nouvelle pluie de perles was released a year after the first of the London editions of its prede-cessor. A performance followed at Osborne’s Matinée musicale in April of 1850, and it too achieved significant popularity although never eclipsing the success of the original piece.83

In his early professional life, Osborne certainly flourished as a pia-nist in Paris. However, the move to London can be seen as detrimental. In Britain, foreign musicians were generally held in greater esteem and Osborne would have been regarded as a provincial musician despite the enormous influence that his time in Paris exerted on his music and pia-nistic style. Furthermore, while his salon music was certainly popular and probably lucrative, this music was considered frivolous in more serious circles, where music of German origin dominated. And, as the nineteenth century progressed, transcriptions composed by virtuosi became increas-ingly criticised for lacking depth of expression. Yet, these transcriptions were a crucial display mechanism for the pianist-composer. In Osborne’s case, while his playing was usually favourably reviewed, his music was often criticised in the English press. Such contemporary opinions indicate his position as an outsider among the musical intelligentsia in England. Yet, Osborne’s music remains as a microcosm of what was popular in his time representing the kind of piano music most likely to have been heard in a middle- or upper-class household in Britain or France. As such, it serves as a vibrant illustration of domestic music making, as well as a reminder of the piano’s golden age in Paris.

83 The Musical World (13 April 1850), 227–8.

Joanne Burns

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore

Music, oh how faint, how weak,Language fades before thy spell!Why should Feeling ever speak,When thou cans’t breathe her soul so well1

Music played a pivotal role in the life and works of the Romantic Irish author and songster Thomas Moore. It was his first love and chief source of inspiration. When writing to the publisher of his song-books Irish Melodies in 1824, he averred that ‘[m]y great delight would be, if I could afford it, to confine myself wholly to Songs & Music, but there are so many calls on me besides, that I am obliged to labour a little at everything’.2 Labour ‘a little at everything’ Moore certainly did, producing an extensive body of work during his lifetime in various genres including songs, prose, poetry, plays, history, and biography. However, it was his musical output, and particu-larly the exceptionally popular ten book series Irish Melodies (1808–34) – in which Moore wrote and arranged lyrics for pre-existing airs – that would prove to be the most successful and enduring of his works. It was not only in the Irish Melodies that Moore put his innate musical talent to

1 From ‘On Music’, in the third number of The Irish Melodies (1810); Thomas Moore, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore. Collected by Himself. 10 vols (London: Longmans, 1840–41), Vol. 3, 279. Moore’s original sets of songs were published in ten numbers between 1808 and 1834.

2 Thomas Moore, The Letters of Thomas Moore, Vol.2, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 523.

40 Joanne Burns

good use; his oeuvre comprises a number of musical works, including the song-books National Airs (1818–27) and Sacred Songs (1816–24), several original compositions for his works ‘Melologue on National Music’ (1811), The Summer Fête (1831), and Evenings in Greece (1832). Moore also wrote extensively on the nature and power of music throughout both the vari-ous prefaces and advertisements that accompanied his works, and in his extensive letters and journals. These writings on music exhibit the extensive influence of contemporary musical, philosophical and historical works. Despite the recent renaissance in Moore studies, this is an area that has yet to be fully explored. However, this study will show the remarkable influ-ence of Rousseau on Moore’s musical outlook and its specific presence in the musical debates engaged in by Moore.

Thomas Moore was largely self-taught on the piano, and was a natu-rally gifted singer. He describes in his Memoirs how, after his failure to learn the harpsichord, it was discovered that he had ‘an agreeable voice and taste for singing; and in the sort of gay life we led (for my mother was fond of society), this talent of mine was frequently called into play to enliven our tea-parties and suppers’.3 Moore’s childhood home was a hub of regular musical activity, and he attributed these home perfor-mances, during which he would accompany himself at the piano, with giving him the skill to become ‘dependent on the instrument’, getting into the ‘lucky habit’, of never singing but to my own accompaniment at the pianoforte’.4 For Moore, music was principally a deeply emotional experience. In response to a letter from English composer William Linley, who wrote to Moore requesting his opinion on some of his own songs, Moore replied modestly:

3 Thomas Moore, Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. J. Russell, 8 vols (London: Longmans, 1853–6), vol. 1, 17–18.

4 Moore, Memoirs, vol. 1, 68.

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 41

my real knowledge of music is very limited, and though I feel it deeply, I am by no means entitled to take a critic’s station by either praising or blaming […] (though I own I am too much given to the sensual part of the music, and that its intellectual graces too often escape me).5

Describing his musical talent in terms of his distinctive ability to feel it over any formal musical capacity, was a claim that Moore would make throughout his life, that the sensual part of music, was the most important aspect. However, Moore did in fact, regularly engage with what he terms the ‘intellectual graces’ of music throughout his writings, in a manner similar to that found in treatises on music that Moore owned and read. Moore’s library, now housed in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, contains several philosophical and historical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on music.6 Such books on music aesthetics were printed in increasing numbers throughout the eighteenth century, being written by intellectuals who had a practical understanding and love of music. These eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophical enquiries that Moore studied were in effect a ‘science’ of music, and they often featured discussion of music’s power to move its listeners.7 For example, French composer and writer Michel-Paul-Guy-de Chabanon (1730–1792) in his De la musique consi-dérée en elle même et dans ses rapports avec, la parole, les langues, la poésie et le théâtre (1785), [On Music Considered Independently and in its Relations with Speech, Languages, Poetry and Theatre] outlined that ‘it is not necessary

5 Moore, Letters, vol. 2, 474. William Linley (1771–1838) was a composer and director of theatre music and the youngest of the famous Linley music family. He features regularly in Moore’s correspondence. For an instance in which Moore recalls Linley singing one of his songs, see Thomas Moore, The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 6 vols (London; Toronto: Associated UP, 1983), vol. 1, 55–6.

6 Moore’s library is housed in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin and includes a full catalogue of its contents. The library was donated to the Academy by Moore’s widow.

7 Peter le Huray and James Day, eds, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), xiv. Le Huray and Day point out that it was in 1752 that the term ‘aesthetics’ was coined. They also highlight that in England, the number of books printed on aesthetics and music from 1750 onwards increased dramatically (Music and Aesthetics, 1).

42 Joanne Burns

to know either theory or practice; it is not even necessary to appreciate a great many of its effects’ in order to understand its theoretical discussions of melody, harmony, and imitation in music.8 Moore’s library contains a heavily annotated copy of Chabanon’s influential text.9

Along with Chabanon’s work, Moore also owned a number of works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Although best known as the author of philosophic and literary works, Rousseau was also a practising musi-cian, and he continued to consider music, in one aspect or another, as his primary vocation and avocation throughout his life.10 Much of Moore’s musical outlook bears striking resemblance to Rousseau’s, almost mirror-ing Rousseau’s fascination with music, emotion, and the close connection between music and words. Both shared an intense love of the art and its potential for expression of feeling. Rousseau is the most frequently repre-sented author in Moore’s library which contains thirteen of his works in their original French versions.11 Whilst it is uncertain when Moore first encountered Rousseau’s writings, his admiration was life-long. His earliest reference to the author is in a letter to Lady Donegal in 1806, in which he quotes an anecdote from Rousseau’s 1782 autobiography The Confessions

8 Harry Robert Lyall, ‘A French Music Aesthetic of the Eighteenth Century: A Translation and Commentary on Michel Paul Gui De Chabanon’s Musique Considérée en Elle-même et Dans ses Rapports avec la Parole, les Langues, la Poésie, et le Theatre’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Texas University, 1975), 43. All English quotations from Chabanon’s work are Lyall’s translations.

9 Moore’s annotations of his copy of Chabanon’s Musique considérée, demonstrate his engagement with the textual arguments. These include ‘X’ markings and underlin-ing, and occasionally some notes. There are several texts in Moore’s library that are annotated in his hand, but rather astonishingly, these have not been transcribed. The Royal Irish Academy’s online catalogue allows a search in Moore’s library for works which contain annotations.

10 As John Scott has argued, Rousseau made a fundamental impact on the theory of music both during and after his time. See Scott, ‘Introduction’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ( John T. Scott ed. & trans.), Essay on the Origin of Language and Writings Related to Music (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), xiii.

11 Moore was fluent in French, which was typical at this time for educated men. French was part of the curriculum in Trinity College from 1776 onwards.

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 43

of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Moore owned two copies.12 Moore also quoted Rousseau in an epigraph to his poem ‘Love and Reason’ in his collection Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806).13 Moreover, it is interesting to note the similarity between Moore’s autobiography and that of Rousseau wherein the philosopher declares his ‘passion for music’, just as Moore would do.14

Moore owned a 1781 Geneva edition of the influential Dictionnaire de Musique, which was published in 1768 and was an immediate success.15 In this seminal work, Rousseau presented many of his central ideas regarding music and organised them in the form of an alphabetised, comprehensive list of articles on musical terms and subjects. In the work, he strove to align his judgements on musical practice with the new philosophy he had been developing since the 1750s.16 The section ‘Unity of Melody’ contains some of his defining arguments, such as the link between melody and sen-timent, that is, the significance of a single voice carrying the melody over the harmony that surrounds it to reach the listener’s emotions.17 In the section entitled ‘Opéra’, Rousseau once again affirms that music is ideal for the direct expression of feelings, which is the primary goal of art.18

12 For the letter, see Moore, Letters, vol. 1, 110. For the original Rousseau quotation, see Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (New York: Random House, n.d.), 31.

13 These poems were written during Moore’s time in America. The epitaph read: ‘Quand l’homme commence á raisonner, il cesse de sentir’ [When man begins to reason, he ceases to feel]. See Thomas Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 2, 215. In his 1818 popu-lar comic travel satire The Fudge Family in Paris, Biddy is impressed by her lover’s knowledge of ‘[a]ll the life and adventures of Jean Jacques Rousseau!’ See Thomas Moore, Poetical Works, 197. See Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1979), 80, for additional treatment of Moore’s derisive attitude to the situation of Rousseau and his lover Madame de Warens.

14 Rousseau, Confessions, 22.15 Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Musique (Genève, 1781).16 See Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention,

Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 47.17 See William Waring, trans., A Complete Dictionary of Music, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

(Dublin: J. Murray and Luke White, 1779), 454–7.18 Waring, Complete Dictionary, 289–301.

44 Joanne Burns

The supremacy of music in this regard was a belief that he would repeat-edly aver in his philosophy of music, and he makes the point again in the Dictionnaire in the segment on ‘Imitation’.19 He continuously linked music and emotion, claiming elsewhere in his Dissertation on Modern Music that ‘a beautiful composition can move the heart by flattering the ear’.20 For Moore and Rousseau, simplicity in music was fundamental. As Matthew Riley has noted, Rousseau believed the most simple and touching genre to be a romance narrative poem relating to a tragic love story and set to an archaic air; this was a formula he followed in many of his own compositions and arrangements. It was also one exemplified in many of Moore’s songs.21

Moore and Rousseau’s self-proclaimed capacity to ‘feel’ music is in line with contemporary Romantic views of music as the most sensitive art-form. As Berthold Hoeckner has argued, the expressiveness of music was one reason why Romantic aesthetics considered it the highest of all the arts.22 At the heart of Moore’s musical outlook is the belief that it is only through music that true expression of human emotion is achieved. Whilst music’s ability to move the listener is now a common notion, it was an idea that was only beginning to be seriously explored in the eighteenth century. Peter le Huray and James Day contend that if there was one point on which every eighteenth-century and Romantic writer was agreed, it was that music was the art that most immediately appealed to the emotions, and that its pre-eminence over all other arts was due to this very emotive-ness.23 Moore’s own song lyrics continuously present music as a higher power whose complexity defies complete understanding. Seeing music as much more powerful than language, Moore portrays it as the sole vehicle capable of truly conveying emotion.

This belief in the influence of music is reflected in Moore’s Irish Melodies, wherein thirty-seven of the one hundred and twenty-four songs

19 Ibid., 198–99.20 See Scott, ‘Introduction’, xvi.21 Riley, Musical Listening, 53–5.22 Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Schumann and Romantic Distance’, Journal of the American

Musicological Society 50.1 (1997), 55–132.23 Le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, xiii-xiv.

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 45

refer to music, song or instruments in some way. Moore’s songs largely celebrate music’s power as emotionally potent and nostalgic and familiar airs frequently serve as a reminder of happier times gone by. A typical example is ‘On Music’, (an excerpt forms the epigraph for this chapter) in which the memory of ‘pleasure’s dream’ similarly lives in ‘Music’s breath’.24 Matthew Campbell has claimed that in these lines, Moore ‘supplants’ lan-guage with music, even though it speaks true despite the ‘great betrayal’ at which his lyrics hint.25 In the first verse of the song, music serves as an emotional trigger:

When thro’ life unblest we rove,Losing all that made life dear,Should some notes we used to love,In days of boyhood, meet our ear,Oh! How welcome breathes the strain!Wakening thoughts that long have slept;Kindling former smiles againIn faded eyes that long have wept.26

‘On Music’ is a relatively unknown song from the Melodies in which Moore powerfully advocates music’s ability to conjure up memories of people and places. The visceral emotional display of weeping in the last line was another recurring leitmotif in Moore’s lyrics, and it was matched by the actual weeping that took place in response to his own famed performances of his songs in the drawing-room.27 The idea that music could move the

24 Moore, Poetical Works, 95.25 Matthew Campbell, Irish Poetry under the Union, 1801–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2013), 29.26 Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 3, 279.27 Throughout the nineteenth century, vivid descriptions in which witnesses attempted

to capture the emotional quality of Moore’s singing circulated in periodicals, letters, and diaries. Byron famously claimed ‘I know no greater treat than to hear him sing his own compositions; the powerful effect he gives to them, and the pathos of the tones of his voice, tend to produce an effect on my feelings that no other songs, or singer, ever could’. See Countess Marguerite Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest, J. Lovell Jr. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), 151. Indeed, one of

46 Joanne Burns

listener with an almost violent force was an idea that Rousseau and Moore would propagate time and again. Undoubtedly, their principal interest in music was its affective aspect.28 In the advertisement to the fourth number of the Melodies, Moore wrote that for those who have a ‘quick sensibility for this enchanting art [music], the sound has scarcely reached the ear, before the heart has rapidly translated it into sentiment’.29 In Britain, the age of sensibility reached its height in the mid-late-eighteenth century, bringing with it a keen awareness of the power of human feelings. The belief in the emotional intensity of music, as promoted by Moore and Rousseau, can be seen to parallel the renowned ability of the popular sentimental novel of the 1740s to 1770s to move its readers.

The influence of Rousseau’s musical arguments on Moore’s own ideas is further evident in Moore’s crucial 1810 ‘Prefatory Letter on Music’. The three and a half page letter was prefixed to the third number of the Irish Melodies (1810), and is the longest piece of writing in which Moore reflects on music. He does so specifically in relation to The Irish Melodies which, by this point, were extremely successful, and accounted for Moore’s rise to fame in both Ireland and England. In the ‘Prefatory Letter’, Moore explores a number of issues pertinent to his project of matching words to old Irish airs, including the linking of music and Irish history, the antiquity of Irish music, and issues of melody, harmony, and arrangement. The influence of contemporary musical debates is palpable from the outset, as Moore begins by boldly claiming that harmony is a much more modern invention in Irish music than may have been previously thought. He claims:

Indeed the irregular scale of the early Irish […] must have furnished but wild and refractory subjects to the harmonist. It was only when […] the powers of the harp

the factors which contributed to the immense popularity of Moore and his songs during the nineteenth century was his celebrated and charismatic performances in the drawing-rooms and salons of London’s literary and social elite.

28 For further detail concerning Rousseau’s argument on music’s ability ‘to transport you out of yourself ’, see Riley, Musical Listening, 49–50.

29 Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 4, 134.

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 47

were enlarged by additional strings, that our melodies took the sweet character which interests us at present […]30

Moore argues that the recent physical addition of strings to the harp was responsible for the development in Irish music, its new capacity to be graced with the ‘sweet character’ of harmony.31

The claim that harmony was secondary to melody was also a central argument in Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise [Letter on French Music] (1753), where he argued that a clear melodic line is musically more important than the harmony built around it. For Rousseau, the harmony should only serve to make the theme livelier; harmony should embellish melody, but not leave it smothered. Rousseau’s idea was that music arose from speech, which had the purpose of communicating feelings; from these sounds came music, primarily melody, through which music could achieve its primary function, which, in his view, was to express emotion.32 Moore contended likewise in the ‘Prefatory Letter’, claiming that it is a single melodic line that ‘most naturally expresses the language of feeling and passion’, and asserting that despite such ‘improvements’ as harmony, music still maintained its ‘native simplicity’.33 Regarding Stevenson’s use of melody and harmony, Moore again averred that although it is a single melodic line that ‘most naturally expresses the language of feeling and passion’, he finds that when a ‘favourite strain’ returns in a ‘harmonised shape’, it adds to the interest and attention of the listener and that every voice [i.e. each harmonised part of the music] is an air to itself that can be heard with pleasure ‘independent of the rest’.34

With those comments on harmony, Moore engages in contemporary debates regarding harmony as a modern construct and as an attack on

30 Ibid., 124.31 Moore is probably referring to the new gut strung harp which took over from the

wire strung harp at the beginning of the nineteenth century.32 Cited in Scott, Essay on the Origin, 318. For further information on Rousseau’s views

of melody and harmony, see Riley, Musical Listening, 47–62. 33 Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 4, 125.34 Ibid., vol. 4, 232–3.

48 Joanne Burns

‘natural’, melodically-oriented music. This was the subject of much dispute from the late eighteenth century onwards. There was a struggle for domi-nance during the final quarter of the eighteenth century, waged between the stylistic factions of the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’, with the movement of ancient music valuing ‘scientific’ elements of harmony and counterpoint. As the century came to a close, harmony superseded melody in perceived importance.35 From Rousseau’s works, and possibly from elsewhere, Moore would have been well aware of such ‘ancient’ music and the debates sur-rounding it. Contemporary arguments concerning melody and harmony also arose out of a larger discourse on music’s imitative properties. For musi-cians and writers of the eighteenth century, the degree to which music was or was not an imitative art, was fundamental, and closely bound to broader considerations that formed Enlightenment thinking.36 A frequent topic amongst philosophers on discussions of music and aesthetic issues was the Aristotelian doctrine of imitation as it applied to music. Figures such as Rousseau, James Beattie, Sir William Jones, Daniel Webb, Adam Smith, and Thomas Twining, were all agreed that music did not imitate the actual sounds of the material world. Rather, they looked instead to music’s power over the affections and its effects upon human beings.37

In an 1814 preface for a collection of his vocal works, Moore com-pared the straightforwardness of the modality of his songs, where he was content ‘to remain simply in the key in which I began, without wandering from home in search of discords and chromatics,’ with the simplicity of Rousseau’s story-telling:

35 See Ethna Williams, ‘Setting Words to Music: Rameau’s Nephew and the Way the Enlightenment Listened’, Reconstruction 9 (2011), 1–8, and Ian Taylor, Music in London and the Myth of Decline: From Haydn to the Philharmonic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 11.

36 See Brian Robins, Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 135.

37 For further discussion of this, see John Caldwell, The Oxford History of English Music (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 172. See also Jessica Quillin, Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 25.

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 49

Roussea [sic], who, though an excellent theorist in Music, had but little experience in the art of composition, very wisely, as well as tastefully, chose in his Devin du Village, a story of young and innocent lovers, whose sentiments required but few notes to express them, and were best told in those simple, unpretending airs, to which his tender and melancholy spirit gave birth.38

Moore had seen Rousseau’s opera performed in Paris in 1819, which, he confesses in his journal, was ‘rather dull’ due to its ‘extreme simplicity’.39 Moore may not have been an admirer of the work, but Rousseau’s opera was an overwhelming success, and his simple melodic approach in the work, along with the simplicity of the love story between shepherd Colin and shepherdess Colette, appealed to his audience and contemporaries. Rousseau had written about Le Devin as an exception to French music of the time, which he felt was overcomplicated, and he claimed that he wrote this piece as an attempt to put the idea of simple song into practice before he wrote about it.40 The simplicity of Moore’s songs was one of the major criticisms levied at them, both during his time and thereafter, despite the fact that their popularity largely lies in their straightforward and universal nature. Indeed, this letter demonstrates that Moore was all too aware of the power of simple melodic lines and lyrics, which was a ubiquitous concern of the current song market. The importance of simplicity in song-writing also featured heavily in contemporary theories of music. For example, Chabanon argued in his work that it is only in song that it is necessary – although sometimes considered ‘bizarre’ – to frequently repeat the same words in the same air, and that these repetitions heighten the pleasure that music procures.41 Moore brackets off a section in which Chabanon states

38 Thomas Moore, A Collection of the Vocal Music of Thomas Moore, (London: J. Power, Dublin: W. Power, 1814), n.p.

39 See Moore, Journal, vol. 1, 214. Moore used the melody of one of the songs, ‘Rousseau’s dream’, as the basis for his own song ‘Hark ‘tis the Breeze’, which appeared in the second number of his Sacred Songs collection (1824). See Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 4, 300.

40 See Riley, Musical Listening, 49.41 Lyall, ‘French Music’, 240.

50 Joanne Burns

that music should not be allied with ‘thoughts which are too profound or too reflective, for this would be to connect opposites’.42

Moore ends the ‘Prefatory Letter’ with a defence of his ‘ingenious coadjutor’, Sir John Stevenson, whose arrangements, he writes, have ‘been accused of having spoiled the simplicity of the airs, by the chromatic rich-ness of his symphonies, and the elaborate variety of his harmonies’.43 Moore draws on Haydn as a contemporary example, as he ‘has sported all the mazes of musical science in his arrangement of the simplest Scottish melodies’.44 Haydn had arranged various Scottish and Welsh folksongs for British pub-lishers (including William Napier, George Thomson, and William Whyte) beginning in 1791 until the end of his career in 1804. This popularity of national airs, which saw other European composers such as Beethoven adapt traditional tunes, thrived during the first half of the nineteenth century. The difference between composers such as Haydn and Stevenson, Moore contends, is that Stevenson ‘has brought a national feeling to this task, which it would be in vain to expect from a foreigner, however tasteful or judicious’, and ‘[t]hrough many of his own compositions we trace a vein of Irish sentiment, which points him out as peculiarly suited to catch the spirit of his country’s music’.45 Karen Tongson has argued that by making a claim for the national feeling a musician such as Stevenson inherently brings to any arranging or singing of his country’s music, Moore’s discourse on nationality is typically couched in terms of ‘sensitivity’ and ‘feeling’.46

Moore’s claims here bear striking resemblance to Rousseau’s arguments in the Dictionary of Music: that music must be understood foremost as a ‘moral or cultural phenomenon’.47 Rousseau uses the example of the rustic Alpine tune ‘Ranz-des-vaches’ which was forbidden in France since it caused Swiss troops ‘to melt in tears, desert, or die, so much would it arouse in them

42 Ibid., 252.43 Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 4, 231.44 Ibid., vol. 4, 231.45 Ibid., vol. 4, 231–2.46 See Karen Tongson, ‘The Cultural Transnationalism of Thomas Moore’s Irish

Melodies’, Repercussions 9.1 (2001), 5–31 (22).47 See Scott, ‘Introduction’, xxxviii.

The Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Thomas Moore 51

the desire to see their country again’.48 Rousseau notes that this effect does not happen to a foreigner, whereas in native people, it induces memories and ‘a thousand circumstances which, recounted by this Tune to those who hear it and recalling for them their country, their old pleasures, their youth, and all their ways of living, arouse in them a bitter pain for having lost all that’.49 The music therefore, Rousseau surmises, ‘does not precisely act as music, but as a memorative sign’.50 Here, Rousseau is arguing that music is not only a physical response, but an emotional and historical one if a song can affect a French man, but not someone else. Rousseau thus outlines the goal of national music, and points toward the powerful nature of national songs by Moore and his contemporaries.51 Rousseau argues this elsewhere in his 1781 Essay on the Origin of Languages, in which he contends that the sounds of a melody ‘do not act on us solely as sounds, but as signs of our affections, of our feelings; it is in this way that they excite in us the emotions they express and the image of which we recognise in them’.52 Pondering as to why sounds that move a Frenchman and yet might mean nothing to a ‘Carib’, or ‘barbarians’, Rousseau attributes this to nationality, stating that ‘Italian tunes are needed for the Italian, for the Turk, Turkish tunes would be needed […] each is affected only by accents that are familiar to

48 Ibid., xxxviii.49 See Scott, Essay on the Origin, 44550 Ibid., 445.51 This was a common view of music in this period, Walter Scott for example, writes

in Rob Roy (1817), that ‘the effect of music arises [. . .] from association, and sounds which might jar the nerves of a Londoner or Parisian, bring back to the Highlander his lofty mountain, wild lake, and the deeds of his fathers’. Cited in Murray Pittock, ‘Introduction: What is Scottish Romanticism?’, The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism, ed. Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011), 1–12 (8). The song ‘ranz-des-vaches’ was commonly discussed by a number of musicians and phi-losophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Franz Liszt, for instance, argues against Rousseau’s reading of it in a preface to the Album d’un voyageur, Années de pélerinage (1842); see Le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 539. Moore also wrote in his journal that during his time in Paris he bought a book about the song. See Moore, Journal, vol. 1, 217–18.

52 Scott, Essay on the Origin, 323.

52 Joanne Burns

him’.53 Rousseau’s influence on Moore is apparent here. Matthew Campbell has contended that Moore promoted ‘just such a version of the psychic, ‘memorative’ power of national music’.54

While writers such as Adrian Paterson and Karen Tongson have made brief reference to Moore-Rousseau connections, as has Gerry Smyth, the full extent of Rousseau’s influence on Moore has been overlooked.55 Tongson, for example, claims that she is ‘not suggesting that Moore was directly responding to Rousseau’, despite the fact that Moore’s power-ful musical outlook reflects Rousseau’s.56 Adrian Paterson intriguingly argues that Rousseau’s musical ideas influenced the very content of The Irish Melodies, as they illustrate Rousseau’s thought on music and melodies’ power.57 However, Rousseau’s influence on Moore is nowhere more explic-itly reflected than in the prefatory material in which Moore wrote about music’s powerful properties. Whilst most commentators and biographers of Moore have aptly highlighted his natural musical talent and ability, this knowledge ran much deeper than merely a casual familiarity with the piano and the possession of a natural singing voice. Moore was a relatively skilled amateur musician who also had a wide knowledge of contemporary musi-cal debates. In particular, Moore had advanced and detailed knowledge of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French theoretical writings on the art form. Indubitably, that influenced his musical ideals to a larger degree than has been accounted for up to now.

53 Ibid., Essay on the Origin, 323.54 See Matthew Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s “Wild Song”’, Bullán 4.2 (1999/2000),

83–103 (92).55 See Adrian Paterson, ‘Drawing Breath: The Origins of Moore’s Irish Melodies’, in Jim

Kelly, ed., Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 125–40, Tongson, ‘Cultural Transnationalism’, and Gerry Smyth, Music in Irish Cultural History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).

56 Tongson, ‘Cultural Transnationalism’, 17.57 Paterson, ‘Drawing Breath’, 133.

David Mooney

‘De la musique avant toute chose’: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry

In his seminal book of 1899 entitled The Symbolist Movement in Literature, author Arthur Symons writes of his friend: ‘With Verlaine the sense of hearing and the sense of sight are almost interchangeable. He paints with sound and his line and atmosphere become music’.1 Thus the ‘prince of poets’ belongs not only to the realms of literature but also to the French art song or mélodie as it is known. The poetry of Verlaine plays an impor-tant role in the history of French art song. The most celebrated settings by Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel represent only a small percentage of the vast corpus of songs, which were composed between the period of the poet’s lifetime and the present day. The image-laden works, particularly from Verlaine’s earlier collections, have continued to resonate with composers to this day, including popular-genre artists such as the singer/songwriter, Léo Ferré. To date, however, the composer Lady Irène Dean Paul (1879–1932), known professionally as Poldowski, is the most prolific creator of musical settings of Verlaine’s poetry. Her twenty-two settings are derived from a variety of his collections. The name Poldowski conceals what is a particularly rich and interesting Franco-Irish connection.

Born in Brussels in 1879, Irène Régine Wieniawska was youngest daughter of the celebrated violinist and composer, Henryk Wieniawski and his Irish wife, Isabella Hampton. She never knew her famous father due to his untimely death in 1880 yet, ironically, she was the only member of the Wieniawski family to follow in her father’s footsteps as a classical musi-cian. She began composing at an early age but it was not until she moved

1 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, repr. 1958), 48.

54 David Mooney

to London sometime around 1896 that her compositions became known. Her first songs with piano accompaniment were published by Chappell in London in 1900. In 1901 she married a baronet, Sir Aubrey Dean Paul and together they had three children, the eldest of whom died in infancy. In 1904, she travelled to Paris to study with the composers André Gédalge and Vincent d’Indy, though no details of the actual study are known. Her French songs, mostly settings of the poetry of Verlaine, were published in Paris and London from 1911 onwards. After a short period of inactivity which coincided with the First World War, she made a determined effort to revitalise her career, both as a performer and a composer. Having separated from her husband, who had lost the family fortune through bad invest-ments, she undertook an extended tour of the East coast of the United States in 1921–22 which brought her much international acclaim and some badly-needed income. In the 1920s, works for piano, violin and clarinet together with some more songs were published, but many of her large-scale works remained unpublished despite well-received public performances. The scores of these compositions are presumed lost. An accomplished con-cert pianist, Poldowski often performed her own music, including at several appearances in the London Promenade Concerts under Sir Henry Wood.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Poldowski was a well-known figure in artistic circles in London, Brussels, Paris and New York. In addition to her musical career, she organised concerts in London and New York under the title ‘Concerts internationaux de la libre ésthe-tique’2. A colourful figure, she was no stranger to controversy and her creative energies yielded both artistic success and personal disappoint-ment. In addition to undeniable musical talents, she was a gifted linguist: she considered French to be her first language and her children grew up in a French-speaking household. In her later years, she was dogged by ill-health and died at the age of fifty-three. She had remained estranged from

2 The title refers to the group of artists known as ‘La libre ésthetique’, active in Brussels in the early years of the twentieth century. Poldowski was a close friend of Octave Maus, one of the founders of the group and she participated in several concerts under their banner in Brussels.

‘De la musique avant toute chose’: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry 55

her husband and was survived by him and her son Brian, together with her daughter, the actress Brenda Dean Paul, who was a central member of the so-called ‘bright young things’.3 After Poldowski’s death in 1932, like many other women composers, her works were quickly forgotten but for-tunately, in recent years, in conjunction with a general revival of women’s music, her music is enjoying renewed popularity.

Paul Verlaine is chiefly associated with the Symbolist movement although his works span a variety of genres and styles, ranging from his initial fascination with the Parnassian movement to the bad-tempered invective of a poverty-stricken alcoholic in his final years. He is also rec-ognised as one of the ‘poètes maudits’ [cursed poets] who embodied the ideals of fin-de-siècle French literature. Verlaine is also associated with the Decadence movement, a term which was sometimes considered to be interchangeable with Symbolism.4 Verlaine himself proclaimed,

I love the word decadence, all sparkling in purple and gold. I contest, of course, any harmful interpretation of it […] the word implies, on the contrary, the refined notions of extreme civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense voluptuous-ness […] it is the art of dying in beauty.5

Important milestones in Verlaine’s colourful life can be traced through his works from his marriage to Mathilde Mauté and his elopement with fellow poet Rimbaud, to his imprisonment and subsequent religious conversion. His earlier collections of poems remain his most loved and appreciated. They are characterised by rich symbolism and imagery, explorations of the senses and an inherent musicality. It is hardly surprising that these qualities proved irresistible to composers such as Poldowski.

Although it is not possible to accurately date Poldowski’s individual works, it would appear that most, if not all, of the Verlaine songs were written before the First World War. The settings that were published in

3 The ‘Bright Young Things’ was the name used by British print media in the 1920s to describe a group of young aristocrats and artists who lived a hedonistic lifestyle in London, being especially famous for their themed parties.

4 Pamela Genova, Symbolist Journals (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 83.5 Genova, 82.

56 David Mooney

the 1920s bear the hallmarks of her early style and it is known that in those years she was beginning to take an interest in other poets such as William Blake and Laurent de Tailhade. A number of the Verlaine settings have been lost and indeed the most recent discovery, a setting of ‘Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été’, was found in a shoe-box under the floorboards of a house in Normandy!6

It is unlikely that the poet and composer crossed paths: Verlaine died in 1896 and at that time Poldowski was only seventeen years old and had just moved to London with her mother and sisters. It is most probable that Poldowski discovered Verlaine through settings by Fauré and Debussy which she had performed. It is also possible that as a young girl growing up in Brussels, Poldowski would have been acquainted with stories of Verlaine’s escapades in Belgium and indeed aware of his Belgian-inspired collections. Concert programmes reveal that Poldowski also performed Verlaine settings by other composers, sometimes sharing the stage with her husband, who was an amateur tenor.

Interestingly, Poldowski often participated in recitals of Verlaine’s works which included recitations of his poetry. It appears that these recit-als were designed for her tour of the Eastern United States in 1921–22. On that trip she was accompanied by her companion/lover Cecile Sartoris. Poldowski’s good friend, Noel Coward, provides a tongue-in-cheek glimpse of these events.

Irene Dean Paul and Cecile sometimes made a little money by giving Verlaine recitals in the homes of the wealthy. Irene had exquisitely set to music many of the poems and sang them in her husky, attractive ‘musician’s voice’. Cecile recited in a rhythmic monotone, her mouth twisted a little at one corner and her eyes, apparently, far away, gazing on enchanted woods and white moons.7

However, apart from the songs, the most valuable evidence of Poldowski’s appreciation for Verlaine, is to be found in a short essay she published in

6 Thanks to Frederic Gausse who discovered this manuscript while researching the Franco-Belgian pianist and pedagogue, Lazare Levy, a friend of Poldowski.

7 Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995), 95.

‘De la musique avant toute chose’: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry 57

1922.8 Simply-entitled, ‘Paul Verlaine’, the essay explores the composer’s relationship with the arts in general, and elects Verlaine as the ideal poet who represents a fusion of music, painting and philosophy. On Verlaine’s use of language, Poldowski’s opinion is:

the sensuous beauty of Verlaine’s language, his intimacy and simplicity, have made new landscapes for me. I look at them from the windows of trains: trees, water, shadows have always been there but the arrangement of them is his. In this he is a painter.

She writes, ‘he has that terrible but wonderful quality of intimacy and simplicity which only a prodigious nature possesses. Probably no poet has ever been so completely and disarmingly humane’. She makes explicit references to three of her settings, charmingly personifying the poet within them as they revisit the scenes of the poems together. She adds ‘ …he takes me to some fantastic palace and there we watch humanity and laugh until we cry’. Verlaine, she says ‘is of the mob and of the Gods’.

Indeed, the parallels between their lives and personalities are note-worthy. This feeling of kindred sprits could be interpreted as being at the core of the relationship. Poldowski’s own artistic and human struggles are mirrored in the life of Verlaine. Artistic temperaments, inability to learn from life’s mistakes, failed marriages, experimentation with drugs, dalli-ances with same-sex relationships, conversion to Catholicism, severe finan-cial problems and long-term illness – all bind these two talented beings. Perhaps it was inevitable that Poldowski should endeavour to create so many settings of Verlaine’s lines.

For composers, one of the key attractions of Verlaine’s poetry is its intrinsic musical qualities, both overt and oblique. Musical metaphors and imagery abound in the earlier collections. The musician is lured into the work by musical titles: ‘Chansons pour Elle’, ‘La bonne chanson’, ‘Romances sans paroles’, ‘Ariettes oubliées’. Less obvious to the casual reader is the use of organic musical devices: rhymes, rhythms, cadences, even actual note-names. What is most striking is that Verlaine’s work provided late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers with material for the

8 Irène Dean Paul, ‘Paul Verlaine’, Music and Letters, Vol. 3 no.3, (1922), 260.

58 David Mooney

development of an emerging genre of intrinsically French music that might serve to stem the tide of Germanic and Italianate influences.

Verlaine wrote ‘Art poétique’ in 1874 whist serving a prison sentence in Belgium and it constitutes an explication of the guiding principles of his early works and embodies his central theory on his creative art and the importance of music in poetry. Verlaine’s primary concern for musico-poetic synthesis is realised in the proclamation, ‘de la musique avant toute chose’ and the preference for the asymmetrical line of the impair metre. This asymmetrical, odd-syllabled line, usually known as the vers impair, was favoured by many of Verlaine’s contemporaries instead of the typical, even-numbered lines of six or twelve syllables. According to Verlaine, the irregular number of syllables in the line enhances the musical qualities of poetry because the poetic cadences remain unpredictable and a greater fluidity of movement is achieved. David Hillery suggests that the effect of the uneven rhythm of the impair metre promotes a lack of substance and projects a feeling of what Verlaine describes as ‘vagueness and solubility’.9 Just as rhythm is to be rendered more supple by the avoidance of regularity, so too is the tone of the poetic language to remain imprecise through the use of grey backgrounds. In the second stanza of ‘Art poétique’, Verlaine states that vagueness and precision are joined in the ‘chanson grise’ [grey song]. The avoidance of eloquence is also advised by Verlaine – ‘take elo-quence and wring its neck!’10 – and his preferred emphasis is for the merits of nuance. It is therefore interesting that two of the most musical collections of poetry by Verlaine, Fêtes galantes and Romances sans paroles, disclose a marked preference of the impair metre. Perhaps it was inevitable that these two collections should be the ones most frequently set to music.

Writing in 1919 critic, Georges Jean-Aubry singles out Verlaine in a discussion on music and poetry and posits that the poet was not concerned here with the music of verse but with the very nature of music. He states:

9 David Hillery, Music and Poetry in France from Baudelaire to Mallarmé (Bern: Peter Lang, 1980), 50.

10 Jacques Borel, ed., Paul Verlaine: Oeuvres poètiques complètes (Paris : Gallimard, 1962), 326.

‘De la musique avant toute chose’: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry 59

‘the writing of Verlaine is the same essential quality as music and infinitely closer to that art than to literature’.11

Of the twenty-two extant Poldowski settings of Verlaine, almost half of them are drawn from Fêtes galantes, one of Verlaine’s better-known col-lections, wherein the poems are based on scenes influenced by the paint-ings of Antoine Watteau and Jules-Honoré Fragonard. Collections that were traditionally more popular, such as La bonne chanson and Ariettes oubliées, the ones preferred by Fauré and Debussy respectively, are not so well represented. Although Poldowski selected poems that had already been treated by Fauré and Debussy, she may have been deliberately avoiding comparisons. It would certainly appear that Fêtes galantes holds a certain fascination for her, indeed as it also did for Debussy who set eight poems from this particular collection. However, there is a wide variety of subject matter in her choices but as the list below demonstrates, there is no par-ticular pattern to her selection process.

Poetry collection Setting by Poldowski

Paysages tristes Crépescule du soir mystiqueFêtes galantes Cortège, Fantoches, Cythère, Le faune, Mandoline, A Clymène,

Colombine, En sourdine, Sur l’herbeLa bonne chanson La lune blanche, L’attente, Donc, ca sera par un clair jourAriettes oubliées Dans l’interminable ennuie de la plaine, L’ombre des arbres Paysages belges BruxellesAquarelles Spleen, Dansons la gigue, A Poor Young ShepherdSagesse Dimanche d’avrilJadis et Naguère CirconspectionParallelèment Impression fausse

It is clear from essays, articles and concert reviews of the period that the critical reception of Poldowski as a composer was strongly identified with Verlaine. Indeed, the success of these settings helped to cement her repu-tation as a composer, a difficult enough task for a woman composer in the early years of the twentieth century. By selecting to set Verlaine, she

11 Georges Jean-Aubry, French Music of Today (translated E.Evans) (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1919), 191

60 David Mooney

immediately placed herself and her work at the mercy of critics, due to the fact that the songs by Fauré, Debussy and other French composers were gaining prominence among English audiences.

In 1912, a short article appeared in the Belgian Symbolist periodical, L’art moderne, in which the critic Octave Maus eulogised four of Poldowski’s Verlaine settings:

Ces mélodies ne tarderont pas à se répandre, car la personalité qu’elles révèlent, l’ins-piration mélodique dont elles sont issues, et par-dessus tout, leur exacte adaptation au texte poétique leur feront aimer de tous […] il y a dans l’oeuvre de Poldowski de la musique. […] C’est ce qui leur assure, parmi tant de productions éphémères […] un avenir certain.12

The French critic Georges Jean–Aubry wrote in 1918,

I heard Jane Bathori sing some Verlaine poems set to music, the composer of which I did not know. These melodies had an individual and personal charm. In those days we were no longer satisfied with inferior settings; Fauré, Debussy, Charles Bordes and Ravel had made us very particular in the matter of translating, in terms of music, this most musical of contemporary poets, […] (but) the songs which I had just heard were quite original. They proved, on the composer’s part, a deep and subtle penetra-tion into the general mood as well as the smallest detail of the poetry. The music was elegant yet free from mannerism, modern yet unaffected and indicated a refined, sensitive nature with which I desired to become acquainted.13

In his short essay on Poldowski’s songs published in 1922, Watson Lyle comments on the appeal of the Verlaine settings:

In her work of this genre the composer shows an understanding of the underly-ing broadly human view, as well as an appreciation of the irony or malice that is so

12 Octave Maus, ‘Quatre melodies de Poldowski’ L’art moderne (Sept.1913), 308. These songs will soon be known far and wide because the personality they reveal together with their melodic inspiration, and above all, their sincere adaptation of the text, will make them loved by all … at the heart of the work of Poldowski, is found ‘de la musique’. What is certain is that amongst the plethora of ephemeral offerings, […] this work is guaranteed a future. (My translation).

13 Georges Jean-Aubry, ‘Poldowski’, The Chesterian, XIII (1918), 195.

‘De la musique avant toute chose’: Poldowski’s Settings of Verlaine’s Poetry 61

frequently the surface impression created by the words. She may transform a cold sneer into a humorous fancy by the warmth of her art; and her work reveals an inti-mate comprehension of human emotions. One finds them all, from the ripple of a mild amusement to the surging agony of a deep sorrow, with swift revulsions from an intense ennui to a condition of rapturous joy.14

Writing in 1923, the American socialite and writer Mary Hoyt Wiborg opines:

Poldowski has portrayed the poetic phantasies of Verlaine throughout her composi-tions with utter subtlety and sincerity whom she approached not only with a passion-ate admiration throughout her music, but with a kind of touching and well-merited devotion and rare understanding. It is this genuine quality of humor and pathos that gives her work such appeal.15

She goes on to add, ‘her setting of Verlaine’s poems have placed her talent on an equal footing with the best of the modern composers of song, such as Debussy, Chausson and Ravel, to whom she is often likened’.

Following Poldowski’s death from pneumonia in 1932, Georges Jean-Aubry wrote an obituary in which he summed up this remarkably fruitful meeting of minds:

The settings of Verlaine poems bear comparison with the best musicians today which is no insignificant feat: Cythère, Cortège, Colombine, Impression fausse, L’Attente, poems of such varied character, have received an extraordinarily faithful interpretation at the hands of Poldowski. It is not easy to set these poems to music without spoiling them, poems which are only apparently simple and whose everyday language is yet replete with rare and sustained sonority. A slave to no fashion, guided entirely by her musical nature and her feeling for the poem, she was capable of constantly vary-ing expression, and discovered means which exactly suited each mental picture and every shade of emotion. And all this with such musical discretion, such a sense of proper values, with a manner of shielding herself, as it were, behind the poem was

14 Watson Lyle, ‘Mélodies de Poldowski’, Sackbut, III, (1922), 143.15 Mary Hoyt Wiborg, ‘Notes on Ultra-modern Composers’, Arts and Decoration, XXII

(1924), 66.

62 David Mooney

to make Poldowski one of the best song writers of the present time and probably the best woman composer of today in this line.16

Poldowski’s debt to Verlaine cannot be underestimated. Her untimely death cut short what might well have been a considerable compositional and performance career. An examination of her musical legacy proves that despite the success of some orchestral works and her Sonata for Violin and Pianoforte during her lifetime, she is chiefly remembered as a composer of songs, more especially as a composer of French songs. Apart from two set-tings by Victor Hugo, Albert Samain and Laurent de Tailhade respectively, other poets would appear to be represented by single offerings only and their number includes Jean Dominique, Jean Moréas, Paul Fort, Maurice Maeterlinck, Adolphe Retté and Anatole Le Braz. It is both fortunate and fortuitous that the aforementioned revival of music by women composers has resulted in a rediscovery of Poldowski. Indeed, just as the composer herself performed recitals dedicated to Verlaine during her lifetime, per-formers today frequently elect to programme entire recitals of Verlaine settings, a tribute perhaps to the timelessness and enduring appeal of this particular artistic synergy but also and deservedly, with due recognition of the remarkable contribution to this corpus by the talented, partly-Irish Irène Dean Paul.

16 Georges Jean-Aubry, ‘Poldowski’, The Chesterian, XIII (1932), 136.

Part II

Operatic Engagements

Eamon Maher

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime

The Irish writer Kate O’Brien (1897–1974) is a significant literary figure of the 1930s, 40s and 50s in particular, decades during which she produced such classic novels as Without My Cloak (1931), The Ante-Room (1934), Mary Lavelle (1936), and The Land of Spices (1943). She also wrote plays and short fiction and was highly regarded as a travel writer. Music was a constant in O’Brien’s life and this emerges very clearly in her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958), which she had originally intended to entitle My Redeemer Liveth, after the aria from Handel’s Messiah. While this chapter will concen-trate on As Music and Splendour, it will also dwell briefly on The Ante-Room and The Land of Spices, both works wherein music plays a significant role.

Born on 3 December 1897, the seventh child of a comfortable Limerick bourgeois family, O’Brien was educated from an early age by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, a French order of nuns to whom she felt greatly indebted and who are evoked in the most wistful and laudatory manner in The Land of Spices. Éibhear Walshe notes how O’Brien’s educators had to be politically astute to survive the religious fanaticism that dominated the writer’s youth:

The nuns at Laurel Hill, the ‘French’ convent, had to tread a very careful line in rela-tion to this religious extremism and also in relation to the emergent cultural nation-alism of Ireland in the early twentieth century. Ireland was still part of the British empire and the nuns were educating the daughters of the Limerick bourgeoisie to be European and Catholic ladies rather than young Irish women.1

1 Eibhear Walshe, Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 15.

66 Eamon Maher

The fruits of their efforts are apparent in the way in which O’Brien, one of their more famous past students, always felt herself to have more in common with the liberal form of Catholicism she experienced in continental Europe than with its obsessive, inward-looking Irish equivalent. O’Brien’s love of music, and of France, clearly owes a lot also to her education and may have influenced her decision to read French and English in UCD, then based in Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin.2 O’Brien’s arrival in Dublin was in the autumn of 1916, a time of great tumult following the suppression of the Easter Rising earlier in the same year. There was also excitement in the lecture halls: Roger Chauviré, her French Professor, left an indelible mark on the bright, precocious young woman who listened, fascinated, to his lectures on the great French writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Music was a constant in O’Brien’s life and work. Prior to writing As Music and Splendour (1958), music featured in The Ante-Room, a story that relates the terminal illness of Teresa Mulqueen, the matriarch of the pros-perous Catholic family living in the luxurious Roseholm residence near Mellick, O’Brien’s fictional Limerick. As her family gather about her, her imminent death is a cause of great sadness to her husband, Danny, and to her three children, Agnes, Marie-Rose and Reggie. Agnes has other torments in her life, most notably the illicit love she feels for her sister Marie-Rose’s husband, Vincent. As a devout Catholic and a loyal sister, Agnes knows she will have to put an end to the feelings she harbours for Vincent. The family devotion to music looms large: they often spend time singing and play-ing music in the drawing room of Roseholm. On one particular occasion, Marie-Rose gives an impassioned performance of Schumann’s Widmung [Dedication] a tribute to the composer’s new bride, Clara Wieck. The song expresses Schumann’s deep feelings of love and devotion, his frustration and suffering during periods of separation, and finally his hopes and fears for their future together. We are told that Marie-Rose’s ‘amateurish voice was high and pure. She loved the song, and after the first quiver of shyness was

2 It is most probable that her studies took place in the very building in which the first version of this paper was delivered (now the National Concert Hall, Dublin) during the 10th annual conference of AFIS in 2014.

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 67

at ease in it, singing it swiftly, hungrily …’3 Listening to her rendition, Agnes senses why her sister had selected this particular song: it was a nostalgic recollection of ‘a free and happy past’.4 Even more importantly, the song encapsulates the special relationship that exists between the two sisters, something that is well captured by O’Brien:

Marie-Rose, singing, wondered at herself with faint irony, and yet knew that out of some crazy loneliness she was singing to her sister, in denial of her own present life of contempt and irritation, and to praise that which could never be again, that harmony of innocence and irresponsibility in which Agnes and she had flowered, their spirits nurturing each other. She was singing to Agnes that she was her soul, her peace and quiet, but that the years they had shared were now, she saw with fear, her earthly portion of these things.5

After such a declaration of sisterly love, Agnes knows that there can be no possible future between Vincent and herself, this same Vincent who is no longer in love with Marie-Rose, who spurns her demonstrations of affection, whose indifference makes his beautiful wife despondent as she recounts in discussing her marital problems with Agnes. Marie-Rose, in a sense, lives through the song as much as she sings it and Kate O’Brien demonstrates her appreciation of music in choosing Schumann’s wistful and atmospheric song as the vehicle for expressing these emotions. The impact it has on others in the room is also revealing. Dr William Curran, hopelessly in love with Agnes, has the following reaction to the song’s movement:

An excellently constructed expression of a mighty feeling, yes – and for the man who had made it the making was the thing – justifying the pains and confusions it came from. But if one would never have anything to say, what point in standing thus to listen? If there were no end, no way of outlet, no given means of saying in our own terms this that Schumann said – oh, God, the young man raged, if I am too commonplace for what she [Agnes] makes me feel, if I am neither to have her

3 Kate O’Brien, The Ante-Room (London: Virago, 1988), 145. All subsequent refer-ences will be cited as O’Brien, The Ante-Room.

4 O’Brien, The Ante-Room, 145.5 Ibid., 145–6.

68 Eamon Maher

nor let her be, if having her I am forever afraid of my mad luck, or losing her, my life is turned to deadliness …6

Moments later, looking at Agnes and Vincent, Curran realises with a start that the two are in love.

Music’s capacity to convey sensations and passions, to unravel those innermost feelings and give them poignant expression, all this is subtly captured in these pages. Each person listening to Marie-Rose has a differ-ent reaction to Schumann’s composition. In its own way, the group is quite sophisticated and cultured. Curran is well-read and has travelled widely. One of the things that attract him most to Agnes is her robust, independ-ent character, her ability to speak with confidence on many topics. When an English specialist, Sir Godfrey Bartlett-Crowe, comes to Roseholm to examine Teresa Mulqueen, he is amazed to find two confident, beautiful, intelligent daughters ‘in the dark interior of Ireland’.7 He is pleasantly surprised at the good cellar and table provided in Roseholm and the obvi-ous good breeding of the household. He is predisposed to encountering ‘indigenous drolleries’ and is particularly interested in meeting some native ‘colleens’, whom he envisages as being ‘shy and wild, no doubt – perhaps even barefoot – and in need of masterly coaxing’.8 Lively, intelligent conversation, an aptitude for music and the arts, an in-depth knowledge of history, all these things force him to re-assess his position:

He began to perceive that, contrary to his expectation, he would need skill if he was to get the true essence of this company in which he found himself – and that even then it would very likely evade him.9

When considering the evolution of an educated Catholic middle class in Ireland, the role of the religious orders in Irish education must be recognised as influential in several aspects. O’Brien was fortunate to be educated by a French order who, like the Compagnie de la Sainte Famille in The Land

6 Ibid., 147–8.7 Ibid., 201.8 Ibid., 203.9 Ibid., 204.

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 69

of Spices, tried to instil ‘la pudeur et la politesse’ [modesty and courtesy] in the children under their care and music was an integral part of the girls’ education. One of the highlights of the year was the school concert, where musical performance, recitations, songs and extracts from plays formed the basis of the entertainment provided. O’Brien captured the atmosphere well in the following passage:

One of the anomalies about the annual Chaplain’s Concert was that, whereas, lis-tening to Mother Mary Andrew’s threats at rehearsal, and appraising the tension in all performers, one might think that a hitch was a major offence, deserving a mark for conduct perhaps – yet, on the night it was almost de rigueur that a few things should go wrong, and any girl who broke down in a song, knocked a wig askew, or got outright hysterics during a big scene, became at once a heroine with a high entertain-ment value, raising a most gratifying laugh from a rather nervous audience, breaking the ice, and as a rule being let off Mary Andrew’s wrath at the end of the day.10

While far from faultless – some of the performances being a lot less suc-cessful than others – the school concert provided a forum where musical and artistic accomplishments could be shared with an appreciative audi-ence. Apart from the nuns and other students, the audience consisted of diocesan priests and various representatives of local religious orders such as the Jesuits. It is clear that these people were not shy about sharing their own talents in the course of the evening, with many of them giving rendi-tions of their musical favourites. The Reverend Mother ‘marvelled often at the self-control of the children, ranged along the walls of the salle’ and thought how wonderful it was that they could mount such a wide-ranging concert with renditions in various languages and ‘on every musical instru-ment which was taught in the school’.11 What emerges from the accounts of events such as this is the appreciation of the arts cultivated in secondary schools such as the one Kate O’Brien herself attended. She was exposed to culture in all its forms and musical knowledge and accomplishment were seen as de rigueur for any young woman with hopes of making her mark in the world outside the convent walls. Her education thus provided the

10 Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices (London: Virago, 2000), 165.11 O’Brien, The Land of Spices, 167.

70 Eamon Maher

writer with a great love and understanding of music, both of which are evident throughout her life, and which are revealed to best advantage in her last novel.

It is clear when reading As Music and Splendour that O’Brien was totally comfortable in her evocation of how two young Irish girls, Rose and Clare, from modest backgrounds in the West of Ireland, end up having highly successful careers as opera singers in Italy. Their training begins in the convent of the Rue des Lauriers in Paris, where they come under the tutelage of Mère Marie Brunel, a hard-headed business woman with a highly developed skill for detecting talent in the girls whom she trains before sending them on elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’, in the case of Clare and Rose, will be Italy, the home of opera. When the girls baulk at being told of the decision to send them to the Italian capital without any consulta-tion, Mère Marie explains:

Because, by accident and by God’s goodness, you each hold promise of possessing soon an exceptionally good operatic soprano voice. That is a very delicate possession, and its growth must be the charge of experts, and only of experts. You are two wilful and ignorant young girls, who clearly do not begin to apprehend the difficult thing you have been sent to Europe to do.12

With hard work and careful nurturing, Clare and Rose realise their poten-tial and find their particular vocation. They discover, for example, that the subtler nature of Clare’s voice lends itself best to sacred music whereas Rose, big-hearted and big-voiced, will be a prima donna in La Scala, Milan’s iconic opera house. But the prize is not easily won for either woman. Living in a tight-knit yet cosmopolitan musical milieu at the end of the nineteenth cen-tury exposes them to experiences they could never have known in Ireland. Their sentimental education is as important as their musical training and they must come to terms with the pain of homesickness, failed love affairs (Rose with René and Antonio, Clare with Luisa), the panic before big

12 Kate O’Brien, As Music and Splendour (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 42. Subsequent references will be to this edition and cited as AMS, followed by page number.

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 71

performances, the dread of not being up to the task. When her Italian manager Giacomo is told by Rose that she is thinking of postponing the offer of going to La Scala, he is at pains to impress upon her how disastrous such a decision would be for her career:

No – you do not refuse La Scala, Rosa. You go there, and you fail or you succeed. If you fail, there is still always the whole teatro lirico in Italy which you can serve with honour, and with profit. You are a good singer and now well-trained. You will always be able to earn your living. But this is the moment you must take with courage. You must face La Scala now. You must accept the great honour, and abide by the results.13

Rose’s hesitation was due, in the main, to her fear of what a long separation would do to her relationship with the vain and emotionally fragile René. But deep down she knows that such an offer may not come again, so she heads to Milan to learn her trade. Never afraid of the demands that her singing career places on her, Rose soon settles into the hectic regime that is the norm in her new environment:

And in La Scala itself, she discovered that all was challenge, all was devotion, argu-ment, ideal, pitilessness, vanity and free enslavement. Here was the source, here was opera, here in this house it was born, it was fed, it was worshipped, it lived and it died and it rose again.14

Reputations must be earned the hard way in places like this; one false note, one less than accomplished performance, one moment of hesitation and the knowledgeable audience will detect weakness and the game will be up. On the night of Rose’s first leading role as Desdemona in Otello, her friend Thomas marvels at how ‘the over-perfumed and self-confident crowds’, that he views with some disdain as they swarm into La Scala, will suddenly fall still when the conductor mounts the podium and begins; they ‘lose their individual vulgarities a while, and simply and mercilessly listen’.15 He listens in anguish as his friend, soon to be ‘La Rosa d’Irlanda’,

13 AMS, 180.14 Ibid., 221.15 Ibid., 217.

72 Eamon Maher

successfully navigates the first act. He thinks, along with the other listen-ers, ‘so far so good’, and knows that the real challenge comes later, in the fourth act, where she must sing Desdemona’s last hour of fear and pain with the sort of pianissimo, or understated, soft singing that would become her most distinguishing characteristic.

The performance is a triumph and the hard work worthwhile, as can be seen in the rush by some of opera’s main luminaries to Rose’s dressing room after the show:

That restless, pressing world to which tonight she had irrevocably given her voice was all about her, whether or not she saw it. And across the bobbing heads and bouquets Thomas could see Signor Faccio who stood beside her; he saw him bend down and kiss her hands. Everyone fell silent before this gesture from La Scala’s greatest man; and when the master turned away, most reverently an avenue was made for him at once. As he passed through the doorway, Thomas and Antonio bowed.16

Antonio, a young Italian aristocrat, had sung opposite Rose during her night of glory and would subsequently become her lover. Éibhear Walshe and other critics such as Lorna Reynolds and Fanny Feehan suggest that Rose is almost definitely modelled on the Irish diva, Margaret Burke Sheridan (1889–1958), who enjoyed enormous success in Italy during the 1920s. In her biography of Sheridan, Anne Chambers explains how difficult it was to succeed in La Scala: ‘To the Milanese La Scala was sacrosanct: “No other theatre anywhere ever meant anything to the Scala clique … For the most part we disliked newcomers on the boards of our hallowed stage and we disliked foreigners.”’17 Lorna Reynolds mentions the scrupulous research O’Brien carried out before writing As Music and Splendour. She had lived in Rome for a protracted period of time and read up on Irish singers and Italian opera and had many talks with Margaret Burke Sheridan in the lounge of the Shelbourne hotel.18 Sheridan would undoubtedly have been

16 Ibid., 233.17 Anne Chambers, La Sheridan Adorable Diva. Margaret Burke Sheridan: Irish Prima-

Donna 1889–1958 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1989), 79.18 Lorna Reynolds, Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait (London: Colin Smythe, 1987),

89–90.

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 73

asked to recount her first major success in La Wally at La Scala, in 1922.19 Chambers quotes the testimony of the Marchese Malacrida, who was in attendance on that night:

When she (Sheridan) appeared we remained speechless … She was agile, she was lovely but above all she was young, young, young. Well, the physique was certainly there. But how would she manage the great aria that murderously – even for an experienced singer – takes place a few minutes after her entrance. It is by that Wally stands or falls and for one or the other reason no one had ever managed since the great Darclée.20

Rose’s real test as Desdemona would come in the fourth act, and she proves as adept as La Sheridan in winning over the audience in La Scala.

Only someone with a keen understanding of the subject matter could have written with such insight about rehearsals and performances at La Scala. As Fanny Feehan observes:

Kate O’Brien knows music and musicians inside out. One is never inclined to squirm when reading As Music and Splendour: on the contrary, the musician is mortified that a non-musician should show such awareness and intuition.21

O’Brien is also adept at tracing the coming of age of her two heroines, their reluctant abandon of the scrupulous religiosity of their Irish upbringing, their seeking out of sexual partners who in some way complete or comple-ment them. In an exchange with Luisa, Clare says that Rose and herself are living in sin and have no firm purpose of amendment, which excludes them from the sacraments and explains why they no longer go to Confession. Much to Luisa’s surprise, Clare admits that she would be lonely without the faith, and adds: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be the slave of the Penny Catechism, but at the same time I’d find it hard – if I ran into a serious moral con-flict – I’d find it hard to decide that I was right and the Eternal Church

19 Alfredo Catalani’s opera was first performed at La Scala in 1892.20 Chambers, La Sheridan, 84. Hariclea Darclée (1860–1839) sang the title role at the

première.21 Fanny Feehan, ‘Kate O’Brien and the Splendour of Music’, in Eibhear Walshe, ed.,

Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), 127.

74 Eamon Maher

wrong’.22 Just before she begins a torrid affair with Antonio, her Italian co-star with whom she falls in love, Rose sums up the consequences for both of them: ‘– perhaps she suspected that to love Antonio, to plunge into free love with him direct and naked from the cold rock of the law of God – that that might be too much, too serious for her, and so unfair to him’.23 Antonio shows no signs of such scruples and ends up marrying a woman who is chosen for him by his family. He does not see his betrothal as posing any threat to his relationship with Rose, who, however, refuses to sleep with him after the announcement of his engagement. That affair has its musical and sexual benefits:

for whatever conscience-searching she might do, and often did, in terms of her Catholic teaching and of the catechism, she did not confuse its answers with the natural good and help and peace she had drawn, as woman and singer, from her first experience of love. It was a sin, and she could face that; but it had also been, and still could be, a blessed and irresistible sweetness, a true explanation of life, for better or worse.24

As well as the religious dilemmas that confront them, the two Irish hero-ines are also exposed to more pleasant discoveries, such as the joys associ-ated with wine and food. Many performances are followed by sumptuous meals and numerous libations. The descriptions can be mouth-watering! But what else would one expect from a life of singing in Italy? After her first gala night at La Scala, Rose and other members of the cast address themselves to the fine supper and splendid wines that had been ordered. They sing and reminisce (Thomas is asked to perform some of Moore’s Melodies) and they soak in the afterglow of success. On another occasion in Rome, there was a similar celebration:

Wine flowed. Antonio ordered himself much to eat. The restaurant was quiet and cool; and the five who sat together, though each in fact – save this latest happy comer – at heart in varying measures disturbed, perplexed, desirous or sad, yet felt

22 AMS, 142.23 Ibid., 169.24 Ibid., 270.

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 75

a passing outer mood of resignation to the lull of the hour, and also an odd, shared ambience of affection circling them.25

However, it is always music that comes first, music that can transport those who master it, however momentarily, into another universe where they come to know their true essence. Professionals to the core, they also take care not to drink excessively before they perform because of the potential damage to their voices. Her mentor in sacred music, Iago Duarte, tells Clare of how she must never underestimate the gift she has been given and he provides the following advice:

To become a great operatic singer, to be the living instrument through which difficult music comes, to be able to produce through your small, vulnerable but perfectly con-structed vocal organs the tenuous work of immortal men – to be able to make that incredibly delicate and complicated work sound almost simple, even to the dullest ears in dullest, dustiest opera-house!26

Duarte, himself a defrocked priest, lives through and for music and expects the same devotion from his students. One might say that for him music is religion: he cannot abide any half-measures, or any lack of commitment in terms of doing things properly, qualities that Clare appreciates in him. His rather ascetic lifestyle (even though he does enjoy sexual relations with some of the female singers, most notably Luisa) suggests that he never really left the priesthood, but merely found a way of living it out through music. It is noticeable, in fact, that virtually all of the characters in the novel show genuine reverence for the life-changing potential of music.

In the opinion of Eibhear Walshe, As Music and Splendour is the novel O’Brien had been working towards throughout her writing life. ‘From Without My Cloak onwards’, he writes, ‘she had been attempting to express, through her fiction, the possibility for an Irish woman to live through art, independent of Mellick and all its constraints. This final novel realises her imaginative ambition.’27 This is an astute observation and it demonstrates

25 Ibid., 266.26 Ibid., 336.27 Walshe, Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life, 128.

76 Eamon Maher

how important for Kate O’Brien was her writing. It was the vehicle through which she attempted to work out the issues that confronted her in real life: in particular, there was her lesbianism, a predisposition that immedi-ately set her apart in the Ireland of her time, a society that was intolerant of anything that went against the tide of the dominant Catholic ortho-doxy. Her deep-seated spirituality sought real and intellectually-satisfying answers to the dilemmas that life threw at her and she perceived the pos-sibilities afforded by art to transcend the mundane everyday experience of life. With Rose and Clare, O’Brien created two female characters who attain success and independence by dint of travel and hard work. Like the eponymous Mary Lavelle, the exposure to a continental culture opens up doors that remained firmly closed in Ireland. Hence, Lavelle can blithely dismiss Agatha Conlon’s belief that the lesbian attraction she feels for her is wrong, by stating: ‘Oh, everything’s a sin!’28

However, it is Kate O’Brien’s convincing representation of the world of opera in As Music and Splendour that is perhaps the greatest achievement of this novel. While not completely convinced about the artistic achieve-ment of As Music and Splendour, Lorna Reynolds acknowledges the extent to which O’Brien captured what it must have been like to engage with the world of Italian opera as a musician or a singer. In spite of a perceived declension in the quality of her writing, O’Brien preserved, in Reynolds’s view, moments of great insight:

Sometimes the old skill shows itself, as in the account of Rose Lennane’s triumph as Desdemona in Otello, reminiscent of Rose Lennane’s triumph in Madame Butterfly, about which Puccini, when he asked himself how she could have sung so as to make him see things in his own music he had not realized were there, said that she could only have done it because she came out of an ‘old race full of dramatic temperament and spiritual vision’.29

Éibhear Walshe argues that one of the consequences of young Irish women like Rose and Clare having successful careers is that they can control their

28 Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavelle (London: Virago, 1984), 285.29 Lorna Reynolds, A Literary Portrait, 93.

Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour: When Words and Music Chime 77

sexual lives. He goes further: ‘As a writer, she (O’Brien) found a way of negotiating her own imaginative difficulty by conflating love with music’.30 Certainly, there is a sense in which the sexual passion of the two characters, Rose and Clare, mirrors their musical preferences and the result is a subtle and ultimately satisfying novel that exhibits O’Brien’s talents to full advan-tage. A sophisticate in her appreciation of music, a tragic figure in some ways whose difficulties with alcoholism prevented her from achieving the heights that she otherwise might have reached,31 Kate O’Brien is deserving of the high esteem in which she has been held, notably by Irish novelists such as John Broderick and John McGahern. Her Laurel Hill education helped her to realise that it was not necessary to placidly accept the role of mother and home-maker, that there were other possibilities of making a living, and that one of them was through writing. Travel opened her mind and strengthened her resolve to explore in her writings the marked cultural differences between Ireland and continental Europe, differences that are well captured by Clare in the following comments she addresses to her Welsh friend Thomas:

The Irish imagination is a bit lopsided maybe. Anyway, it isn’t at all like the Latin – we are alarmed at the power and stretch of feeling – oh, believe me, Thomas, we are! We don’t find it at all amusing to be in love – that’s why we are so awkward. We are not Mediterranean.32

In spite of Clare’s assertion, one of the aspects most evident in O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour is the portrayal of a flexibility and adaptability in the Irish character which allows freedom to go where the spirit leads, and to discover the full potential contained in precious things, such as music.

30 Walshe, A Writing Life, 129.31 Kate O’Brien suffered from alcoholism.32 AMS, 211.

Axel Klein

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement

In his day, the popular French singer and chanson composer Gilbert Bécaud (1927–2001) was an international celebrity. Somewhat surprisingly, there are hidden Irish connections in his work, ones that conjoin the Aran Islands, twentieth-century opera and Irish cultural history viewed through a French prism. The idea that there could be a 1960s Bécaud opera, in French, and with an Irish locale, would seem improbable, but it happened. The story of how Bécaud came to write his L’Opéra d’Aran merits recording, as does its background and performance history.

Gilbert Bécaud was born as Gilbert François Léopold Silly in October 1927 in the Mediterranean coastal town of Toulon. English-language read-ers will understand immediately why he needed a stage name for his inter-national career, and the young musician must have been acutely aware of this from early on. The first pseudonym he adopted, from about 1942, was ‘François Gilbert’; then subsequently, in 1952, he decided on ‘Gilbert Bécaud’ –a belated acknowledgement of his true father’s name.1 Unlike most other twentieth-century performers of French chansons, Bécaud enjoyed a ‘classical’ musical education. However, if one tries to establish simple facts such as dates, places and teachers, most available sources yield little, apart from one claim that he was educated at the Conservatoire de Nice and that he studied piano and composition with a certain Tadlevsky, allegedly a pupil of Paderevsky.2 However, the years cited for this study

1 <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Bécaud#cite_note-1>, accessed 19 October 2014.

2 Paul-Xavier Giannoli, Gilbert Bécaud – Seul sur son étoile (in the series Vedettes à la une) (Paris: Librairie Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1970), 17.

80 Axel Klein

would indicate that Bécaud was ‘around twelve’ when he started there3 and that he dropped out in 1942, allegedly in order to join the Résistance. That would mean that his musical education took place from 1939 or 1940 to 1942, when he was between twelve and fifteen years of age. However, at this period, no Conservatoire de Nice yet existed. The institution was a simple ‘École Municipale de Musique’ that was not upgraded to ‘Conservatoire’ until 1968, twenty-six years after Bécaud had left.4 That very simple examination of dates would appear to show how cautious one must be when investigat-ing biographies of ‘celebrities’.

Bécaud started songwriting in 1948, and within five years he worked for stars like Edith Piaf and Yves Montand. It was not until 1953 that he performed his music himself, with his early hits being Je t’appartiens (1955) and Le Jour où la pluie viendra (1957). Both of those songs, as Let It Be Me and The Day the Rains Came Down, were covered in English by several American singers including Bob Dylan, the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. There was an American connection to Bécaud’s career ever since his first early 1950s American tours, when he accompanied sing-ers like Marie Bizet and Jacques Pills (Edith Piaf ’s husband) on the piano.5 Another important song in his early career was Et maintenant (1961), and it was made famous in the English-speaking world as What Now My Love by a similarly illustrious range of singers.

Even that short glimpse of Bécaud’s biography indicates that he was already a very popular singer-songwriter in France by 1962. In his music, he successfully bridged the gap from chanson to pop music. All through his long performing career, his energetic stage presence made him known as ‘Mister 100,000 Volts’. Apart from the songs already mentioned, his most popular hits included Nathalie (1964), Quand il est mort le poète (1965), L’Important c’est la rose (1967), Un peu d’amour et d’amitié (1972) and many

3 ‘Vers 12 ans, …’, in Giannoli (1970), 17.4 Website of the Conservatoire National à Rayonnement Régional, Nice: <http://

www.crr-nice.org/index.php?rubrique=conservatoire&page=historique>, accessed 19 October 2014.

5 Giannoli (1970), 32–5; Kitty Bécaud and Laurent Balandras: Bécaud, la prémière idole (Paris: Éditions Didier Carpentier, 2011), 17–21. Piaf and Pills married in 1952.

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement 81

others, particularly during the 1960s and ’70s. Bécaud died at the age of seventy-four in December 2001 on his houseboat on the river Seine in Paris.

L’Opéra d’Aran: Plot, Music, Source

Intriguingly, the name of Bécaud’s houseboat was ‘Aran’. If proof were needed, this name surely substantiates the extraordinary role this opera played in Gilbert Bécaud’s life. It would seem, according to its composer, that he worked on L’Opéra d’Aran on and off for five years, starting work on it as early as 1957. There are, in fact, some indications that in his early career he kept a lively interest in art music; he later claimed he had ‘a trunk-ful of sonatas, concertos and other things’.6 The success of his Christmas cantata called L’Enfant à l’étoile, and performed to great acclaim in 1960, encouraged him to quickly finalise the score for the opera and to look for performance opportunities. However, such openings were initially not as abundant as his popularity would seem to have suggested. After all, his fame resulted from a different type of repertoire. The opera was finally put on at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 25 October 1962, where it ran without interruption for one hundred performances until early January 1963. L’Opéra d’Aran could be deemed to be Bécaud’s largest and most controversial achievement. Yet it is a work that is mostly passed over by his biographers, who tended to describe the public phenomenon and stage presence that he embodied rather than devoting any space to his compositional talent.

The formal structure of L’Opéra d’Aran reveals a full-scale opera in two acts and seven scenes, encompassing thirty musical numbers, many of which follow each other without a break. It was recorded on a triple LP record set, performed by the original cast of the first production and, on

6 George Langelaan, ‘Mister Hundred Thousand Volts Writes An Irish Opera’, The Irish Times, (23 April 1962), 8.

82 Axel Klein

that recording, its duration is 110 minutes.7 There is no spoken dialogue. Act 1, with scenes 1 to 4, has nineteen musical numbers; the remaining items are in act 2. Not only is the first act longer than the second, which would be usual practice, but also within each act, the first scenes are signifi-cantly longer and more varied than the following ones, notwithstanding, of course, that the single numbers are not of equal length.8

The introduction begins with a fanfare and a chorus whose words describe the isolated situation of the Aran Islands. In scene 1, the fisher-man Mickey bursts into a pub exclaiming he had found the body of a half-drowned man in his nets. The stranger is young and handsome, a Mediterranean type, and is immediately admired by a ‘chorus of women’ standing at the door. Mickey brings him back to life with artificial respira-tion. Within a short period of time, the islanders get the impression that a Mediterranean sun is rising over Aran, because of the sunny nature of their guest. While the Aran girls all take an interest in the man, Mickey tells them that Angelo, the stranger, has eyes for Maureen only. Maureen, however, is betrothed to Seán who left the island long before, and nobody believes either that he is still alive or would ever return. Furthermore, Maureen lives with and takes care of Mara, Sean’s mother. It all seems to rule out any possibility that Angelo and Maureen could come together, despite their mutual feelings.

Scene 2 sees Angelo well integrated into the daily life of the fishermen of Aran. He entertains them with songs and stories but does not seem to have much talent as a fisherman himself. The old people of the island turn against him as they think Angelo is spoiling the other men. Angelo himself longs for the day when a ship will come to take him away from the island. He claims he was a prince in his home country and is not made for the simple life of a fisherman. But the others, particularly Mickey, want him to stay forever:

7 Pathé DTX 320–2, triple LP (1963); American issue: Angel 3637 C/L.8 Act 1 with scenes 1 (nos. 1–7), 2 (8–14), 3 (15–16), and 4 (17–19); act 2 with scenes

5 (nos. 20–5), 6 (26–8), and 7 (29–30).

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement 83

Angelo Angelo

Mais oui, je fus, c’est vrai, I was, it is truecouronné un beau dimanche. crowned one fair Sunday.On m’habilla de ciel, et de They dressed me in sky and goldenrayons d’or. sunshine.Venez dans mon pays, Come to my country, j’en écarterai les branches; I’ll push back the branches; une barque oubliée nous plante an abandoned boat will be ourle décor. setting.

Mickey et les filles Mickey and the girls

Angelo, partage ton royaume avec Angelo, share your kingdom withnous! Dis, Angelo, parle! us! Oh, say you will, Angelo!9

In scene 3, Mara dies during a terrible thunderstorm and Maureen senses that there is now nothing that would hold her on the island anymore. Angelo comes in and beseeches her to leave with him as soon as possible. The first act ends with the steamer arriving as Angelo thanks his hosts and intends to say good-bye. Maureen is joining him, and the whole village accompanies them to the pier as the ship arrives. But the first person to leave the gangway is the long-absent Seán, who was not expected to return.

In act 2, the drama takes its course. Seán learns that his mother has died and that Maureen was just about to leave the island with a stranger. Seán explains that he could not come back earlier because he had killed a man in a fight, and spent several years in prison. He also says that he does not intend to lose Maureen a second time and that he is prepared to fight Angelo. Although Mickey offers his boat to Angelo and Maureen so that they can leave the island, the God-fearing Maureen now decides that she should stay with Seán.

Scene 6 sees the conflict between Seán and Angelo develop, with Angelo, for instance, saying that while Seán may have Maureen’s lips, he

9 Quoted from booklet of the libretto in the 1963 American issue of the triple LP set, Angel 3637 C/L, 11. The French original record was published in the same year on Pathé DTX 320–2, without English translation.

84 Axel Klein

will not have her dreams. Naturally, such provocation leads to a fight with the whole village looking on. As it becomes more violent, Seán snatches a steel line that is used to tie up boats and uses it as a whip towards Angelo. But Maureen throws herself between the two and is hit by the steel line across her eyes. As she falls down, bleeding and blinded, she confesses her love to Angelo.

The opera ends with another storm building up on the horizon. Mickey wants to join the couple, but then Angelo explains that all the stories he had told them about him being a prince in his native land had been lies and that in reality he is even poorer than the islanders. The situation is now extremely messy and desperate: Seán tells Maureen and Angelo to take his boat and leave, despite the storm that is heading towards the islands. As Maureen and Angelo row away in the boat, all the villagers know that they will not be able to make it to the mainland. In this, the final scene, Mickey shouts to Angelo in the boat to come back.

As far as the plot of L’Opéra d’Aran is concerned, there would appear to be no recognisable source in previous literature. Unlike other contem-porary operas with an Aran Islands sujet, the plays by Synge or Yeats do not seem to have been used here.10 There are very vague allusions to Robert Flaherty’s 1934 fictional documentary film Man of Aran as a source for this plot, but they are indeed so vague that they are hardly worth quoting.11 Three French writers were involved in the creation of the libretto, but it still remains quite unclear as to who was responsible for what: the ‘livret’ is by

10 Like Riders to the Sea (1927) by Ralph Vaughan Williams; Spindrift (1963) by Bruce Montgomery; Riders to the Sea (1972) by Eduard Pütz; Riders to the Sea (1996) by Marga Richter.

11 For instance, in The Independent, 31 March 1997, in an obituary of Alvino Misciano, the original Angelo in 1962, Elizabeth Forbes claimed the opera was ‘based on the screenplay of Robert Flaherty’s film’, see <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-alvino-misciano-1276117.html>. However, the stories of the film and the opera are not comparable, nor have I found any reference by Bécaud himself to Flaherty’s film.

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement 85

Jacques Emmanuel and the ‘textes’ by Louis Amade and Pierre Delanoë – but the difference between ‘livret’ and ‘textes’ is ambiguous.12

Performances and Critical Reception

Bécaud organised three parallel casts so that the performances could run without interruption for ten weeks during the first run of performances in 1962. Quite well-known opera stars sang in the first performance, such as Rosanna Carteri from La Scala opera house in Milan who sang Maureen, Peter Gottlieb as Mickey, Frank Schooten as Seán and Alvino Misciano as Angelo. The conductor was no less than Georges Prêtre. Huge media attention accompanied the performances, with newspapers, popular maga-zines and specialised music journals covering both the performance and the recording. Excerpts were shown on television.

There was no public money involved in the enterprise, and had it not been for the name and reputation of Bécaud, the opera would probably never have been staged. Bécaud’s most persuasive argument was probably that he financed the production, including renting the theatre himself and paying three parallel casts. Ticket prices were not nearly as high as would have been necessary, especially as audience numbers seem to have dropped in the course of the three months of productions. Giannoli (1970) claims that about 100,000 people saw the opera in 1962, and Bécaud’s debts amounted to 50 million francs: ‘L’opéra a eu un dénouement que son auteur n’avait pas prévu’ [The opera had an outcome that its author had not anticipated].13

According to Kitty Bécaud, the composer’s widow, the audience num-bers were slightly lower (80,000), but the conclusion remains the same: ‘Cent représentations et 80 000 spectateurs ne suffiront pas à rembourser

12 It is possible that the ‘livret’ is the general storyline, the ‘textes’ the concrete wording. It is typical of the imprecisions surrounding this work and its composer.

13 Giannoli (1970), 96 (my translation).

86 Axel Klein

l’investissement.’ (One hundred performances and 80,000 spectators were not enough to repay the investment.).14 However, the success of Bécaud’s popular songs quickly compensated for the losses. Apparently, by September of the following year, the composer was affluent again: ‘En septembre, Bécaud sera, à nouveau, renfloué. Il dira: “Ça y est. Je suis redevenu riche.”’ [In September, Bécaud was once again replenished. He said: ‘That’s it. I’ve become rich again.’].15

Following its initial run in Paris, the opera was performed a number of times. There were productions in Montreal in 1965,16 Liège in 1966,17 Luxembourg in 1980,18 Vienna in 1994.19 More recently, it could be seen at French provincial summer opera festivals such as Montmorillon in 2000,20 Lamalou-les-Bains in 2003,21 and elsewhere.22

The opera strongly divided public opinion in France. There was a large group amongst both media and the public who appreciated, and were fas-cinated by, everything Bécaud gave them. Bécaud’s opera was on the title pages of magazines, and popular weeklies such as Paris Match devoted space to the debate, asking, for instance, ‘Bécaud – is he serious?’ thereby

14 Bécaud/Balandras (2011), 115 (my translation).15 Giannoli (1970), 96 (my translation).16 At the 30th Montreal Festival on 9, 12, 14, 16, 18 August 1965 at the Grand Salle,

Place des Arts.17 From 14 October 1966 at the Théâtre Royal. The number of performances is unclear.18 No details available other than two key roles: Deborah Sasson (as Maureen), René

Kollo (as Angelo), with Gilbert Bécaud conducting.19 Three concert performances at the Konzerthaus during the weekend 9–11 December,

including Gilbert Bécaud as Mickey and conducted, as in the première, by Georges Prêtre.

20 5–10 August 2000 at the Maison Dieu.21 15 and 16 August 2003 at the local Festival d’Opérettes.22 There is no complete list of performances. Those found in an internet search are usually

incomplete as regards exact dates, number of performances, lists of performers etc. There are references to performances in Reims (Grand Théâtre, 1980), Italy (1982), Toulon (Opéra de Toulon, 8 & 10 December 1995), Tours (Grand Théâtre, 1998). There are undated references to performances in Bordeaux and Calais; Bécaud/Balandras (2011, 115) mention Germany, Hungary and Poland; Giannoli (1970, 100) refers to a possible performance in Russia.

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement 87

querying ‘is he a serious composer?’.23 Paris Match went as far as asking three music critics and the composer Francis Poulenc to give their verdicts on the work. Bernard Gavoty, as music critic of Le Figaro, politely declared that he did not regard Bécaud as a serious composer, although he added that despite the simplicity of his style, he found the work quite moving:

D’une musique très simple, presque élémentaire et qui ne prétend ni renouveler, encore révolutionner, quoi que ce soit, s’élèvent par moments des mélodies, des cris, des plaints, des accents qui ne trompent pas. Ce que Gilbert Bécaud avait dans le cœur, il l’a exprimé de la façon la plus directe et, parfois, le plus émouvante. […] Une œuvre touchante fût-elle par instants un peu rudimentaire […].24

[It’s a very simple, almost elementary music that does not claim to renew or even to revolutionize anything, that rises to moments of real tunefulness, crying and lamenting. Whatever was in Gilbert Bécaud’s heart, he expressed it in the most direct, and at times the most moving, way. […] A touching work, albeit at times a little rudimentary […].]

The radio journalist Jean Witold recounted the story of his first meeting with Bécaud at which the singer told him about his opera plans. Witold asked him to play the principal themes for him on the piano, and the two ended up improvising on those themes with four hands on the piano. His conclusion was:

Je ne connaissais Bécaud, chanteur de charme, que de nom. Ce soir-là j’ai fait la connaissance d’un musicien. Sa musique ne me rappelle aucune autre musique pré-cise. Puccini, non. Menotti, non. Pour moi, c’est tout neuf. […] Vous me demandez si cet opéra plaira au grand public. Je vous réponds : certainement. Car tous ceux qui connaissent ses chansons découvriront un meilleur Bécaud et feront le même pas en avant que Bécaud lui-même.25

[Of the charming singer Bécaud, I did not know more than his name. On that even-ing, I made the acquaintance of a musician. His music does not remind me exactly

23 Maurice Croizard, ‘Bécaud est/ce sérieux?’, Paris Match no. 707, (27 October 1962), 70–3.

24 Ibid., 72.25 Ibid., 73 (my translation).

88 Axel Klein

of any other music. Puccini? No. Menotti? No. For me, it’s all new. […] You asked me whether this opera would please the general public. I reply: certainly. Because those who are already familiar with Bécaud will discover a better Bécaud and will make the same step forward as Bécaud did himself.]

The opera specialist Olivier Merlin perceived the work as the renaissance of the ‘grande imagerie lyrique’,26 whereas composer Francis Poulenc’s comment was simply that ‘Les protestataires nous endormiraient.’ [The protesters make us fall asleep.]27

While the Le Monde critic René Dumesnil compared Bécaud with Puccini, Mascagni and Leoncavallo,28 conceding ‘le sens de la musique dramatique’, many other writers were considerably more negative. An anon-ymous critic in the weekly journal Carrefour was quoted as saying: ‘La banalité de sa musique, au second acte surtout, est désespérante et parfois comique. On a l’impression d’assister à la représentation d’une caricature d’opéra.’ [The banality of his music, especially in the second act, is desperate and sometimes comical. One has the impression of attending the carica-ture of an opera.].29 The critic Claude Samuel thought the participating performers must have worked under ‘collective hallucination’: ‘Que des artistes de talent se soient laissés embarquer dans cette entreprise, aient cru à la valeur musicale de l’ouvrage, relève, pour ma part, de l’hallucination collective.’ [How talented artists could embark on this venture and believe in the musical value of the work, can for me only be explained with col-lective hallucination.].30

It is probably true that this opera drew a kind of audience that would otherwise never enter an opera house. I personally share the opinion of many concertgoers at the time that the work is full of genuine emotion and drama. But the fact remains, too, that the score is totally anachronistic: it consciously ignores the stylistic development of twentieth-century art

26 Ibid., 73.27 Ibid., 72 (my translation).28 Quoted in Giannoli (1970), 86.29 Giannoli (1970), 89 (my translation).30 Giannoli (1970), 89–90 (my translation).

Gilbert Bécaud’s L’Opéra d’Aran (1962) – A Rapprochement 89

music, by deploying a musical language composed of nineteenth-century romantic opera and mid-twentieth-century chanson, somehow pointing in the direction of an American musical. Max Pinchard described it as ‘musique de variété, ou la musique de film de Hollywood’;31 a writer in the Jesuit periodical Études called it ‘musique douce ou au jazz symphonique’;32 another critic perceived ‘une succession de chansons comme il nous en offrirait dans un théâtre de variétés’ [a succession of songs such as he would present in a variety theatre].33 Perhaps, had Bécaud called his work a ‘musi-cal’, it may have been less provocative. But his ambitions were operatic and, as such, it was compared with other contemporary operas. As Max Pinchard put it: ‘La sincérité de Bécaud ne peut être mise en doute, mais, en art, la sincérité n’est pas tout’.34 [There can be no doubt about the sincerity of Bécaud, but, in art, sincerity is not everything.]

Bécaud’s Irish Connection

Finally, turning to the media attention the work received, it seems extraor-dinary that nobody in France ever seems to have asked Bécaud what made him choose an Irish subject. Why Ireland? Why the Aran Islands? What is the connection between Bécaud and Ireland? Not one of the books,35 articles and interviews ever touched this question – which is, certainly for an Irish audience, one of the obvious questions to address. In France,

31 Max Pinchard, ‘Le rideau rouge s’est levé sur l’Opéra d’Aran de Gilbert Bécaud’, Musica no. 106 ( January 1963), 11–15; (14).

32 ‘Gilbert Bécaud et Carl Orff ’, Études (December 1962), 383–4.33 Stéphane Wolff, ‘L’Opéra d’Aran’, L’Entr’acte no. 255, (16–30 November 1962), 90.34 Pinchard, 11 (my translation).35 Including the most recent by Bécaud/Balandras (2011).

90 Axel Klein

nobody seemed to be interested. Even Bécaud’s widow, Kitty Bécaud, does not know of any connection either.36

The opera was never performed in Ireland but an interview in the Irish Times on 23 April 1962 (published six months before the first perfor-mance in Paris) was entitled ‘Mister Hundred Thousand Volts Writes an Irish Opera’. In it, after Bécaud admitted that he had never seen the Aran Islands, the interview continued:

interviewer: ‘How many acts, and why Aran, if you have never been there?’bécaud: ‘We needed an island, an island within touch of our so-called

civilisation, yet away from it all … An island where people have remained pure and God-fearing, people who really believe in beauty and kindness, people who still have a heart.’

interviewer: ‘And you think Aran …?’bécaud: ‘The Aran Islands are probably the only islands in the world

that fit. Also, the Irish love singing and music that moves the heart. People shout, whistle and clap, stamp their feet and go wild sometimes when I sing, but people no longer cry. It is only in Ireland that a song or music will bring tears into pretty eyes. Do you understand?’

interviewer: ‘Gilbert, how do you know, since you have never been to Ireland?’bécaud: ‘I know some Irish people and I know their songs!’37

It is an interesting tale but there it ends: in every possible shade of mean-ing, L’Opéra d’Aran is a work of creative fantasy.

36 E-mail to Axel Klein dated 7 April 2014 from Laurent Balandras on behalf of Kitty Bécaud.

37 Langelaan (1962), see footnote 8.

Laura Watson

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France

This chapter will examine images of Ireland as evoked in the music of the Third Republic in France with particular focus on the 1924 production of Henri Rabaud’s L’Appel de la mer, addressing its libretto, score, and recep-tion history. The musical adaptation of any literary text will always result in some transformation of the original material but when Rabaud (1873–1949) decided to set John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea as a one-act opera, he strove to retain its authentic local colour, natural dialogue, and refer-ences to islander rituals, all the while writing with the Opéra-Comique audience in mind. ‘They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me’, laments Maurya towards the end of Synge’s one-act play about a widow from the Aran Islands who loses her husband and each of her six sons to the surrounding North Atlantic ocean. The isolated island, its people, and traditions comprise Maurya’s entire world, one so self-con-tained and alienated that even the west coast of Ireland seems impossibly distant. How, then, did a 1903 drama about the grinding daily hardship of a tiny fishing village find its way to the cosmopolitan setting of a Parisian opera house in 1924?

A most celebrated Franco-Irish literary and musical connection had been established by Hector Berlioz’s Neuf mélodies irlandaises (published in 1830 and subsequently retitled Irlande).1 Composed nearly a century later, Rabaud’s work is one of the most substantial efforts to unite Irish literature and French music, although like many French operas premiered in the 1920s it faded into obscurity. In contrast, a better-known Riders to

1 Berlioz’s song settings were inspired by the lyrics and music of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies.

92 Laura Watson

the Sea (1932), the opera by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, successfully broadened the appeal of the work by depoliticising the drama and employing a modernist musical language.2 Yet, Parisian critics at the time judged Rabaud’s opera as significant. While his music merits more recognition than it currently receives, today the opera is also of major historical interest because it marks a watershed in how French composers portrayed Ireland. Certainly, Rabaud did not entirely dispense with the outdated views of the country projected in earlier works but, courtesy of Synge’s text, his depiction of Ireland is grounded in realism. As it appears to be attuned to social and nationalist sensitivities, it thus mirrors wider contemporary French sympathies for Ireland. Given the particular time it emerged, L’Appel de la mer is not just an opera about Ireland but also one embedded in the cultural politics of Third Republic France. Thus it is particularly interesting both to analyse Rabaud’s response to early twentieth-century Irish literature, and to consider how L’Appel de la mer engaged with some key aesthetic principles that influenced the operatic repertoire of Third Republic France, namely exoticism and symbolism, and resistance to modernism.

Images of Celtic Ireland in the Music of Third Republic France

In the intervening century between Berlioz’s Moore song settings and L’Appel de la mer, a handful of other Irish-themed works were published and performed by composers living in France. Unlike the Berlioz and Rabaud works which were at least rooted in tangible manifestations of

2 Yumiko Kataoka argues the political point, while Byron Adams illustrates that octa-tonicism was central to Vaughan Williams’s Riders. See Yumiko Kataoka, ‘Riders to the Sea: Irish Voices, British Echoes’, Journal of Irish Studies 18 (2003), 65–73; and Byron Adams, ‘Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship’, in Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29–55.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 93

contemporary Ireland – each was respectively based on a text that had been published twenty to thirty years beforehand – these other compositions conjured up visions of the country without being anchored in any concrete national sources. Still, the multifarious means of constructing Ireland in the French musical imagination, including these sometimes whimsical offerings, provide a glimpse of how the French perceived Ireland. In addi-tion, they grant insights into compositional developments during this era. Apart from Berlioz’s Neuf mélodies, all the works discussed here belong to the Third Republic, a period fraught with political upheaval, debates about nationhood, implementation of new laws separating church and state, and social change. Traces of these discourses are refracted through music which is ostensibly about Irish myth, culture, and identity but which also participates in discourses about the function of music in French society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Augusta Holmès (1847–1903), born in France to an Irish-born father and a mother of Scottish descent, was a foremost figure in this strand of French music history. She is significant in another respect, as an excep-tionally successful female composer during the late nineteenth century.3 Amongst her prolific output, the symphonic poem Irlande (1882) remains one of her most popular works.4 Its premiere prompted the leading French music journal Le Ménestrel to praise Holmès as ‘parmi les compositeurs marquants de l’école moderne’ [among the noteworthy composers of the

3 For more on Holmès, see Gérard Gefen, Augusta Holmès: l’outrancière (Paris: Belfond, 1987). The question of gender as it pertains to the composer has received much attention. For a detailed discussion of gendered critical reaction to Holmès in 1889, see Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 103–38.

4 For more on the music of Irlande, see Mary Pierse, ‘Close Connections: Nationalism and Artistic Expression in the Opere of Sydney Owenson/Lady Morgan and Augusta Holmès’, in Eamon Maher and Catherine Maignant, eds, Franco-Irish Connections in Space and Time: Peregrinations and Ruminations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). See also Timothy Jones, ‘Nineteenth-Century Orchestral and Chamber Music’ in Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter, eds, French Music Since Berlioz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 53–90.

94 Laura Watson

modern school].5 Six years later Le Ménestrel reiterated its admiration for this ‘œuvre virile, bien conçue’ [well-conceived, virile work].6 Not long afterwards, it was programmed at the inaugural Feis Ceoil in Dublin in May 1897. On the eve of this performance, the Irish Times boasted this country’s claim to its creator, the ‘greatest of woman composers’.7 Probably thinking of Holmès’s other ‘Irish’ pieces such as La Chanson de gars de l’Irlande (1891) and Noël d’Irlande (1896), the newspaper stated: ‘some of her songs are, perhaps, known to Dublin people, but this will be the first time that an important work by our distinguished countrywoman has been performed in Dublin.’8 The evidence indicates that the city’s musical fraternity saw Holmès as one of their own. With the Feis Ceoil commit-tee defining an Irish composer as one ‘of Irish birth or parentage whether resident in Ireland or not’, the performance of Irlande helped accomplish one of the festival’s key aims – ‘to have orchestral concerts of music by Irish composers’.9 Local musicians were certainly responding to a prevail-ing cultural nationalism with an Irish mode of musical utterance’ which was in tune with Holmès’s nationalist ideology and symphonic aesthetic: Michele Esposito and Hamilton Harty each composed an Irish Symphony for Feis Ceoil competitions in subsequent years.10

As well as galvanising the Irish artistic cause, Irlande indirectly shaped fin-de-siècle French cultural politics. That work and the composer’s ancestry came to define Holmès, so that by 1889 Arthur Pougin wrote: ‘elle chante

5 Anon., ‘Concerts et soirées’, Le Ménestrel (2 April 1882) (This translation and all subsequent ones are mine).

6 H. Barbedette, ‘Paris et départements’, Le Ménestrel (25 November 1888). For com-mentary on how Holmès’s education and upbringing enabled her to transcend gender barriers, see Pierse, ‘Close Connections’.

7 Anon., ‘Feis Ceoil’, Irish Times (14 May 1897). This article quotes French critic Adolphe Jullien’s praise for Holmès.

8 Anon., ‘Feis Ceoil’.9 Jennifer O’Connor, ‘The Role of Women in Music in Nineteenth-Century Dublin’

(PhD diss., National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2010), 215, 211.10 Patrick Zuk and Séamas de Barra, ‘Composition’, in Harry White and Barra Boydell,

eds, The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013), vol. 1, 226. Esposito’s symphony dates from 1902 and Harty’s from 1904.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 95

la liberté, la patrie, la gloire […] qu’elle songe aux douleurs du pays de ses ancêtres […] qu’elle glorifie notre chère France, sa terre d’adoption’ [she sings of liberty, patriotism, glory […] whether contemplating the sorrows of her ancestral country […] or extolling our dear France, her adopted land].11 Pougin saw nationalism as so fundamental to Holmès’s aesthetic that the essence of her 1882 symphonic poem would resurface in a uniquely French work. Indeed, Holmès recycled and amplified Irlande’s themes of freedom and patriotism when she was commissioned to write the Ode triomphale en l’honneur du centenaire de 1789 for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. One resonance between Irlande and the Ode is that the former alludes in its prefatory text to the voices of the Irish people – ‘ton vieux chant triomphal’ [your old triumphant song] – while the latter incorporates a multitude of French voices – soldiers, workers, and so on – in its choral parts.12 Parallels between Irlande and the Ode were possible partly because of a shared musical language, in other words, Holmès did not strive for an authentic Irish sound or use folk material in her symphonic poem. Still, she does present stylised echoes of the country.13

The next significant reference to Ireland in French art music came in 1903 when the cantata theme for the annual Prix de Rome composition competition was officially announced. The Académie des Beaux-Arts chose a dramatic libretto about Celtic Ireland.14 Written by Marguerite Coiffier and Eugène Adenis, the libretto was ostensibly based on the Irish legend of Alyssa, although the source of the tale is unclear and may have been fab-ricated by these authors. The story, set in ‘fabled times’, features the fairy Alyssa, a young Irish chief called Braïzil, and a bard. Like Irlande, it is a

11 Arthur Pougin, ‘Semaine théâtrale’, Le Ménestrel (15 September 1889).12 Augusta Holmès, Irlande: Poème symphonique, transcription for piano (Paris: Léon

Grus, 1882), front matter. For more on the Ode, see Mark Seto, ‘Luigi Cherubini and Augusta Holmès’, in Donna M. Di Grazia, ed., Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (New York: Routledge, 2013), 227; and Pierse, ‘Close Connections’.

13 Pierse notes that Irlande includes some Irish pastiche material and a ‘noticeable echo’ of one of Moore’s melodies. See ‘Close Connections’, 86, 87.

14 As Celtic Ireland is the theme of Irlande, this decision might have been influenced by the popularity of Holmès’s work.

96 Laura Watson

patriotic call to arms: Braïzil falls in love with Alyssa but the bard tells him he must lead his people into battle, and eventually he chooses duty over love. That year’s winner, Raoul Laparra, composed a piece which alludes to the Irish setting by opening with a six-eight harp motif evoking both folk instrumentation and rhythm.15 Apart from that, however, his cantata was a fairly conventional exercise. The text’s formulaic drama and characteri-sation were designed to fit a rigid compositional mould, so references to Ireland could only be token ones. Alyssa’s ancient setting, mystical atmos-phere, forest and waterside scenes, and passionate themes were all generic mainstays of Prix de Rome cantata libretti. They were also hallmarks of the Wagnerian repertoire that reigned on the fin-de-siècle Paris opera stage. As Celtic mythology had inspired Richard Wagner’s landmark Tristan und Isolde, the Alyssa text would invariably encourage contestants to respond in a Germanic musical mode. Maurice Ravel entered the competition that year with a convincing cantata that was steeped in Wagnerism and without reference to Alysssa’s alleged Irish roots.16

Alyssa prompted Ravel to think of Wagner; similarly, other composers at this time did not equate the Celts solely with Ireland – France had its own Celts in Brittany, who in the early twentieth century, made concerted efforts to strengthen their cultural identity. This pan-European Celticism fascinated the American composer Swan Hennessy (1866–1929) who spent most of his life in Paris.17 An obscure figure today, Hennessy mostly wrote amateur-level solo piano and chamber music; in a nod to his Irish heritage, he published numerous ‘Celtic’ works and a handful of ostensibly ‘Irish’ scores.18 The latter includes the 1908 Variations sur un air irlandais ancien for solo piano.19 An unidentified air is subject to twelve short treatments.

15 Raoul Laparra, Alyssa: légende irlandaise (Paris: Enoch & Cie, 1903), 1.16 Robin Holloway, On Music: Essays and Diversions (Brinkworth: Claridge Press,

2003), 276. 17 I wish to thank Axel Klein for bringing Hennessy’s music to my attention. 18 Hennessy received very little French critical attention. His death notice in Le Ménestrel

on 1 November 1929 simply read: ‘Ce délicat musician avait écrit un certain nombre de trios, quatuors et de pièces de piano.’

19 Swan Hennessy, Variations sur un air irlandaise ancien (Schott: Paris, 1908).

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 97

The variations mostly maintain the lyrical nature of the monophonic theme: forays into a more opaque impressionist sound-world are rare, with the exception of the tenth variation. Here, the juxtaposition of an Irish-tinged melody in the right hand and chromatic chordal sonorities of the modern French school in the left hand has the effect of musically linking the two countries.20 Hennessy continued writing in this style in the 1920s, for instance in his Rhapsodie gaélique for cello and piano (1925), but it was becoming dated as French images of Ireland changed.21

Of all the post-1870 music mentioned thus far, only Hennessy’s Variations purport to evoke Ireland with overt reference to native music. So, for a period of about thirty years Ireland was generally constructed in the musical imagination of Third Republic France using a late nineteenth-century, Romantic idiom. Whether writing for voice, a solo instrument, orchestra, or with a dramatic setting in mind, composers used the stand-ard forms and techniques of European art music to convey a loose sense of Irish myth and nationalist ideology. This is true of Holmès’s output in the 1880s (Irlande) and 1890s (La Chanson de gars de l’Irlande and Noël d’Irlande), of the Laparra and Ravel cantatas in 1903, and of the small-scale piano pieces Hennessy produced in the first two decades of the twentieth century. None of these compositions managed to convey the ‘authentic’ folk reality of Ireland. With the advent of the Irish Literary Revival in the late 1890s, however, the country and its leading creative figures were afforded greater recognition in the cultural life of the French capital. Subsequent to this shift, composers such as Rabaud, who wished to express some aspect of Irish identity, could no longer offer up the musical equivalent of out-dated tropes stemming from mythologised folk memories. Instead, with a new Irish literary movement gathering pace, major figures in French music needed to engage in a more profound way with the country.

20 This judgement is based on the musical material presented in Hennessy’s Variations, 8–9.

21 The absence of Parisian press commentary on any of Hennessy’s music suggests that neither in general, nor in the specific evocations of Ireland, was it considered to be of major interest or novelty.

98 Laura Watson

French Perceptions of the Celtic Revival

The Irish Literary Revival was rooted in the nineteenth-century Celtic Revival which, especially after the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893, attempted to renew interest in the national language and promote interest in native folklore, music, and heritage. The subsequent establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 by Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn incubated a new nationalist movement in drama pioneered by figureheads such as Synge, who ‘emphasised that his plays were drawn from observations of a specifically Irish reality’.22 Riders to the Sea was written in 1903 and premiered in Molesworth Hall, Dublin on 25 February 1904. It was another decade before France properly discovered the work of Synge but, in the intervening years, Irish revivalist politics were making waves in Paris. Le Figaro advertised a public talk on ‘The Irish Revival in the Nineteenth Century’ in 1906, while in 1912 L’Intransigeant reported on Home Rule with a striking trilingual headline: ‘“Eiré [sic]” et “Sassanach”: L’Irlande celtique et le Home Rule’ it announced on the front page.23 Despite this article’s ostensible concern with political manoeuvring, much of it is mired in misty-eyed sentimentality about a people who ‘trop longtemps on a pleuré les malheurs de la Shean Vhan Vhocht’ [for too long have wept about the misfortunes of the Shean Vhan Vhocht (sic)].24 All was set to change, Jean Malye wrote: ‘Aujourd’hui 700,000 personnes parlent celtique […] l’effort celtique se manifeste partout’ [Today 700,000 people speak Gaelic […] the Celtic effort is manifest everywhere].25 Concluding with an allusion to the ending of the 1920 play by Lady Gregory and Yeats, he proclaimed: ‘L’Irlande celtique ne veut pas du Home Rule anglais: son

22 Oona Frawley, ‘The Shadows of the Glen and Riders to the Sea’, in P.J. Mathews, ed., The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16.

23 Jean Malye, ‘“Eiré” et “Sassanach”: L’Irlande celtique et le Home Rule’, L’Intransigeant (29 April 1912).

24 Malye, ‘“Eiré” et “Sassanach”: L’Irlande celtique et le Home Rule’.25 Malye, ‘“Eiré” et “Sassanach”: L’Irlande celtique et le Home Rule’.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 99

indépendance véritable datera du jour où le Cathleen ni Hoolihan, jeune et libre, saluera le monde’ [Celtic Ireland does not want English Home Rule; her independence will date from the day when Cathleen Ni Hoolihan [sic], young and free, greets the world].26

L’Intransigeant’s stance typified how the French press regarded Ireland at this time, although Malye seems to have been particularly familiar with the political symbolism attached to cultural tropes such as the Sean bhean bhocht and Kathleen Ni Houlihan. Perhaps he was subtly reminding read-ers of France’s historical investment in the Irish cause, for the ‘Sean bhean bhocht’ song which dates from shortly after 1798 starts by celebrating French participation in the Rebellion:

‘The French are on the sea,’ says the Sean Bhean Bhocht,‘Oh, the French are in the bay, they’ll be here without delay,And the Orange will decay,’ says the Sean Bhean Bhocht.

This episode of Irish history, as narrated in the Sean Bhean Bhocht, was in turn dramatised in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Yet despite these allusions to a shared Irish and French past, L’Intransigeant’s account of a resurgent nation is prone to exoticising tendencies. A fascination with ‘la vieille langue des Gaels’ [the ancient language of the Gaels] is apparent: ‘Gan teanga gantir [sic] (pas de langue, pas de pays) disent-ils’ [No language, no country, they say].27 Later, the journalist tries to capture Ireland in a broader sense:

Limerick, qui se rappelle toujours la violation du traité de 1691, Galway, ancienne reine des mers […] les montagnes bleues de Connemara […] Glendalough et son lac fatal murmure toujours son histoire d’amour, Killarney enchante toujours par son charme.

[Limerick, a place which still recalls the violation of the 1691 Treaty of Limerick; Galway, formerly queen of the seas […] the steel-blue mountains of Connemara […] Glendalough and her fatal lake still whisper of a legendary romance, Killarney’s charm is still enchanting.]28

26 Malye, ‘“Eiré” et “Sassanach”’.27 Ibid.28 Ibid.

100 Laura Watson

The abundant references to a unique language, people, geography, history and mythology paint the country as Other. Importantly, Malye wrote this piece at a time when Paris was in the throes of a theatrical obsession with exoticism. Ever since they had arrived in the French capital in 1909, the musico-choreographic presentations by the Ballets Russes of exotic tales from Russia, the Far East and elsewhere had been wildly popular with the French public.

In this environment, one could see the potential in Riders to the Sea as an exotic opera. French composers for the stage had long been inspired by a range of remote settings: Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) was set in Spain, Reynaldo Hahn’s L’Île du rêve (1893) in Polynesia, and Florent Schmitt’s Tragédie de Salomé (1907) in Egypt. Thus, an opera on an Irish theme could have added to a pre-existing repertoire. Rabaud, though, would plough a different route. Why? Perhaps because Synge’s artistic world was entwined with that of the current Parisian cultural scene. He, more than other Irish playwrights, is likely to have intrigued French composers for a host of rea-sons: his previous music career, the contemporary French influence on his writing, and reports of the riots which had greeted the Dublin premiere of his Playboy of the Western World (1907).29 That play reached the Parisian stage in December 1913, just six months after Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring had scandalised theatregoers and sparked disturbances at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Both works provoked outrage for perceived vulgarity of content and style. By the eve of World War I then, modern Ireland occupied a more prominent position in French cultural thought than was the case in the late nineteenth century when Holmès and her peers had paid homage to ancient Ireland.

29 At least one music critic made a point of detailing Synge’s past: ‘il avait travaillé le violin, le piano et obtenu au Conservatoire de son pays, dès l’âge de vingt ans, les prix d’harmonie et de contrepoint. Il s’en fut ensuite compléter en Allemagne son éducation musicale.’ [He had studied violin, piano, and won prizes in harmony and counterpoint from the conservatory in his own country by the age of twenty. He then went to Germany to complete his musical education.] Anon., ‘Avant-première: à l’Opéra-Comique L’Appel de la mer de M. Henri Rabaud’, Le Ménestrel (4 April 1924).

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 101

Setting the Scene for L’Appel de la mer

The outbreak of war profoundly altered the Parisian music scene and its effects were still felt in the 1920s when L’Appel de la mer appeared on the opera stage. The two flagship institutions, the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, had adapted to the conflict by concentrating their lim-ited resources on patriotic pageants rather than on complex new works. Few premieres were given by either company during 1914–18; instead, they were delayed until the 1920s. As a consequence, the predominantly tonal pre-war compositional language of these ‘postponed’ operas immedi-ately seemed dated when compared to avant-garde developments in other genres, such as ballet, which had actually gained momentum during the war. Following Stravinsky’s abrasive modernism, Erik Satie further startled audiences with gunshot sound effects and American ragtime in Parade (1917). Shortly afterwards Darius Milhaud built on these experiments with a polytonal tribute to Harlem jazz as part of La Création du monde (1923). The Milhaud ballet premiered the year before L’Appel de la mer but the two had little in common. ‘Modernism is the enemy’ was Rabaud’s slogan, a reactionary public stance which partly explains why L’Appel de la mer failed to excite audiences, vanished from the repertoire, and remains neglected by musicologists today.30

In early 1924, however, an air of anticipation surrounded L’Appel de la mer, as Rabaud had previously scored a hit at the Opéra-Comique in May 1914 with an exotic Egyptian spectacle called Mârouf, savetier du Caire. Mârouf was cited by André Cœuroy in 1922 as a work which featured ‘toutes les hardiesses de l’école moderne’ [all the boldness of the modern school], despite the composer’s disinclination to align his art with a particular aesthetic.31 During the post-war period, Rabaud’s conservative reputation

30 Anna Girardot and Richard Langham Smith, ‘Henri Rabaud’, Grove Music Online <http://oxfordmusiconline.com> accessed 10 May 2014.

31 André Cœuroy, La Musique française moderne: quinze musiciens français (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1922), 118.

102 Laura Watson

was no barrier to interest in his work. As a reporter for Le Ménestrel wrote on the eve of the 1924 première: ‘le succès universel et persistant de Mârouf donneront à la première représentation de L’Appel de la mer une impor-tance que– si nous en croyons les échos de l’Opéra-Comique – la beauté de l’œuvre ne démentira pas’ [Mârouf’s universal and enduring success makes L’Appel de la mer’s first performance an important occasion which – if the rumours from the Opéra-Comique are true – the beauty of this work meas-ures up to].32 Rabaud was the subject of close scrutiny for another reason: in 1922 he had been appointed the director of the Paris Conservatoire, the country’s government-funded centre of music education. With a history of training singers, instrumentalists, and composers for careers at the capi-tal’s two major opera companies, an Opéra-Comique première courtesy of a reigning Conservatoire director was always an auspicious event. Such events assumed an even greater official importance in the 1920s as opera became ensnared in post-war political debates concerning the nature of French identity. Key productions in this vein included: Vincent d’Indy’s Légende de Saint-Christophe (1920), a paean to Christian martyrdom that fused religious belief with right-wing nationalism; Marcel Bertrand’s Sainte Odile (1923), which alluded to the country’s reclaiming of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918; and Joseph Canteloube’s Le Mas (1929), which championed region-alist ideology. By turn, L’Appel de la mer is memorable for how Maurya (in diametric opposition to the d’Indy, Bertrand, and Canteloube protagonists) loses faith in doctrinaire Catholicism and instead seeks solace in keening rituals and pagan festivals. The subtlety of Synge’s rhetoric was lost on the critics, however. In any case, Rabaud’s Mârouf had them primed not for a sermon but for another exotic opera. So what did the composer deliver?

Rabaud decided to set Riders to the Sea as an opera after reading the play during a trip to Boston in 1919.33 Deciding against using an available translation, he produced his own libretto: ‘version presque littérale, qui,

32 Anon., ‘Avant-première: à l’Opéra-Comique’.33 As reported in Le Ménestrel, (4 April 1924). A performance of Riders to the Sea at the

Petit-Théâtre anglais, Paris, was advertised in Le Figaro on 9 March 1915. Whether Rabaud attended this is or not is unknown.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 103

tout en conservant au dialogue – les personnages sont d’humbles gens de mer – […] corrige seulement quelques tournures trop populaires pour se prêter à l’expression musicale’ [an almost literal version, which, keeping the sense of the informal dialogue – the characters are humble, seafaring people – […] corrects only the occasional colloquial turn of phrase in order to enhance the musical expression].34 In trying to preserve the authenticity of Synge’s Aran-Islands dialect, Rabaud, contrary to expectations, signalled that L’Appel de la mer would be shaped more by realism than exoticism. His study of Synge’s text would have revealed a further reason to avoid reductive exoticism: such an approach would have been incompatible with Riders to the Sea’s stylistic and thematic resemblances to French turn-of-the-century aesthetic movements. These similarities were the result of Synge’s first-hand, sustained absorption in the country’s literary and linguistic cultures.35 One Parisian music critic detailed how Synge spent 1895–98 in France, ‘fréquentant nos bibliothèques, suivant les cours du Collège de France et de la Sorbonne, se familiarisant avec nos classiques et étudiant d’autre part … la langue bretonne’ [frequenting our libraries, attending classes at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne, familiarising himself with our classics … and also studying the Breton language].36

Synge developed a deep affinity for Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbol-ist plays, which can be perceived in Riders to the Sea; for instance, the drowning of the sons echoes the plot of Maeterlinck’s Intérieur (1894).37 In Synge’s drama, Maurya lives with her daughters Cathleen and Nora and son Bartley. Her father-in-law, husband, and five other sons have already been lost to the sea, the most recent victim being Michael, whose body has just washed up in Donegal. Against his mother’s wishes, Bartley then departs for Galway. Maurya predicts she will have no sons left and, as prophesied, Bartley’s drowned body is returned to the family towards

34 Anon., ‘Avant-première: à l’Opéra-Comique’, Le Ménestrel. 35 Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008), 117.36 Anon., ‘Avant-première: à l’Opéra-Comique’, Le Ménestrel.37 Ben Levitas, ‘J.M. Synge: European Encounters’, in Mathews, ed., The Cambridge

Companion to J.M. Synge, 84.

104 Laura Watson

the end of the play. Beyond reminiscences of specific Maeterlinck plays, Synge’s text reproduces a few of Maeterlinck’s general stylistic qualities: the nature symbolism, claustrophobic atmosphere, characters’ isolation from the outside world, and fatalistic narrative are all familiar from both Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1901). Those plays had also been adapted as operas, by Debussy and Paul Dukas respectively, and staged by the Opéra-Comique in 1902 and 1907.

Musical Aspects of L’Appel de la mer

Traces of the early twentieth-century modernism of Dukas and Debussy linger in Rabaud’s post-war opera score, suggesting that Maeterlinck and Synge prompted similar responses in French composers of this period. As one would thus expect, L’Appel de la mer does not quite embrace Milhaud’s cutting-edge polytonality but the tonal language extends to incorporate the modal structures of Irish traditional music. The music is anchored in the G mixolydian mode, a mode which differs from the major scale by flattening the seventh scale degree. Rabaud, however, altered the mixolydian mode to include a raised fourth scale degree, thereby generating tritonal dissonance that mirrors the unsettling mood of the libretto. At distinct moments (for instance: the first iteration in bar 4, its appearance as the curtain rises in bar 15, and in the last bar), the harmony is voiced as an A major chord stacked over a G dominant seventh such that this modal idiom generates a modern sound.38 The modal colour introduced in the orchestral prelude is later inflected by more particular references to native Irish music.

As the opera first unfolds, however, it is indebted to Pelléas. Like Debussy, Rabaud uses the orchestra to establish the mood – its turbu-lence here evokes the sea – and, adhering to his predecessor’s style, the

38 It could be regarded as either polytonal or jazz-inspired harmony, both of which were part of the French modernist musical language.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 105

vocal writing is often declamatory. As in Pelléas, Rabaud’s characters tend to communicate with each other in a prosaic, syllabic fashion unless the mood of the text calls for a more affective musical response. The action begins with Nora and Cathleen discussing whether clothes found on a Donegal shore could belong to their brother Michael. They sing quietly in a recitative style that ebbs and flows with the natural spoken rhythms of the libretto. Maurya enters the conversation with a more lilting, sentimental part as she mentions Bartley’s plan to travel to Connemara. Although she insists: ‘il n’ira pas aujourd’hui’ [he will not go today], Bartley’s relentless, galloping orchestral theme asserts otherwise and he soon sets off.39 Maurya laments his departure with a melismatic outpouring of emotion reminis-cent of sean-nós singing, but whereas the sean-nós singer would perform unaccompanied and in the Irish language, this passage is in French and the orchestra maintains a quiet presence.40 Rabaud’s approach to the use of folk material echoes that of Debussy and Dukas, both of whom featured French folk songs in their respective operas but only as climactic set-pieces.41 The understated vocal expression in much of L’Appel de la mer amplifies the realism inherent in Synge’s text, while the wisely-judged incorporation of native tunes and techniques ensures that the opera never descends into stage-Irish farce.

When the score has recourse to Irish music, it embraces it imaginatively. Nora tells Cathleen what the priest had to say about their latest tragedy: ‘“Si c’est à Michael,” dit-il, “vous pouvez dire à votre mère qu’il est en terre chrétienne, par la grâce de Dieu”’ [‘If [the clothes] are Michael’s,’ he says, ‘you can tell your mother that he is in Christian ground now by the grace of God’]. Nora mimics his words to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Green’.42

39 See Henri Rabaud, L’Appel de la mer, vocal score (Paris: Max Eschig & Cie, 1923), 11, 13.

40 Ibid., 28–9. 41 In Pelléas, Mélisande sings ‘Mes longs cheveux’ from her tower in Act III. In Ariane,

Bluebeard’s imprisoned wives sing ‘Les cinq filles d’Orlamonde’ towards the end of Act I.

42 Rabaud, L’Appel de la mer, 5.

106 Laura Watson

The spirited, sentimental melody captures the young priest’s naivety and lack of authority. Maurya later dismisses him because ‘ces hommes là n’y connaissent rien, à la mer’ [it’s little the likes of him know of the sea].43 In contrast, Maurya is established as a sincere, serious figure by singing in an Irish folk style with far greater sensitivity. The best example is found towards the end of the opera. Over a drone accompaniment typical of the traditional genre, she mourns the men in her family, her voice wander-ing plaintively around the true G mixolydian mode.44 Remembering how other islanders brought news of a drowning when Bartley was a baby, she recounts this to the tune of ‘She Moved through the Fair’.45 Also in the G mixolydian mode, it is an apt melodic choice for this scene. The last main allusion to Irish tradition arrives towards the end of the opera when Bartley’s body is brought home. Women keen over his body, a ritual which Rabaud reproduces as a soft, almost inaudible hum initially on the pitches D and E, but soon expanded into a fuller lament in E minor.46 Realism is the order of the day as the music seeks to convey the private, emotional truth of the characters.

43 Ibid., 65.44 Ibid., 67 onwards. This is the ‘true’ mixolydian mode in the sense that Rabaud does

not raise the fourth scale degree here, as he had previously done. 45 Ibid., 70, to the words: ‘J’étais assise ici; Bartley, encore un bébé, était couché sur mes

deux genoux; et j’ai vu deux femmes, puis trois femmes, puis quatre femmes, entrer et se signer sans dire un mot.’ [I was sitting here; Bartley, still a baby, was asleep on my knees; and I saw two, then three, then four, women enter and make the sign of the cross without saying a word.]

46 Women’s voices are heard first from the corridor and are then followed by the keen-ing, 71;75ff.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 107

French Reaction to L’Appel de la mer

Starring Suzanne Balguerie as Maurya, the opera officially premiered on 10 April 1924 but most critics attended the dress rehearsal on the after-noon of Saturday 5 April.47 Several positive commentaries appeared in the press over the next week, most of these focusing on realism, the use of Irish music, symbolism, and Gallic influences on the libretto. Despite Rabaud’s track record with Mârouf, L’Appel de la mer could not be catego-rised as exotic: it lacked the seductive female Other and the supernatural element integral to the earlier work. Instead of offering escapist fantasy, the 1924 opera is grounded in Synge’s unvarnished realism. From the very first notes, it made a visceral impact – as Paul Bertrand stated in Le Ménestrel: ‘c’est la musique qui, dès le début du prélude, évoque, en de larges accords dissonants, la mer tourmentée’ [from the start of the prelude, the music’s thick dissonant chords evoke the tormented sea].48 André Messager of Le Figaro reacted likewise: ‘le bruit de la mer se fait entendre tout au long de l’ouvrage par grandes poussées sonores qui donnent l’impression des coups de bélier de ses flots sur les roches’ [the noise of the sea makes itself heard throughout the work through great sonic gestures that give the impres-sion of water hammers as the waves hit the rocks].49 The sonorous sym-bolism derives from the construct of the sea as antagonist, a device which reviewers recognised from Intérieur, as well as from novels such as Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande (1886) and Victor Hugo’s Travailleurs de la mer (1866).50 Apart from making intertextual allusions to French literature,

47 One source names Thursday 10 April 1924 as the official date: see Nicole Wild and David Charlton, Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique Paris: Répertoire 1762–1972 (Belgium: Mardaga, 2005), 142. Le Figaro on 5 April 1924 advertised the dress rehearsal taking place that afternoon.

48 Paul Bertrand, ‘La Semaine musicale’, Le Ménestrel (11 April 1924).49 André Messager, ‘Les Premières’, Le Figaro (7 April 1924). 50 At least two critics remarked on this: Adolphe Boschot, ‘La Vie musicale’, L’Écho

de Paris (9 April 1924); and Louis Schneider, ‘Le Gaulois au théâtre’, Le Gaulois (7 April 1924).

108 Laura Watson

the composer demonstrated a keen sensitivity towards Synge’s play too. As Messager observed: ‘M. Rabaud […] s’est appliqué à commenter et renforcer le pathétique de situations extrêmement dramatiques par elles-mêmes’ [Mr Rabaud has applied himself to commenting on and reinforcing the pathos of situations that are extremely dramatic in and of themselves].51 Louis Schneider in Le Gaulois similarly applauded the composer for writing an opera where ‘la musique est à sa place sans ralentir l’action’ [music is in the right place without slowing down the action].52 Stylistic fidelity to Synge’s drama was integral to the overall production. As Adolphe Jullien observed: ‘la mise en scène, très exacte en son réalisme, ajoute encore à l’intensité d’un spectacle infiniment triste’ [the staging, which is very exact in its realism, further adds to the intensity of this infinitely sad spectacle.]53

Where L’Appel de la mer really intrigued Parisians was in its appropria-tion of Irish culture. Commentators such as Adolphe Boschot regarded the work as authentic due to Synge’s first-hand experience of the Aran Islands and its people. Paraphrasing Synge, Boschot observed that: ‘ces âmes frustes […] savaient vivre et mourir’ [these frustrated souls […] knew how to live and die].54 In so saying, he highlighted the fatalistic world-view of the islands’ inhabitants, which the play reproduced. To the satisfaction of critics such as Henry Malherbe, Rabaud’s opera remained true to these folk origins. Malherbe had a good ear for native inflections in the score: ‘J’ai cru discerner quelques souvenirs de deux ou trois mélodies irlandaises de Moore’ [I thought I discerned a few memories of two or three Moore’s melodies].55 He further identified ‘The Wearing of the Green’ and ‘les plaints funèbres traditionnelles d’Erin, le ritual Caoin ou Keen ou Keening, que Lady Gregory a consigné’ [the traditional funeral cries from Erin, the ritual Caoin or Keen or Keening to which Lady Gregory referred].56

51 Messager, ‘Les Premières’.52 Schneider, ‘Le Gaulois au théâtre’.53 Adolphe Jullien, ‘Revue musicale’, Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (13 April

1924).54 Boschot, ‘La Vie musicale’. 55 Henry Malherbe, Chronique musicale’, Le Temps (9 April 1924).56 Ibid.

Ireland in the Musical Imagination of Third Republic France 109

These reviews show French music critics of the 1920s to be well-informed about Ireland’s indigenous vocal traditions and attendant social customs. Unlike the central European symphonism of Holmès’s Irlande, or the Alyssa cantata texts of dubious provenance, or Hennessy’s vaguely Celtic salon music, L’Appel de la mer represented a real Irish community with the score giving full voice to its folk traditions. Staging such a work at the Opéra-Comique could only have happened during the historical moment of the 1920s when there was acute French awareness of Ireland’s plight. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 had prompted Le Figaro to run two front-page articles on the matter. One of these queried ‘“République” ou “État libre”?’ [‘Republic’ or ‘Free State?’] in reference to continuing political difficulties, It concluded by quoting Seán T. O’Kelly: ‘La France nous a toujours manifesté sa sympathie, et j’espère qu’un jour la “République irlandaise” pourra lui témoigner sa reconnaissance’ [France has always been sympathetic to us and I hope that one day the ‘Irish Republic’ will be able to show its gratitude].57

Produced at a time when Ireland was attempting to assert its politi-cal independence, L’Appel de la mer is an invaluable artistic artefact and historical document. Rabaud’s nuanced treatment of Synge’s drama forms a nexus of creative connections between early twentieth-century Irish lit-erature and French music. Moreover, the opera functions as a focal point for understanding how cultural thought about Ireland evolved in Third Republic France, reflecting the gradual transformation from a paternalistic view of an oppressed nation to a more modern acceptance and recognition of Ireland’s emerging statehood.

57 James de Coquet, ‘“République” où “État libre”?’ Le Figaro (7 December 1921).

Part III

Fruitful Encounters

Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre

Could there be a link between sea monsters and silences, and between them and music and famous paintings? However unlikely such connec-tions might seem, they are artistically and novelistically achieved by two modern writers: by French author Françoise Lefèvre in Un album de silence [A Book of Silence] (2008) and by Neil Jordan in Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994). This chapter will examine how, while focusing on parent-child relationships, both books depict diverse reactions to loss, and embrace words, music and visual art as both supports and descriptive illustrations.

Françoise Lefèvre, born in 1942, has produced eighteen books since the 1970s. In 1975, La première habitude [The First Habit], about an ill-fated relationship between a young woman and a painter, was selected by the readers of the women’s magazine Elle for their Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle. In 1990 she was awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for Le Petit Prince Cannibale [The Cannibalistic Little Prince], which is an account of her struggle to bring up an autistic child. Born in 1950, Neil Jordan achieved fame as a writer very early on, with a collection of stories, Night in Tunisia, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He has also written, directed and produced many films which have made him internationally famous. He is the author of five novels, Mistaken (2011) being the latest to date.

In Françoise Lefèvre’s book, Un album de silence (2008),1 the first-person narrator, Madame L as her banker calls her, is a woman in her early sixties, who bears a close resemblance to the author. Like her, she lives in

1 Françoise Lefèvre, Un album de silence [A Book of Silence] (Paris: Mercure de France, 2008). My translation (as are all the translations in this chapter). Lefèvre has told me (personal communication) that none of her books had ever been translated.

114 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

a village in Burgundy and is engaged in the writing of a new book, having already produced seventeen books before that. Like Françoise Lefèvre, she is the mother of four children, and the youngest, also called Hermine, is a budding young cello player who has left a home that has now become an empty nest. Madame L feels the loss keenly and, in attempting to assuage that pain, she resorts to music that Hermine used to play, to a Flemish painting and to passages from various French poets.

Neil Jordan’s book, Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994),2 is his third novel. Here the first-person narrator is a young man, Donal, whose mother died, presumably of TB, when he was only six years old. Donal’s father had been involved in the War of Independence and was, at one time, a member of the Free State government. In the silence that soon settles over the household following his mother’s death, Donal is attracted to the piano that she used to play and he tinkles with the keys. He later conjures up visions of sunrise and sea monster (found in a painting). In addition, the use or avoidance of certain words is what marks out Donal’s development in a motherless environment.

What is remarkable is that the theme of loss which permeates each of these books is dealt with by each of the narrators through a musical instrument, a work of art, and the power of words. This chapter will first explore the nature of each individual’s loss and its accompanying image, before examining the ways in which music, art and words become particular tools in the struggle against grief.

Individual Loss

Loss is experienced by both narrators, Madame L and Donal, although cir-cumstances differ noticeably. In Donal’s case, the loss is tangible, brought about by the death of his mother. Madame L’s loss is of the empty-nest

2 Neil Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994).

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 115

type. Her last child, now a young woman, has just embarked on a musical career that has taken her away to Paris, and the big house where all four children grew up has become a sinister place (‘L’inquiétante maison’ [the sombre house]).3 Donal’s house by the seaside at the end of the Promenade in Bray, ‘That cold structure’,4 echoes with the elusive sounds of a stolen childhood; Madame L’s house resonates with the cries, laughter and patter of feet of a not-so-distant past.

The boy Donal has lost someone essential, a mother with whom to learn and to share love. Madame L has lost the main thread on which her life hung: her beloved children who have turned into young adults. Now that he has been deprived of a mother’s presence, Donal has no one to turn to for support, since his father’s grief is of the silent type. Madame L’s grief is contained within the walls of a desperately empty house. Donal reaches out for a substitute for the mother that he has lost to death while Madame L reaches out for the loved ones she has lost to life. Donal has not been able to love to the full while Madame L’s whole being used to be suffused with boundless, all-encompassing love. Both of them, however, experience the pain brought about by loss.

The pain strikes each of them with a different intensity. Madame L was once surrounded by children who constantly needed her and she was utterly content, fulfilling each task with what she refers to as joy. Now the loss is threatening to annihilate her: ‘Je perds mes forces. Je perds ma vie. J’ai perdu ma joie’ [ I’m losing my strength, the urge to go on living. I’ve lost the joy of living].5 Donal’s grief is that of a child who guesses, rather than understands, what is happening to him: ‘What I did know was that everything had changed […] I felt a sadness oozing out of me […]’.6 Both his ‘sadness’ and Madame L’s ‘chagrin’ [grief ],7 however, find expression through closely connected imagery.

3 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 33.4 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 30.5 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 24.6 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 10.7 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 104.

116 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

On the day his mother died, Donal was out fishing with his father and he suddenly found himself alone on the beach when his father started hur-rying towards their house. He knows instinctively that he will never see his mother alive again and he immediately connects her death with the sea: ‘I knew I should follow but couldn’t’, he says. ‘I turned and walked towards the sea’.8 In his child’s mind, the waters in the sea are like a grave for her: ‘and I knew then that if she had gone anywhere it was into that sea from which we had plucked so many fish’.9 Water is what connects a child to its mother, and it brings Donal some measure of comfort when he sees her in her coffin: ‘She looked younger in death, not sick any longer, but somehow distant, as if she was already sleeping beneath the tide’.10

For Madame L, however, the deadening, crushing weight of her loss is suggested through water turning into snow and ice, and therefore holding no comfort. Looking out of the window, she writes that she seems to have watched snowflakes whirling around outside all year round: ‘Toute une année je suis restée derrière la fenêtre à regarder tomber la neige’ [I have been standing by the window for a whole year, watching snow fall].11 Not only have loss and grief made her feel numb, they have almost annihilated her. Her whole being has frozen from the loss of that earlier life-giving love: ‘[ Je suis] métamorphosée en statue de glace derrière la fenêtre’ [I have been turned into a statue of ice behind the window].12 On two occasions, she cries out that she wants to tear a shard of ice from her flesh: ‘Je veux retirer cette lame de glace fichée dans mon coeur’ [I want to tear off the blade of ice that has been thrust into my heart],13 or ‘Comment retirer cette lame de glace fichée dans ma poitrine?’ [How can I tear off the blade of ice that has been thrust into my breast?].14 She has been struck by an incurable

8 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 6.9 Ibid., 10.10 Ibid., 12.11 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 11.12 Ibid., 20.13 Ibid., 113.14 Ibid., 129.

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 117

disease, what she calls “maladie de l’attachement” [motherly attachment syndrome].15

Both Donal and Madame L are unhappy but each tries in different ways to resist being crushed by grief. Donal goes on hoping for a female presence other than their maid, Maisie, who ‘made a poor substitute for even the hope of [my mother’s] presence’.16 Madame L is desperately trying to summon up all her strength: ‘il va […] falloir que je reprenne mon envol’ [I’ll have to take flight again],17 and later ‘Il faut que je travaille à ma résur-rection’ [I have to try and achieve resurrection].18 Rebirth will be sought through music, art and words.

Musical Consolation

Both Donal and Madame L have been forced, through the loss of a loved one, to leave a world where a form of inner contentment was experienced at the closeness of a mother or a child, respectively. Madame L keeps knocking on the doors of a lost kingdom: ‘Dieu sait si j’aurai usé mes poings à frapper aux portes d’un royaume perdu’ [God knows how I have been rapping my knuckles raw on the doors of a lost kingdom].19 She once lived in a house that seemed to come straight out of a fairy story (‘Elle sortait d’un conte’ [it was a fairy tale house])20 and to be a haven where happiness reigned supreme (‘le havre qu’elle était’ [the haven that it used to be]),21 but she

15 Ibid., 46.16 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 24.17 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 24.18 Ibid., 142.19 Ibid., 112.20 Ibid., 33.21 Ibid., 33.

118 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

now feels she has been forever banished from its joys and sent into exile (‘Je suis dans l’exil. Tous les exils’ [I’m in exile, in each and every exile]).22

Donal now lives in the ruins of a former kingdom where there used to be a modicum of family life in spite of his mother’s disease. A strong bond of affection connected him to his mother through a form of ritual when he was allowed into her room. He explains that

She would smile weakly when I came in and I would […] stand by the bedstead […] until her hand stretched over the pillow to grasp mine […] she’d […] draw me slowly down to the bed […] and I’d reach across the mounds of the quilt […] and lie there, listening to both of us breathing.23

After her death, Donal is left wandering through the empty rooms, with his silent, withdrawn father in the background. He feels as if his somewhat mysterious little world had been suddenly whisked out of existence: ‘She had vanished, effected a trick more complete than any town-hall magician’.24

Donal and Madame L are, therefore, desperately trying to hang on to the few shreds of memories they have left. Madame L feels that her memory is slowly disintegrating: ‘je suis en train de perdre la mémoire’ [I’m losing my memory].25 Donal soon becomes aware that he remembers his mother very imperfectly: ‘my memories of her […] grew dimmer as the years went on’.26 In order to resist the wave threatening to engulf their respective memories of a not-so-distant past, each of the narrators resorts to music. It is music which helps them maintain a vital link to a loved one whose loss has brought irremediable change to their lives. It is music which is the first stage on the road to a form of rebirth.

In the living room of Donal’s sombre house stands a piano. He says, ‘I have a dim memory of her playing’.27 The silent keys attract him like a magnet, and the memory of the tunes she used to play is never very far from

22 Ibid., 38.23 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 4.24 Ibid., 14.25 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 79.26 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 9.27 Ibid., 24.

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 119

his mind, causing him to be under some sort of delusion at times: ‘when the wind whistled through the sails in the harbour outside my bedroom window I would mistake the sounds for music’.28 Out of a desire to reach out for some form of communion with his mother, he starts to play: ‘I would tinker with [the keys], become her ghost myself, pick out the melodies I most wanted to hear. “Roll out the Barrel” […] “The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls”’.29 As he says, ‘The piano became my way to her’.30 Later, he brings out a record of ‘Rachmaninov playing himself ’31 which he finds in his mother’s belongings, during a piano lesson with Rose, the teacher hired by his father, and she begins to teach him love: ‘The playing was impossibly good and I wondered whether [our maid Maisie] would notice the orchestral bits or hear our ever-more impassioned breathing’.32

When Hermine, Madame L’s youngest child, leaves home with her cello for Paris, a world of joy, love and carefree laughter is torn apart. Now Hermine’s room is empty (‘la chambre désertée’ [her room is deserted]),33 and the house echoes only with the silence of the strings that are gone: ‘Étrange silence des cordes qui ne vibrent plus’ [how strange is the silence of strings that produce no sounds].34 And yet the music Hermine used to play inhabits the place so that, like Donal, Madame L is deluded into thinking that a loved one is there, playing her instrument: ‘Grave, ample, chaud, s’élève le chant d’un violoncelle […] je sais qui joue si merveilleuse-ment. Ma fille. Mon amour. Mon dernier enfant. Hermine […] Je l’appelle. Aucun son ne sort de ma bouche’ [the warm, deep ample sound of a cello suddenly reaches my ears. I know who’s playing so wonderfully well. My darling daughter. My youngest child. I want to call her but not a sound comes out of my mouth].35

28 Ibid., 24.29 Ibid., 24.30 Ibid., 24.31 Ibid., 43.32 Ibid., 44.33 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 28.34 Ibid., 27.35 Ibid., 20.

120 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

Although music causes the pain of absence to be cruelly felt by Madame L, it is nevertheless one of the vital ingredients in her recovery, especially through retrieval of the memories of her lost kingdom. Again and again, she thinks she can hear sonatas being carried to her, one after another, from some mysterious distant place: ‘Une sonate me parvient de très loin. Puis une autre. Encore une autre […] Schubert […] Chopin […] Brahms’ [a sonata reaches my ears from very far away, then another, and yet another].36 Music brings tears to her eyes, reminding her of the happiness she has lost, but it is also what brings back the precious memories she dreads having lost for good: ‘En évoquant [ce bonheur], […] je me suis immergée dans ce qui a disparu […] Seule la musique me le restitue. En particulier, l’adagio du Quintette pour deux violoncelles de Schubert’ [In conjuring up memories of past happiness, I have returned to the world I have lost. Only music brings it back to me. Particularly the adagio in Quintet for Two Cellos by Schubert].37 This particular cello piece resonates deep inside her and is referred to several times: ‘Et toujours Schubert […] Ce mouvement lent du Quintette pour deux violoncelles. Obsédant’ [And Schubert again and again. The slow rhythm of Quintet for Two Cellos. Obsessively].38 A form of obsession is also experienced by Donal when he is attracted again and again to the piano in the living room: ‘I would creep downstairs […] I would creep down again, in darkness this time’.39

Music helps both Donal and Madame L to experience a form of pres-ence-in-absence when dealing with the pain of loss. It almost fleshes out the loved ones in elusive snatches of a time never to be regained. Art is what will add a new dimension to their quest by building up a different world and moving their pain on to another plane.

36 Ibid., 39.37 Ibid., 45.38 Ibid., 112.39 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 24.

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 121

Serenity in Art

The most immediate reference to art is the very title of Jordan’s book, Sunrise with Sea Monster. It calls to mind a painting by J. M. W. Turner which is now at the Tate Gallery and is entitled Sunrise with Sea Monsters (c.1845). In Lefèvre’s book, Madame L refers several times to The Milkmaid (c.1658–1660), the painting by the Flemish artist Vermeer.

Donal the narrator never makes any explicit references to Turner’s painting other than indirectly through a comment on the way his father used to enjoy watching the sea: ‘Boats on the horizon had always meant a lot to him. Thoughts of the Americas, of the edge of the world […] Those monsters at the world’s end, fabulous creatures’.40 Although the painting is never mentioned by name, this description fits the details of Turner’s paint-ing. In the child’s mind, the sea is associated with something mysterious and vaguely threatening, especially because his mother died during one of the fishing expeditions he went on with his father. There is some form of hope in the image of the sunrise but the monsters are well and truly there, with their eyes and mouths discernible at the world’s end, on the blurred merging of sea, sky and sunlight.

Moreover, his imagination finds an outlet in his dreams. The monsters are the fish that got caught: ‘the fish our hooks had gleaned were not the comforting plaice and sole we were used to, but odd misshapen creatures, pallid, […] huge whiskers and eyes, mouths shaped like tulips’.41 The dis-covery is soon followed by a tidal wave threatening to engulf them. The world of imagination and dreams turns the incomprehensible scene of that day into a representation of a child’s perception that bears a resemblance to Turner’s painting. Much later, at the end of the book, the monstrous fish reappears, before a surreal meeting between Donal and his dead father, at sunrise: ‘As I came closer it revealed itself, outsize and majestic, […] quite silver-scaled, eyes bulging and distended, tulip-mouthed, on its forehead

40 Ibid., 97.41 Ibid., 6.

122 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

a curved and perfect horn’.42 A form of resolution of what the child had experienced as a vaguely threatening mystery is suggested through his father vanishing into the sea at sunset, thereby transforming the disquiet-ing painting into an image of serenity at last.

Serenity is also associated with art for Madame L who, like Donal, finds herself in a world that has lost its familiar contours, and even seems alien and threatening to her. The invisible fabric woven by everyday life with her adored children was irreparably frayed when the last one finally left home: ‘Les berceaux sont vides’ [the cradles are empty].43 Since then, Madame L has completely lost her bearings: ‘Je ne retrouve pas le chemin de la maison’ [I’mno longer able to find my way back home].44 The notion of space has dissolved and she is left outside, with nothing to hold on to. She is suspended in a limbo-like universe that has no substance: ‘Il me semble que désormais j’habite un pays rayé de toutes cartes’ [I seem to be living in a country that cannot be found on any map].45 To resist the sense of anni-hilation that the absence has produced, Madame L has not only music but also art, particularly the Vermeer painting, The Milkmaid: ‘cette peinture de Vermeer, La Laitière. C’est mon refuge’ [the painting by Vermeer, The Milkmaid, is my place of refuge].46

The work of art is literally a parallel environment that abolishes all the uncertainties and grief belonging to the old one. It is for her a different form of space, a place she can enter and leave at will: ‘j’entre dans ce tableau de Vermeer’ [I enter the Vermeer painting]47 or ‘Tout juste sortie du tableau de La Laitière’ [I’ve just come out of the painting The Milkmaid].48 She even claims to live in it: ‘je retourne habiter cette peinture’ [I’m going back to live in this painting].49 In a very natural fashion, she takes the woman’s

42 Ibid., 173.43 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 37.44 Ibid., 133.45 Ibid., 78.46 Ibid., 53.47 Ibid., 57.48 Ibid., 62.49 Ibid., 53.

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 123

place, wears her clothes and engages in her daily tasks, particularly that of caring for her children. An infant is breathing softly in a cradle (‘On entend juste la respiration d’un nouveau-né dans son berceau’ [all that can be heard is a newborn breathing in its cradle],50 and simply watching over this cradle (‘[ Je] veille’ [I’m on the watch])51 fills her with deep content-ment. In this interchanging of space, she is at one with the work of art. In the figure of an unknown young woman absorbed in a simple task, that of pouring milk into a bowl, she catches glimpses of eternity: ‘Ce simple geste de verser est une promesse d’éternité’ [the very act of pouring milk is a promise of eternity].52 Against the relentless flow of time taking away her beloved children one by one, she turns to art for a sense of immortality in the boundless infinity of a mother’s love.

Saved by Words

However, in the end, it is not just through art and music that Madame L gathers the strength to go on living, in spite of the searing pain of absence, reflected in her question ‘Où sont les êtres que j’ai tant aimés?’ [where have my darling ones gone to?].53 Words, both her own and those of other writers before her, are close at hand to help her fill her book of silence (‘album de silence’ of the title). She writes: ‘Je suis soulevée par l’amour, la musique, les mots’ [my heart can be uplifted at times by love, music and words].54 For Donal, it is a combination of both silence and speech – of words or their absence – that sums up the relationship between himself and his father

50 Ibid., 58.51 Ibid., 58.52 Ibid., 53.53 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 111.54 Ibid., 132.

124 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

before and after his mother’s death. Words in his case can be enemies or allies while, for Madame L, they are synonymous with either pain or healing.

As a child, Donal is surprised to see his father withdraw into himself after his wife’s death. What had been deep anxiety during her illness turns into pain and grief at her loss. As Donal describes the scene immediately following the death, there is a sense that words are utterly inadequate: ‘Father entered and stood with his face by the window […] His retiring soul kept the grief intact’.55 Her death only serves to make the silence deeper. Between father and son, the tone is set very early on, and yet words are felt to be either inadequate, and even painful, or strangely comforting, espe-cially when father and son engage in a fishing practice called nightlines:

Two metal rods with a line of hooks strung between them, to be jammed in the sand at low tide, […] then left to simmer as the ocean passes over them until morning […] In the morning the tide […] makes an orderly retreat, leaving a ray, a plaice, a pollock or […] a salmon bass swinging from the hooks .56

Throughout the process, from sundown to early morning, the contrast between the two forms of speech between father and son is brought into stark relief. They do not have to ‘blunder towards speech’.57 They move from ‘the many gradations of awkward speech’58 experienced in everyday life, to a kind of truce: ‘The next morning there would be the catch of course, when the tide went out […] We would walk out and could talk now’ (italics mine).59 His father would then, naturally enough, give explanations about the fish dangling from the hooks. Words, or the lack of them, run through their difficult relationship.

Madame L, however, never lets silence take the upper hand. She resists the urge to let herself be engulfed by snow or petrified by ice. She refuses to be annihilated by the crushing weight of the loss she feels. As both a mother and a writer, Madame L is holding onto words. She knows they

55 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 7–8.56 Ibid., 59.57 Ibid., 17.58 Ibid., 3.59 Ibid., 3.

Assuaging Loss: Artistic Approaches by Neil Jordan and Françoise Lefèvre 125

will break her heart: ‘Restent les mots navrants pour dire ce qui a disparu’ [only painful words are left to convey what is gone for ever].60 And yet she feels that they alone can save her, ‘L’écriture me sauvera peut-être de ce désastre’ [perhaps writing can save me from this desolation],61 that they alone can bring some light into her life, ‘Je ne retrouve un peu de lumière qu’en écrivant’ [only when writing do I find some light again],62 even make her smile again, ‘Écrire, c’est tenter de sourire à nouveau’ [to write is to attempt to smile again].63 The act of writing is her only way to salvation, or what she also calls her resurrection, and she delivers an impassioned praise of words: ‘Écrire est une joie, une peine, une force, une espérance […] Les mots sont des abris. Les mots sont des refuges. Les mots guérissent’ [writ-ing means joy, pain, strength, hope. Words are shelters. Words are places of refuge. Words can heal].64

Moreover, not only does she find renewed strength in her writing but also in the writings of others, especially poets: ‘Les mots des poètes, aussi, m’aident à tenir’ [the words written by poets, too, help me go on living].65 Throughout the book, quotations from Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire or Stéphane Mallarmé stand as so many stepping stones that help her to try to cross over to the other side and reach some form of serenity. Near the end of her Album de silence, Madame L conjures up a memory of those happy days in the past when she used to take Hermine to the local primary school. They would stand on the bridge over the River Norges to look at the reflection of their faces close together. The image is what she calls ‘tout le bonheur du monde’ [all the happiness in the world],66 but mother and daughter knew, even then, that ducks and geese could sud-denly dive and blur the image entirely as if it had never existed. And yet, at the end of the book, conveyed through jubilant words (‘dans la beauté du

60 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 20.61 Ibid., 78.62 Ibid., 38.63 Ibid., 24.64 Ibid., 24.65 Ibid., 45.66 Ibid., 151.

126 Maguy Pernot-Deschamps

monde’ [in our beautiful world]),67 the memory is still there, as mother and daughter repeat the poet Mallarmé’s line about ‘le bel aujourd’hui’ [the beauty of each and every day].68

The pages she has written about her loss have started to reconcile Madame L to the painful passage of time. In a similar way, Donal brings his narrative to a peaceful conclusion by tying it up with an image that finally brings together his mother and father as a young loving couple, after the imaginary reconciliation with his father. It reads like a painting: ‘I saw them walk then, in the thin evening light across planes of sand, sea and air, mauve, purple and silver’.69 The monster of the title has vanished. Similarly, Madame L’s album has not been composed in vain. Words have saved the two characters.

In these two novels, an Irish writer and a French writer have chosen narrators who are compelled to grapple with grief. In both similar and contrasting ways, Donal and Madame L attempt to come to terms with what they see as an irretrievable loss. They both experience time as an enemy, something that insidiously blurs their dearest memories and steals their precious past from them. And yet both narratives are finally, if pain-fully, brought to a serene conclusion through the saving grace of music, art and words.

67 Ibid., 155.68 Lefèvre, Un album de silence, 155.69 Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, 183.

Mary Pierse

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine?

Pas de grande poésie sans silence.1

Three Irish poets of our times – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue and Dennis O’Driscoll – are justly celebrated for their artistic output. There are remarkable shared qualities in their disparate approaches to poetry: amongst them are the incorporation of a wealth of suggestion, allied to history and place, and an originality that generates a spark for the reader. In several instances, that particular combination, although constructed in words, arises rather silently and in a soundlessness that is particularly conducive to stimulation of reflection, memory, and even argument or dispute. This paper will suggest that such quietude in words facilitates perception of what might lie in and behind the lines, and thereby allows a wealth of imaginative riches to flow from their compositions.

Understandings of memory differ. In poetry, the featuring of memories has long been accepted as a recognised approach, and reminiscence could possibly be viewed as central to the genre, especially in the nineteenth century. In the Anglophone world, that expectation might be seen as part of the legacy of Wordsworth’s rather deceptive ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. In the context of French literature, recording of memory is popularly and inevitably associated with Marcel Proust and his seven vol-umes of A la Recherche du temps perdu, written between 1913 and 1927. It is particularly interesting to note that two English translations of that title add further possible elucidations of the nature of memory. The differing

1 Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves (Paris : José Corti, 1942), 258.

128 Mary Pierse

comprehensions intimated by Remembrance of Things Past2 and In Search of Lost Time3 appear to convey selected focus on certain remembrances or on the hunt for the forgotten, or a concentration on what was previously unattained. In those diverse possibilities, it is immediately apparent how very simple words affect the influence and the interpretation. This is very clear in use of the word ‘Remembrance’, especially because its particular Shakespearean association inflects and directs understanding in a certain manner. The words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 explain the interpretation:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thoughtI summon up remembrance of things past,I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,And heavily from woe to woe tell o’erThe sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,Which I new pay as if not paid before.But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

The path traced by Shakespeare is one of partial empathy with a human propensity to dwell on past woes while the sonnet’s trajectory is mapped as a relatively rapid one of recall, mourning, achievement of catharsis and healing – and moving on. Remembrance has been consciously undertaken,

2 This translation, undertaken between 1922 and 1930, was by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. The translation was revised, under the same title, by Terence Kilmartin in 1981. Scott Moncrieff also translated the letters of Abelard and Héloïse, the Song of Roland and several works by Pirandello and Stendhal, A biography by Jean Findlay, Chasing Lost Time: the Life of C K Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy and Translator was published by Chatto & Windus in 2014.

3 This was the title given by D.J. Enright for his 1992 revision of Scott Moncrieff ’s work.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 129

the cure for unhappiness is apparent and the outlook positive. In contrast, the view of Marcel Proust who coined the label of ‘involuntary memory’, a notion that is forever linked to him and to the madeleine, stands in con-tradistinction to Shakespeare’s approach. Proust’s belief was that involun-tary memory held the ‘essence of the past’, that its involuntary nature has a spontaneity which enriches the creative process and life.

This chapter will venture to suggest that in the apparent divide between descriptions by Wordsworth and Shakespeare on the one hand, and Proust’s theorising on the other, there is a space where concepts con-cerning the literary composition process, subject choice, and even the intended readers, can be contemplated. In musing on that space and how three Irish poets might be seen to occupy it and engage with memory, the focus will be both on their silences and on some of their word pictures. These passages in their writings are predominantly sound-free, and it is in this relative silence that images acquire an interesting depth, extend tentacles far out into the aether and the past, and evince considerable potential to stir thought and emotion.

Memories, Places and Silences

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem, ‘The Bend in the Road’4 concerns shared family memories, but they are ones that can strike a chord more widely, and it is also a poem that addresses diverse aspects of memory. The poet addresses the real, the particular, the evolution of perception – from the event of a child’s car sickness to ostensible recall of it twelve years later, and suggests multiple random associations. The poem acknowledges the layers and layers of memories – they are ‘piled high’ – it notes their easy proximity to the

4 Originally published in her collection The Girl who married the Reindeer (2001) and more recently included in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Selected Poems (Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2008), 112.

130 Mary Pierse

surface, they are accessible because they are ‘wrapped lightly’. The bend in the road ‘is as silent as ever it was on that day’, it is the poet who retrieves and voices linkages. If the bend in the road is the trigger for involuntary memory, the subsequent purposeful focus on the initial incident uncovers for the poet ‘all that went on in those years’, memories that are not disclosed in any specific detail but which are then deliberately connected to tree and air. One might call it cloud storage, even though clearly avant la lettre, and in silence, the single cloud rains a succession of pictures.

In the poem ‘Old Roads’,5 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin furnishes different images but still with a focus on place. Remembrance here is highly evoca-tive of an interconnection between geographic wear and tear, presence and absence, and a parallel human physiological deterioration. As the old road is, as she says, ‘Missing from the map’, it is memory that returns it. She first knits the human into the landscape by such words as ‘reach’, ‘thread’, ‘shuffle’, and then this human connection is reinforced and to an extent explicated by ‘arthritic fingers’ ‘stiffening grasp’, ‘lose their grip’. It is on the one hand an affectionate picturing of wandering old roads – but in blending landscape and humankind, the depiction seems ineluctably wedded to unavoidable ultimate decline, it is a memento mori. Once again, Ní Chuilleanáin establishes the creative potential of a silence: the grass ‘guards the gaps of silence’. Moreover, the poem intimates that more will tumble from memory when those gaps are ‘trampled on the pattern day’. For all that might emerge on such days, no certainty can be ascribed to any story since ‘Slowly the old roads lose their grip’.

A notable feature in those two poems is the simultaneous existence of silence with invitation to encounter palpable stimuli, including auditory and tactile ones. Visually, the memory potential expands to occupy greater space in ‘The Bend in the Road’, as the third and final verse paragraph is allotted nine lines (instead of six lines in each of the two preceding para-graphs) and no limit is set to further extension, imagination or mutation. In ‘Old Roads’, ‘Drenched’ definitively and thoroughly saturates the land;

5 Originally published in her collection Site of Ambush (1975) and subsequently included in Selected Poems (2008) 31.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 131

‘reach’ and ‘thread’ are noiseless advances across the page and mountain, as is ‘Grass flows’, while ‘shuffle’ communicates both faint sound and a halt-ing, uneven progress. Ominously, the verse paragraphs shrink as the roads fade (the sequence is of eight, seven and then four lines). The relative quiet invites, even compels, closer attention through all senses. In the words of Paul Éluard: ‘Non le silence des sourds, mais celui qui a tout à dire, tout à entendre.’6 [Not the silence of the deaf but one which has much to say, much to convey.]

Other silences, and this time relating to what is not said, are found in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘The Party Wall’.7 The very title suggests at least two sides to a story. Silence in its lines concerns what is not being disclosed about the adjoining house or the relationship with its inhabitants, or about a probable family dispute that persists for decades, or in relation to a prolonged distancing from perceived related difficulties. There is doubt whether hinted complications were even necessarily or actually involved. Stirring of memory and enquiry results from ‘aerial photographs’ that showed what had been excluded from sight and memory over the years: the existence of ‘the house that backed against ours/But looked away across the Avenue’. The pictures display the physical proof of buried memories, some of which may be partially exhumed; others will have disintegrated into dust. That a shower of white feathers should have sparked query and retrospection has other silent implications and connections, ranging from the angelic to historically bellicose symbolism.8 Ní Chuilleanáin master-fully conveys layers of connection and disconnection over time and space, the compartmentalisation of knowledge, and the unreliability of memory

6 Paul Éluard, Donner à voir (Paris : Gallimard, 1939), 99.7 Originally published in her collection The Brazen Serpent (1994) and subsequently

included in Selected Poems (2008) 84. 8 White feathers were the silent accusatory symbols given in the First World War

period to those who were reproached for not joining the military. The White Feather Brigade and their Order of the White Feather were controversial. Of more recent years, feathers have been associated with belief in messages from angels and the poem actually pictures the house as ‘Blessed with angeldown’, a depiction that is capable of ironic interpretation.

132 Mary Pierse

when such knowledge is always incomplete. The lines allow the chance that the speaker maintained a further silence on the jigsaw pieces that were passed down. Or was it the case that the old priest could possibly have been regaled with many of them and perhaps had vouchsafed other snippets in return, even though ‘he had never been told my aunt’s story/About all the trouble over building the party wall.’ The poem incorporates a succession of silences that invite questions, again prompting readers to recollection of similar circumstances. That process could be described as exactly mirroring that of chaining in involuntary memory, the progression noted by Marcel Proust.9

Expanding Memory in Time, Space and Text

Bernard O’Donoghue’s academic specialisation in mediaeval English would seem to be far distant from the topic of his poem ‘Tom’s Soldiers’10 but his acknowledged expertise ranges over several centuries, epochs and genres. The poem commences with a picture in a continuing present, it features partial recourse to experience and reminiscence, and if it does not cat-egorically rule out mortality, it refuses certainty to that trajectory. This is a sonnet that, starting with the image of a child amid toy soldiers, encourages memories of similar childhood games, notes the mutating tastes of decades, and then wryly, forces speculation on what the morrow may bring. Here, memory is nearly in list form, but its accuracy is called into question with a semi-aside: ‘If I remember rightly’. The recollections are not highlighted; they lack the precise detail of the carpet’s geometry, and rank second or

9 Consideration of chaining has regained attention in the past ten years. An influential publication on the subject is that by J. H. Mace, Involuntary Memory (New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2007).

10 Bernard O’Donoghue, The Absent Signifier (Hitchin, Herts.: Mandeville Press, 1990), np.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 133

third in importance behind the present ‘Gulliver’ and a future fate. The soundtrack of the present has humming, drumming heels and the essential ‘palatal fricative explosions’ of toy soldier warfare; but musing and reflec-tion in the second seven lines are conducted in environmental silence. In the concluding lines – ‘still waiting myself/ For reason’s horses to declare the outcome.’ – the poet clearly intends that the link should also be made with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels wherein the rational components of Houyhnhnm society embrace conflicting aspects of humanity. In addi-tion, the lines can facilitate the readers’ return to Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, to further meditate on what control the poet/charioteer might exercise over the rational and irrational constituents of human nature. That steer-ing is unspoken, unvoiced, somewhat hidden and ultimately enriching; in whichever direction it drives thought and rumination, the possible routes are numerous.

The resolute ambiguity regarding the future – seen in the last line of ‘Tom’s Soldiers’ – occurs also, although with a different articulation, in O’Donoghue’s poem ‘Kindertotenlieder’.11 The poem opens with the lines ‘Because we cannot see into the future,/ It follows that what we anticipate/ Can’t happen’. These are fifteen words that challenge, wake up, or needle the reader into argument or agreement with the logic. However, there is a very striking immediacy in the final lines, so reminiscent of television pic-tures of famine, drought and disease in Africa, and death hangs ominously over those lines – as might be suspected from the title that means ‘songs on the death of children’.12 The description ‘The mind too is a country/ Like Somalia’ is an original delineation and comparison – and because unusual, it pushes towards generation of visual memories and cogitation.

Silences in poetry are on occasion, and rather paradoxically, voiced recollections of what was not said. For instance, in O’Donoghue’s poem ‘Esprit d’Escalier’,13 the poetic voice is ‘stuck for an answer’, he ‘only thought’.

11 The Absent Signifier (1998), np. 12 Kindertotenlieder is the title given to a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich

Rückert in 1833–34. Five of them were set to music by Gustav Mahler in 1901–04). 13 In The Absent Signifier (1990), np.

134 Mary Pierse

In this case, the effect on the voice is attributed to shock; his reaction is a common response when faced with a familiar dilemma concerning what is appropriate, or what could be helpful – in the end, he is silent. Finally, the lines recount what he feels he ‘should have said’. Although a short poem, even in its brevity this sonnet can paint so many pictures – the garden, the gardener, the roses, a bar-stool diagnosis concerning symptoms (‘a loud continuous hum/ Inside his head’), the listener’s instant rejection of facile interpretation and his understanding of scientific reality (‘Brain tumours’), and then his tardy insight as he thinks, too late, of a more appropriate and more ideal rejoinder. Of course, as Francophone readers will have immedi-ately noted, the poem’s title ‘Esprit d’Escalier’ is a French expression that conveys that exact reaction, thinking of the perfect answer or riposte just that bit too late. And because of the close rhyming links between escalier and espalier, that method of training roses, is it fanciful to think that the rose picture, with blossom and thorn, could perhaps be intentionally even more intertwined?

Memories over Three Generations

Writings by Dennis O’Driscoll, whether in prose, poetry or critical essays, are very diverse. The poem ‘Family Album’14 provides an interesting illus-tration of the memory/silence linkage, and of that chaining of involuntary memory. Instead of a Proustian madeleine, O’Driscoll serves up an entire and wonderful chain and succession of memories – of taste and tactility, of the visual, and of the cautiously measured options of childhood when circumscribed by the limits of pocket money, by the stock of the local sweet shop, and by the great need to eke out the pleasures. Rather than express-ing a careful harvesting of emotions in tranquillity, three five-line stanzas,

14 Originally published in his collection Weather Permitting (1999) and subsequently included in Dennis O’Driscoll New and Selected Poems (London: Anvil, 2004) 181.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 135

with a mere 112 words, actually re-live the moments, doing so without any verbs of sound. It is a totally silent menu, replete with the contentment of digestive and emotional satisfaction. There is no need for the reader to possess earlier familiarity with ‘liquorice whip’ or ‘powdery flying saucer’ or the implausibly named ‘cream pie’ with its ‘flat/wafery bottom, squared out like graph paper’, or even with a’6d coin’. The tale of careful expendi-ture (‘enough pennies yet to buy’) and staged gratification can only trigger comparable responses over several generations.

That portrayal of commerce and consumption in decades past accords rather neatly with the opinions of Roland Barthes and of historian Hayden White with regard to the meshing of poetry and history. In ‘The Discourse of History’, Barthes considers the narration of past events and asks: “Does this narration differ in fact, by some specific feature . . . from imaginary narration as we find it in epic, the novel, the drama?”15 He might well have added ‘poetry’ to that listing. Historian Hayden White has pointed out that poetics is not just a decoration on a narrative, it actually is both form and content.16 On that basis, it can be argued that Dennis O’Driscoll’s account of sweet purchase and delectation constitutes valued historical record, having both the factual ingredients of realism, and the selective represen-tation common to so-called objective and scientific history; moreover, it is decorative. Of course, in the balance of what is said and what is omitted from any narrative, the silences of omission can carry as great an import as the words that are written.

Moving from childhood to setting up home, ‘Pioneers’,17 is a poem by O’Driscoll which portrays aspects of life in new houses (‘squat bungalows’) on an unfinished estate, and in its lines there is explicit mention of silence. In this case, silence reflects both the cosiness of home (‘the otherworldly quiet of its attic ribcage/ neat and insulated as a chaffinch nest.’) and the bleakness of the surroundings (‘in the middle of a muddy field’) with their

15 Roland Barthes ‘The Discourse of History’, in The Rustle of Language trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 127–40) 127.

16 As quoted in Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) 28.

17 O’Driscoll, New and Selected Poems (London: Anvil Press, 2004) 123.

136 Mary Pierse

cheerless lack of beauty – what the poet calls the ‘squalor, shoddiness and grot’. However, despite the environs, he writes that everything was ‘edged with an expectant silence.’ In this instance, the stillness seems open to experience and to surprise, and the ambience yields up some positive ele-ments in the urban desert, most notably in ‘dew-sprayed lettuce/left by our good neighbours on the sill.’ In depicting an experience familiar to the many thousands who have found themselves in similar circumstances, O’Driscoll’s silences embrace coping mechanisms, human kindness and some compensation for ‘grot’.

The multi-sensorial potential of silence is epitomised in O’Driscoll’s poem entitled ‘Two Silences’.18 This is especially so in the first section where the car window is open, open to sensation, to memory, to linkages of recol-lection, to the visual and tactile, to smell and taste and touch. Viewing the page, a striking aspect of this poetry is the dearth of punctuation. That is an absence that facilitates within the lines the blending of time and place and sharing between father and son as they eat a packed lunch. There are just two commas in the entire section and they occur on the first and last lines. In fact, the punctuation after ‘his morning calls over,’ and again after ‘we take our ease,’ marks out a time frame within which there is a timeless-ness that is crowded with memories. Much detail is effortlessly recalled and maybe because of that ‘perfect silence’, there is enhanced perception of ‘creamy and fresh’, of ‘tickling lemonade’ of the banana’s ‘cheetah spots’. It is a silent invitation to the reader to provide disparate or comparable experiences, to revisit like sensations. The lack of verbal communication between the generations does not equate with any paucity of interaction; the ‘perfect silence’ radiates a calm contentment of mutual understanding.

O’Driscoll offers an analogous reader stimulus in the poem ‘Fruit Salad’.19 There are five discrete parts to this poem, ‘Peach’, ‘Strawberry’, ‘Pear’, ‘Apple’ and ‘Fruit Shop’ and, in particular, the section called ‘Peach’ exhibits a mix of sensory exploration. Once more, sound is absent. Sight

18 Originally published in his collection Hidden Extras (1987) and subsequently included in O’Driscoll, New and Selected Poems (2004), 26.

19 O’Driscoll, New and Selected Poems (2004), 56.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 137

and touch are the predominant senses: ‘There’s not much point in trying/ to cultivate a sultry peach of words./Just pass me one to stroke, to eat’. Vision perceives shape and colour; physical contact reports the contours and the degrees of firmness, ‘its downy yielding roundness’; taste is urgent and short-lived, and the subtext there can be read as ‘carpe diem’, a definite invitation to ‘eat the peach’. To assert the futility of attempting to constitute ‘a sultry peach of words’ is to situate the relative place of the verbal, to sug-gest its frequently subordinate position in memory but then to reinforce and reaffirm the power of those same words to generate and multiply recall of intense sensory experiences. Consumption of the sweet shop treasures and of the varied fruits of the salad would seem to have extended memory-activating possibilities beyond those of the madeleine.

Transience, Élan and Esprit

Seizing the day is a notion that can be discerned in the writings of Ní Chuilleanáin, O’Donoghue and O’Driscoll. It is rather striking how mortal-ity lurks within, or intrudes into, or forms an integral part of the thoughts and ideas in so many of the poems that appear in editions of Selected Poems by each of the three poets. Even if transience of the individual, or within the environment, may not be forcefully foregrounded, yet it is more often than not, in evidence in the backdrop – as has been seen here in ‘The Bend in the Road’, ‘Old Roads’, ‘Kindertotenlieder’, ‘Esprit d’escalier’ and ‘Fruit Salad’. Bereavement and illness are particularly in evidence in many of O’Driscoll’s collections.20 Can it be that the poets enrich that stillness of death with memories, word pictures and multiple allusions because death is the ultimate silence? Perhaps their lines are both a forestalling of the final

20 The numerous poetic examples include ‘Someone’, ‘Kist’ (both from 1982), ‘What she does not know is’ (1987), ‘Residuary Estates’ (1993), ‘All’ (1997), ‘Either’ (1999). These have been included in New and Selected Poems (2004) 13, 14, 31, 63, 132, 143.

138 Mary Pierse

curtain and a declaration of the impossibility of closure while strands of memory are accessible.

In reflecting on the memories evinced in the poetry of Ní Chuilleanáin, O’Donoghue and O’Driscoll, one construal of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is of interest. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has posited that Proust’s novel is less about the past or about voluntary or involuntary memory than about the artistic development of Marcel, about his learning process, his discovery of sensation, and thereby his gradual understanding of reality and truth.21 In that interpretation, while memory of any kind is not viewed as the central aspect or focus of Proust’s seven volumes, memory plays a role in the search for artistic truth. Both time and memory, rather than being primarily nostalgic or regressive (as in other depictions and instances of memory), contribute towards the potential for gain in that ontological quest.22 This conclusion by Deleuze, particularly in the light of his engagement with Bergsonian philosophy, would seem to confirm the diverse approaches of literature and philosophy: the creative that eschews restriction and boundary; the scientific search for tight and mechanistic definition. It has been suggested that Henri Bergson (who married one of Marcel Proust’s cousins) actually gave Proust the idea for his novel.23 There

21 See Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1989), 36.

22 Deleuze’s study of Henri Bergson’s theories on memory in Bergsonism (1966), and in several other works, engages with the concepts elucidated in Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory). Amongst other things, Bergson sought to explore the relationship between past and present, positing that a synthesis of past and present can connect to future creativity. Bergson made the point (in his Huxley lecture at University of Birmingham in 1911) that consciousness was both memory and antici-pation of the future. See Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy (1920), trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2007), 8.

23 Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. Proust was best man at the wedding. See Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007) 9. Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 for ‘rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.’ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1927/ accessed 2 June 2014.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 139

were many connections between the two men – Proust attended Bergson’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France; he read Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896);24 he embraced Bergson’s belief that all human memories are preserved, and hence that what has been ‘lost’ can be found. However, Proust also went to some lengths to mark out his difference from Bergson:

My work is dominated by the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory, a distinction which not only does not appear in M.Bergson’s philosophy but is even contradicted by it.25

Moreover, he spelled out his belief in the distinct qualities of voluntary and involuntary memory:

For me, voluntary memory, which is above all a memory of the intellect and of the eyes, gives us only facets of the past that have no truth; but should a smell or a taste, met with again in quite different circumstances, reawaken the past in us, in spite of ourselves, we sense how different that past was from what we thought we had remem-bered, our voluntary memory having painted it, like a bad painter, in false colours.26

For three Irish poets who do not overtly engage in Bergsonian philosophical arguments, and from whose texts no Proustian categorisation of memo-ries is apparent, it is nonetheless perceptible that retelling some memories from the past is, in part at least, a record of a learning process, albeit one where the lessons may not be either complete or clear. Their undogmatic presentations confirm an equable acceptance of that uncertainty. It is also evident that they understand that the past is recoverable and capable of representation (and misrepresentation) in fragmentary form and in per-sonal reaction. Whether or not a solid substance or matter triggers invol-untary memory, their poetic inscription of it is reflective and selective and

24 This was one of Bergson’s major works, first published in 1896 and translated into English by Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott Palmer as Matter and Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1911). Bergson attracted distinguished students: Charles Péguy was one; T.S. Eliot also attended his lectures in 1910.

25 Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1980), 235.

26 Ibid., 235–6.

140 Mary Pierse

voluntary. It can also be said to have élan vital [vital impetus)27 without being confined to explanations of that label in texts by Bergson or Deleuze, by William James or Paul Ricoeur.

What O’Donoghue, O’Driscoll and Ní Chuilleanain provide, and particularly so in their sound-free poems, is an intimation of multiple pos-sibilities rather than a fixed and limited construal. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has said that she favours the tentative and the oblique. Her view is that ‘there is a great uncertainty in the Irish voice, which is very particular’. When a reader interpreted the mention of hermits in a Ní Chuilleanáin poem as relating to hermit crabs, the poet’s response was: ‘the very fact that she had read this poem and constructed her own understanding of it was interesting’.28 One can infer a like tolerance in attitude from Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetic account in ‘The Shells of Galice’29 of how he has tried to unsettle and undermine over-confidence in certainty. Throwing down a mischievous challenge to scientists and archaeologists of the future: ‘I’ve left Irish mussel-shells/ exposed to the midday sun at Ostia./Once I placed a pale-pink sea urchin/[…] high on a limestone mountain.’ The impish-ness of his wish ‘to wash some influence/ into the future.’ is fuelled by a determination to free memory, not just from restrictive interpretation but to permit its recurrences and mutations.

27 Identification of Henri Bergson with the French tradition of spiritualist philosophy, rather than with nineteenth-century materialism, is illustrative of his deviation from strictly scientific categories that would exclude such a concept as his notion of élan vital. Bergson expanded his theory of evolution through that idea, thus running contrary to strict Darwinism. Other French philosophers who might be consid-ered as being in the spiritualist tradition, and who attended Bergson’s lectures, were Jacques Maritain, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Gabriel Marcel. The poet Saint-John Perse was clearly Bergsonist in some respects, to judge from what he wrote in 1955: ‘La justification première du poème sera toujours dans son élan vital’ (Œuvres Complètes, Paris : Pléiade Gallimard (1972), 922.

28 In an interview with Inés Praga, published in Jacqueline Hurtley, et al, Ireland in Writing: interviews with writers and academics (Amsterdam; Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1998), 83–92.

29 Originally published in his collection Outliving (2003) and subsequently included in Bernard O’Donoghue, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 107.

Silent Pictures in Mind and Memory: Irish Poets and a Proustian Madeleine? 141

In sum, the presence of silence in these poems is rich and fertile. It is not time-limited or spatially constricted; neither do the poetic voices pro-vide rigid interpretation or pretend omniscience. As Paul Éluard remarks:

Les poèmes ont toujours des grandes marges blanches, des marges de silence, où la mémoire ardente se consume à recréer un délire sans passé. Leur principale qualité est non pas, je le répète, d’invoquer mais d’inspirer.30 [Poems always have big white margins, silent margins where passionate memory exhausts itself in recreation of frenzy without a past. Their main attribute is not, I repeat, to portray but to inspire.]

Whether being intentionally enigmatic, or gently prompting, or inadvert-ently creating confusion (as in the case of the hermit crabs), Ní Chuilleanáin, O’Donoghue and O’Driscoll reflect with honesty and acceptance the prevalence of pervasive uncertainties and doubt. Their silences are a poetic eschewal of sound elements to the ultimate enhancement of other sense experiences that invite thought, reflection, empathy, comparison, and understanding. Their silences and words together are particularly gen-erative of pictures in the mind that, in turn, allow the readers to refract, reframe, re-imagine and add light, sound and music at will. What Maurice Blanchot said of ‘le véritable livre’ applies equally to these poems: ‘Il s’élève et s’organise comme une puissance silencieuse qui donne forme et fermeté au silence et par le silence.’31 [It rises and gathers itself like a silent force that, through silence, gives structure and solidity to silence].

30 Paul Éluard, ‘L’Évidence poétique’, Œuvres Complètes, tome 1 (Paris : Pléiade, 1978), 515.

31 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris : Gallimard, 1986), 298.

Brian Murphy

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship

Food and wine have always been synonymous with the arts. At times, they have acted as subject, sometimes as muse and more recently even as the art form itself. In recent years, Western society has become more and more exposed to endless streams of gastronomically-related material from all forms of media. Formerly considered as a subject that was the preserve of an aris-tocratic class, gastronomy has now become somewhat democratised and has assumed a greater importance and visibility in many aspects of quotidian lives. In the past, a subject like gastronomy was sometimes seen as less cerebral than other areas of study. However, gastronomy can now be viewed differently as it increasingly becomes more associated with the ‘upper senses’. These senses include hearing and sight and are reputed to allow more considered objective contemplation. There are many contemporary examples of food and wine intersecting with the art world and displaying a symbiotic relationship that is considerably more complex than the traditional dynamic that was the norm between subject and artist. This chapter will explore how food and wine have been seeping into traditional cultural fields of art and now even into music.

Food and drink were historically often associated with servitude. A burgeoning hospitality industry in the twentieth century certainly led to food and drink preparation and service being viewed in a somewhat nega-tive light. Indeed, the topic of food and drink has been condemned in the past by Roger Scruton for being associated with the ‘lower senses’ and only used for utilitarian purposes.1 Yet, there are many contemporary examples

1 Steve Charters, ‘Listening to the Wine Consumer: The Art of Drinking’, in Fritz Allhoff, ed., Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 188.

144 Brian Murphy

of food and wine overlapping with the art world and displaying a symbi-otic relationship that is considerably more complex than the traditional dynamic that was the norm between subject and artist. Recent studies have cited some good examples: Rirkrit Tirivanija (who has cooked meals for gallery-goers as a form of installation art since the 1990s); Sonja Alhauser (famous for her edible sculptures to be consumed by the public, within a certain time frame, exploring the issue of eating as an aesthetic experience); Jana Sterbak (her Vanitas: Flesh dress for albino anorectic expands on the idea as food tied into the perception of self ).2

Further illustration is provided by Kirsten Ditterich-Shilakes who explains how four selected wine-related artworks at San Francisco’s Fine Art and Asian museums help portray four classic civilisations where wine, as it is known today, began: namely, Greece, France, China and Japan. She explores two artworks from the West, a Black-figure Greek Amphora from 510–500 bce, a painting by John Sargent entitled Le Verre de Porto, and two wine-related works from the East, a Chinese Ritual Wine vessel from 1300–1050 bce and a traditional Japanese Sake bottle created by Fujiwara Yu. In her view, all four works ‘encapsulate the height of classic civilisa-tions and artistic technical perfection in the West and the East and rise to the category of “iconic”’.3 What is interesting about the author’s use of these works is not how gastronomy was used as the subject matter but how Ditterich-Shilakes interprets the oenological aspect of these four wine ves-sels and how they reflect, among other things, a real sense of history, class and society. Her research illustrates how culturally important gastronomy has been down through the ages. She shows that food and wine in art have the potential to move beyond their mere utilitarian function.

2 Charles Spence, Maya U. Shankar and Heston Blumenthal, ‘Sound bites: Auditory contributions to the perception and consumption of food and drink’, in Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, eds, Art and the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209.

3 Kirsten Ditterich-Shilakes, ‘Muse in a Stem Glass: Art, Wine and Philosophy’, in Fritz Allhoff, ed., Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 44–62.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 145

Mention of a Greek amphora is a reminder that the ancient Greeks gave Dionysus, the god of wine, to the world. Both he and his mythical entourage feature very heavily in Greek literature and art. According to John Varriano: ‘He and his circle of maenads, nymphs, satyrs and sileni were among the most colourful and frequently represented figures in all classical art and literature’.4 Ancient Greek literature and art are not unique in their use of gastronomy as a common theme. There is also clear evidence of wine, in particular, having the ability to intersect with other cultural forms. Varriano raises the cultural profile of gastronomy by suggesting that ‘when a respected contemporary philosopher compares a Chablis to a Jane Austen novel, a Collioure to a sculpture by Maillol and a rare American varietal to ‘the sound of a deep organ note beneath the choir of summer perfumes’, he is only following a rhetorical practice that began with Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’.5

Wine in particular is unique in the epicurean world in that, more than any other beverage, it harbours attributes that appear to allow it to intersect with broader cultural areas. A case in point is the extraordi-nary vineyard of Château La Coste, near Aix-en-Provence, which offers an unprecedented amalgamation of wine and the arts. Owned by Irish property tycoon Paddy McKillen, and run by his sister Mara, the winery is a wonderland of cutting-edge building design populated by renowned works of modern art. Many famous artists and architects have contributed to its development. International architect and creator of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Frank Gehry, has designed the music pavilion in the grounds of the Château. As recently as August 2014 La Coste hosted a series of piano performances in the pavilion dedicated to the works of Chopin and Liszt among many others.6 The works of other well-known artists are carefully distributed around the grounds of the Château and indeed in some cases McKillen’s Irish heritage is clear in his support of Irish designers

4 John Varriano, Wine: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 24–5.5 Varriano, 7. His reference is to philosopher Roger Scruton.6 See <http://www.musiquesechanges.com/academie/nos-concerts#soirees> accessed

2 February 2015.

146 Brian Murphy

and materials. According to The Sunday Times, ‘Paddy McKillen [. . .] can now meditate on his problems in a purpose-built chapel. Made from 8000 pieces of Waterford Crystal and slabs of Kilkenny black stone, the chapel was designed by John Rocca in his Dublin studio and then transported in 26 panels to McKillen’s vineyard in Provence, France’.7 The La Coste example cannot be explained as a simple vineyard with beautiful build-ings. David Aylward has introduced the concept of attaching a ‘cultural economy’ to a food or drink product.8 He suggests that a product, such as wine, through its association with defined cultural elements, can come to be perceived as something more than its original incarnation as a pleasant alcoholic drink. Thus, in the case of Château La Coste, wine and the arts have been combined to form a new cultural entity that has the potential to be appreciated in its own right. Neither the wine nor its surroundings can be viewed separately.

There are very few products that can tolerate such a blatant association with another cultural form. It is more difficult to imagine such an asso-ciation between art and, for example, beer, bread or cheese. Throughout its 6000-year oenological history, this ancient beverage has threaded its way through many aspects of cultural life and so its association with other cultural domains seems somehow natural. However, it has not been until relatively recently that wine has started to blend seamlessly with another renowned bastion of cultural DNA, namely the world of music.

When suggesting that there is an emerging cultural relationship between wine and music, it is appropriate that it should first be estab-lished that gastronomy is a cultural entity in its own right. This case has been made by Priscilla Parkhurst-Ferguson in French Food, On the Table, On the Page and in French Culture. Using the example of France, she posits that gastronomy fulfils all of the requirements of a cultural field. Parkhurst-Ferguson suggests that there are certain structural factors that allow such

7 Gabrielle Monaghan, ‘McKillen retreats to crystal palace’, The Sunday Times (12 January 2014), 3.

8 David Aylward, ‘Towards a Cultural Economy Paradigm for the Australian Wine Industry’, Prometheus 26.4 (2008), 373–85.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 147

a new cultural field to emerge. ‘These include: new social conditions that encourage a general cultural enthusiasm for a product; certain specific sites dedicated to production and consumption, namely restaurants; the intro-duction of standards and regulation legitimising production; and lastly, association and links with adjacent cultural fields.’ She offers gastronomy in nineteenth-century France as something of a template for the analysis of cultural fields more generally.9 Parkhurst-Ferguson’s analysis is plausible and indeed it can even be suggested that a similar form of gastronomic cultural field has emerged in Ireland in recent decades, albeit on a much smaller scale.10 Such developments have allowed interactions between gastronomy and cultural areas—such as literature and art—to become increasingly discussed and documented. Many human desires are threaded through the fabric of such cultural domains but food and drink are some of mankind’s most promiscuous needs because they are embedded elements of practically every cultural pursuit.

Gastronomy as Art

The old culinary proverb that one eats first with one’s eyes is undoubtedly true and the contemporary focus on visual presentation has had a lot to do with gastronomy being perceived as art. Both food and wine have always had some pedigree in terms of their perceived aesthetic quality. The very first category of wine analysis – as dictated by the Wine and Spirit Education

9 Priscilla Parkhurst-Ferguson, ‘A cultural field in the making: Gastronomy in 19th Century France’, in L. Schehr and A. Weiss, eds, French Food on the Table, On the Page and in French Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 9.

10 Brian Murphy, ‘“A hundred thousand welcomes”: Food and Wine as Cultural Signifiers’, in Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien, eds, From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 166–7.

148 Brian Murphy

Trust’s systematic approach to tasting – concerns sight perception.11 During that analysis, and before any other engagement, a wine is visually described across a spectrum of colour, consistency and interaction with the glass in terms of viscosity. Nomenclature in third-level catering courses also helps to emphasise the importance of the aesthetic. Programmes that were for many years described as professional cookery courses have, in recent years, morphed into qualifications in Culinary Arts. A simple Google search on the ‘Art of Wine’ throws up literally millions of references. The traditional lexicon associated with epicurean skills has changed and a new vernacular now presents as something more cultural. It is now the case that ‘a coffee’ is an incomplete description; rather, the consumer has the opportunity to consume ‘latte art’. International fast food chain Subway now uses the term ‘sandwich artist’ when referring to their operative level employees.12

It is not uncommon to hear successful chefs described as artists. Their manifest anger in the heated chaos of a busy kitchen brings to mind the image of a tortured artist or poet. Near-iconic images of celebrity chefs abound and they appear almost competitive in their efforts to portray themselves as dark introspective characters more concerned with the pro-tection of their art than with the service industry in which they work. One might contrast the rebellious hair and rather intentionally menacing image of famous chef Marco Pierre White, unshaven and brandishing a cleaver, with the more traditional image of the classic French head chef, resplend-ent in starched whites, neatly tied neckerchief and tall rigid white hat. The most unique plates of food from each of these new masters are described as their signature dishes, a term derived from the signature artwork of paint-ers whose individual style was easily recognised.

In The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think, Julian Baggini devotes attention to the aesthetic appreciation of food. He likens a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant to an artistic performance and draws interest-ing comparisons between it and more accepted art forms. While admit-ting that many are sceptical of such comparisons, Baggini feels that the

11 See <http://www.wsetglobal.com/qualifications/25.asp> accessed 3 April 2014. 12 See <http://www.subway.co.uk/business/careers/> accessed 20 April 2014.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 149

comparison is apposite and valid. ‘Some say a meal just comes and goes but all performances are experienced in time and once finished cannot be exactly replicated’.13 Of course, a piece of visual art such as a painting has consistency of effect but perhaps a comparison between a 3 star meal and a live musical performance has more in common than one might initially think. No two such performances can ever be exactly replicated. They are artistically dependent on time and space. Baggini points out that some detractors insist that food has no ‘cognitive content, no truths – moral or metaphysical – to take away or think about’.14 It can be argued, as Baggini does, that much art does not possess those qualities either. However, on closer inspection one can find evidence of a more cognitive and even a metaphysical interpretation of both food and wine. There is now increas-ing analysis of how flavours and compounds found in both food and wine interact and affect the senses. For example, The Flavour Thesaurus offers an in-depth analysis of how certain food flavours interact. In summary, it says ‘What The Favour Thesaurus does add up to, in the end, is a patchwork of facts, connections, impressions and recollections, designed less to tell you exactly what to do than provide the spark for your own recipe or adapta-tion. It’s there, in short, to get the juices flowing’.15

A feature of recent years has been a scrutiny of expensive wines, their analysis explored in tremendous detail, and debated, discussed and broken down in terms of complexity and effect. Such wines have even been compared at times to the human condition. Well-known winemaker Paul Pontallier of Château Margaux has suggested that ‘wine is not just fermented juice, it can be philosophical, it is so close to ourselves, its life expectancy is more or less ours’.16 Pontallier is suggesting, as have many other authors in the past, that wine is akin to a living thing. It matures over time. The bottle acts as a vessel that has captured a moment in space and time because of a strict association with an individual terroir. Opening

13 Julian Baggini, The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think (London: Granta Publications, 2014), 222.

14 Baggini, 222–3.15 Niki Segnit, The Flavour Thesaurus (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 11. 16 ‘Wine-The Faith’, Wine (Episode 2), BBC Four, 23 February 2009.

150 Brian Murphy

a bottle of wine allows it to breathe, to escape from its confines, to rest. Some connoisseurs are even more fervent in their analysis, going so far as to bestow a vinous personality on a wine, referring to it as brash, upfront or even pretentious. While sometimes mocked and dismissed as frivolous, these examples show that, for some people, both food and wine actually possess substantial cognitive depths that a great many would consider of value both in terms of appreciation and of related discussion. The per-sonification of wine has no doubt been bolstered by prominent culinary personalities who feature more and more in our everyday consumption of modern media. Simple interpretations of wine no longer suffice. Complex and lavish descriptions by such media wine experts as well as frequent analysis in dedicated magazines such as Decanter have contributed to the acceptance among some of wine as a topic for more metaphysical analysis.

Steve Charters and Simone Pettigrew have proposed that wine con-sumption is an aesthetic experience.17 Having accepted that many philo-sophical writers have long dismissed any relationship between food, drink and aesthetics, they conclude in their own research that ‘informants gener-ally saw similarities between the consumption of wine and the consump-tion of aesthetic products – notably music’.18 In particular, the authors refer to the similarity between wine and music in terms of common evaluative criteria that can be used across a range of aesthetic products. Using the suggestions of Beardsley in the 1980s,19 these criteria included concepts of balance/unity, complexity and intensity. All of these are terms that sit well when applied to a high-end wine and they are likely to underpin any discussions that one might overhear at a professional wine tasting. The very nature of such a tasting can, in a sense, reflect a similar appreciation of music. To the knowledgeable taster, wine can be made up of highs and lows. Experts talk negatively of an over emphasis on individual elements such as acidity or tannin; they discuss the lack of depth, structure and

17 Steve Charters and Simone Pettigrew, ‘Is wine consumption an aesthetic experience?’, Journal of Wine Research, 16.2 (2005), 121–36.

18 Charters and Pettigrew, 133.19 Ibid., 134.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 151

cohesion in a wine; they consider a wine to be at its best when all elements are balanced and working in unison; they are keen for no one element to dominate the show at the expense of the other individual participants. The affinity with assessment of an orchestral performance cannot be ignored.

Wine and Music: A Special Bond

Wine writers have often compared wine to pieces of music and there has been considerable research recently which looks at this relationship. There are obvious commercial applications here and there have been examples where music has played an important role in determining a customer’s purchase decision. One such example involved researchers from the Music Research Group at the University of Leicester who discovered that play-ing background French music in a wine store had subliminally encouraged customers to purchase French wine.20 Other more recent research exam-ined the effect of background music on the taste of wine and found that ‘auditory stimuli can in fact influence flavour perception’.21 Both sets of findings are not all that surprising when one considers a more everyday example of an Italian-themed restaurant playing authentic Italian music in order to enhance and complement the style of décor, service, food and wine being offered. Playing a completely different style of music would potentially inhibit the experience of the diner.

One winemaker taking such research to a more specific level suggests that different styles of music can make the same wine taste differently by causing what is referred to as a cross-modal influence. Clark Smith is a winemaker and the author of Postmodern Winemaking. He suggests that music can strongly influence the way a wine tastes. When even sceptics can

20 Leon Jaroff, ‘Days of Wine and Muzak’, Time, V 150, 22 (1997), 84.21 Adrian North, ‘The effect of background Music on the Taste of Wine’, British Journal

of Psychology, 103 (2012), 298.

152 Brian Murphy

accept that glassware, tableware, ambient temperature and décor can influ-ence an overall meal experience, is it really such a leap to suggest that the auditory sense can also play a part in influencing how a particular wine’s flavour is perceived? Unlike other research in the same area, Smith sug-gests that music not only enhances but actually changes how the taste of a wine is perceived. A simple but admittedly less than scientific experiment took place during a radio interview with Smith and helps to illustrate the point. The show’s host was blindfolded and offered three wines to taste. The first was tasted while listening to a Beach Boys track, the second with a flamenco track, and the third was tasted in conjunction with a Metallica track. The host then described each of the wines live on air. Of particular note, even in this most informal of experiments, was that all three blind wines were described very differently. They were in fact all exactly the same.

Clark Smith offers actual album tracks on his website, ones that he judges best to accompany his wine selection.22 He defines postmodern winemaking as ‘the practical art of touching the human soul by rendering its grapes into liquid music’23 and likens the intricacy involved in making wine to the complexity involved in achieving a good orchestral performance. He talks of the illusory nature of harmony: ‘When an orchestra tunes up, there’s lots of noise but not much harmony between the instruments. But then there’s music […] which is perceived as sad or joyful. It carries emotion’.24 That orchestral comparison is reminiscent of earlier efforts to compare wine appreciation to music appreciation. Individual elements included by the winemaker such as acidity, tannin or fruit intensity might be compared to colours created by the combination of instruments in an orchestra. It is only through the skill and competence of the ‘wine conduc-tor’ that these independent elements can achieve balance and unity thus

22 See <http://postmodernwinemaking.com/wine-and-music> accessed 6 May 2014.23 W. Blake Grey, ‘Music to drink wine by: Vintner insists music can change wine’s fla-

vors’, San Francisco Chronicle [Online] available at <http://www.sfgate.com/wine/article/Music-to-drink-wine-by-Vintner-insists-music-can-3235602.php> accessed April 24 2014.

24 See interview with Clark Smith. <http://www.wineanorak.com/clark_smith.htm> accessed 12 May 2014.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 153

allowing an accomplished performance to be appreciated by the audience. According to Smith, the following guidelines help achieve successful wine and music pairings.

Red wines need either minor key or they need music that has negative emotionPinot noir generally likes romantic musicPolka music does not pair with any wineCabernets are more at home with angry music.25

Though something of a wine maverick, Clark Smith is not alone in his explorations of cross-modal relationships between wine and music. Recent work by Charles Spence and others has garnered a lot of publicity in the wine world. Spence is Professor of Experimental Psychology in Oxford26 and has carried out much research on the influence of contextual variables on multisensory flavour. Most recently, he has been looking for cross-modal links between classical music and fine wine. His early studies found that participants did in fact match recognised wine aromas with classes of instruments and musical notes in a non-random way: ‘It is clear that participants picked much lower pitched sounds as corresponding with the smell of smoke, musk, dark chocolate and cut hay while generally associat-ing the fruitier aromas (apple, lemon, apricot, raspberry, pineapple, and blackberry) with higher pitched notes instead’.27

A more recent study by Spence and his colleagues scientifically examined the relationship between four specifically chosen and signifi-cantly different wines and eight pieces of music as chosen by the London

25 W. Blake Grey ‘Music to drink wine by: Vintner insists music can change wine’s flavors’, San Francisco Chronicle [Online]. See footnote 23.

26 Recently the subject of an RTÉ radio discussion on matching wine to music. See <http://www.rte.ie/radio1/today-with-sean-o-rourke/programmes/2014/0416/609206-today-with-sean-o-rourke-wednesday-16-april-2014/?clipid=1535470> accessed 17 April 2014.

27 Charles Spence, Liana Richards, Emma Kjellin, Anna-Maria Huhnt, Victoria Daskal, Alexandra Scheybeler, Carlos Velasco, and Ophelia Deroy, ‘Looking for crossmodal correspondences between classical music and fine wine’, Flavour, 2, 29 (2013), <http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/2/1/29> accessed 2 May 2014.

154 Brian Murphy

Symphony Orchestra. The results of these experiments suggested that there was significant agreement among participants that certain wines went well with particular pieces of music and that other wines did not blend as well. In fact, some wines were actually enhanced by the addition of particular types of music during the tasting. Spence is not unique in his scientific conclusions and Adrian North’s 2012 study at Edinburgh University confirmed his view that ‘auditory stimuli can influence flavour perception’.28 Such conclusions have led Dave Williams, editor of the prestigious Wine and Spirit magazine, to suggest that in the near future it is quite possible that diners in Michelin-starred restaurants might soon be presented with music lists to choose from to best match with their food and wine. The development of hyper directional speakers would in theory make this possible.29 Such technology would allow individual tables within close proximity to each other to channel individual pieces of music according to requirements. This would quite feasibly enhance their fine dining experience.

Not all interactions between music and oenology have been posi-tive. In 2012, an Australian wine competition commissioned a special piece of music to be played while the designated judges tasted particu-lar wines. The competition in question was the Adelaide Review Hot 100 Wines Show. The organiser of the show James Erskine commis-sioned an original piece from composer Eugene Ughetti which was subsequently performed by one of South Australia’s most renowned pianists, Gabriella Smart. The piece was played during the judging of individual wines entered into the category ‘Wines produced without the addition of commercial yeasts or acids’. According to Erskine, the music was included because he wanted:

To provide an environment which forces the judges wherever they are from, to think, feel and taste in a South Australian mindset to better understand the emotional, or

28 Adrian North, ‘The effect of background music on the taste of wine’, British Journal of Psychology 103 (3) (August 2012), 293–301; 298.

29 Charles Spence, Maya U. Shankar and Heston Blumenthal, 217.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 155

non-geophysical, terroir of South Australia that influences the wine styles we are tasting.30

The inclusion of the piece entitled Terroir was not to everyone’s taste. While many people accept that music has the potential to influence how a particular wine might be perceived, some commentators felt that such an intrusion into the process would have an unfair impact on a judge’s objectivity. Guy Woodward, editor of influential wine magazine Decanter, clearly was not a fan when he said that the idea was ridiculous. Music quite clearly affects people’s moods –there are enough studies to show that. So it follows that how an individual reacts to a certain type of music could put them in a certain frame of mind when judging the wines, and could quite easily impact on their judgment.31

While the work of Smith, Spence and North provide good examples of how music and wine relationships are beginning to be explored at a scientific level, there are many other examples of how these two cultural entities interact closer to home. A recent theatre piece helps to empha-sise how music-wine linkages can enhance an entertainment experience. A play entitled A Wine Goose Chase is an innovative one-woman show that integrates wine tasting, Franco-Irish connections, music and theatre. The show is written and performed by Kildare woman Susan Boyle.32 It is accompanied by a number of intermittent wine tastings which are linked to the performance. It is usually enacted in a beverage setting such as a wine bar or pub. The show was recently performed as part of the Savour Kilkenny Festival 2014 in The Left Bank Bar and Restaurant. Boyle takes her audience on a vinous journey through the centuries, detailing the long and surprisingly tangible connections that have tied Ireland to the wines of France and other countries down through the ages. However, for many, the highlight of the show occurs at the end when the audience are asked to

30 Christina Pickard, ‘Judges treated to live music at wine competition’, Decanter [online]: <http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/530467/judges-treated-to-live-music-at-wine-competition> accessed 14 January 2014.

31 Ibid.32 See <http://awinegoosechase.com> accessed 18 January 2014.

156 Brian Murphy

raise a final tasting glass in celebration of the many Irish wine connections and to raucously sing together that evocative song The Parting Glass. The lyrics of the song itself reflect the warmth of the association between drink and music when each verse concludes with the line ‘so fill to me the parting glass, goodnight and joy be with you all’.33

There are many other examples of music and wine enthusiasts attempt-ing to marry their two cultural loves. One such final example is worth mentioning. It is offered by Food and Wine’s wine editor Raymond Blake and by The Sunday Business Post’s wine writer Tomas Clancy. Both of these renowned oenophiles host a show called Intermezzo on RTÉ’s Lyric FM which often fuses the two distinct artistic fields of classical music and wine culture. Examples of show descriptions include:

The salubrious effects of a thimble of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Prokofiev’s last, great chess game are under discussion as Tomas Clancy and Raymond Blake find a seat in the foyer for an interval chat.

Conversation in the lobby tonight alights on Kodaly’s little known influence on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the burnt orange notes of Liszt’s favourite wine, Tokaji, as Tomas Clancy and Raymond Blake meet up for an interval jar.34

Both A Wine Goose Chase and Intermezzo are good examples of how wine culture is beginning to impact in the music world. Different from previous interactions, this time wine is becoming an equal partner in the cultural entity. Its traditional role was one of the subjects, or in some cases the liba-tious muse that encouraged art creation. Instead, in the case of the play, it has become an integral part of the performance and is granted cultural parity through discussions in the Intermezzo example.

33 Lyrics from the song made famous by the Clancy Brothers.34 See <http://www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_the-lyric-concert.xml> accessed

4 February 2014.

Wine and Music: An Emerging Cultural Relationship 157

Conclusion

Food and wine have always been part of artistic and literary culture. The earliest Greek symposia provided a forum where ‘men drank and talked, often about specified topics in a convivial setting removed from the con-straints of everyday life’.35 Not only was wine used as an essential libation to help loosen the tongues of symposiasts, but there are numerous exam-ples showing the incorporation of wine culture into artistic and literary representations of the time. Wine has always been there on the periphery, sometimes as muse, sometimes as subject. In recent years, however, wine culture and gastronomy in general have begun to move into a new academic space. Gastronomy is emerging as a cultural entity in its own right and much epicurean-themed academic discourse continues apace. Though far from mainstream, these developments have now allowed wine culture to engage on a new level with their previously distant cultural cousins such as music. The examples provided in this chapter have shown how wine and music can complement each other. Though many may still be sceptical, it will be acknowledged that serious research is beginning to examine how music can influence not only the enjoyment of gastronomic experiences but even the perceptions of taste. There may be a long way to travel before there could be definitive agreement with maverick winemaker Clark Smith that Cabernet Sauvignon is a perfect match for heavy rock music; the general public will remain somewhat dubious about statements such as ‘red wines need either minor keys or they need music that has negative emotion. They don’t like happy music …Cabernets like angry music’.36

Sadly, the future of research into how wine and music relate to each other is, in truth, most likely to be driven by commercial interests. It will be undertaken by the marketeers who are unlikely to be interested in the cultural appreciation of either wine or music. Their sole aim will be to har-ness the power of music, good or bad, to subliminally influence how the

35 Varriano, 2010, 37.36 Spence et al, 2013.

158 Brian Murphy

consumer spends money. However, it is refreshing to think that the business of gastronomy can be analysed and appreciated in a different, artistic and non-mercenary way, among lovers of wine and music who, contemplating the interrelated pleasures, may still indulge in their own scientific experi-mentation. The hypothesis of Spence and others that ‘Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No 1 in D major turned out to be a particularly good match for the Château Margaux 2004’37 is one that wine lovers may choose to put to the test.

37 Spence et al, 2013.

Benjamin Keatinge

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause in Richard Murphy’s The Battle of Aughrim

Richard Murphy’s long historical poem The Battle of Aughrim (1968) has been praised for its objectivity and documentary-like overview of a major military encounter on Irish soil which took place on 12 July 1691 outside Ballinasloe, Co. Galway. The conflict was between a French-led Irish Jacobite army loyal to the deposed King James II and a Dutch-led Williamite army defending the Protestant and English interest of William of Orange who had claimed the English throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This was a decisive battle, of greater historical importance than the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, since it was at Aughrim that the Jacobite army was effectively destroyed, thus leading to the Treaty of Limerick and to the flight of the Wild Geese in October 1691. These events would confirm the Protestant, Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Ireland for over two centuries.

Murphy’s poem is exceptionally aware of the presence of history in the consciousness and imaginations of Irish people; a well-known line from the poem insists on the presentness of the past in Irish culture: ‘The past is happening today’.1 This viewpoint is affirmed by Audrey S. Eyler and Robert F. Garratt2 who argue that:

The persistence of history in recent politics and cultural development dramatically demonstrates the tenacious grip of the past upon the contemporary Irish imagina-tion. This historical sense seems inextricably bound to a crisis of identity, the logical result of living in a bifurcated society in which Gaelic and British elements struggle

1 Richard Murphy, Poems 1952–2012 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2013), 69. Also published as The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952–2012 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013) in the UK.

2 Audrey S. Eyler and Robert F. Garratt, eds, The Uses of the Past: Essays on Irish Culture (Newark: UP of Delaware, 1988).

160 Benjamin Keatinge

to authenticate themselves within their respective traditions. Both elements of Irish society, propelled by the confusion of differing political and cultural realities, look to the past to validate a sense of community and identity.3

In his influential review of Seamus Heaney’s North,4 Murphy identifies the themes of ‘Poetry and Terror’, yoked together with violence within Heaney’s landmark volume. For Murphy, Heaney’s poetry in North ‘contains, pre-serves, and yields up terror as well as awe’ so that Heaney’s archaeological sifting, which ‘traces modern terrorism back to its roots in the early Iron Age’, is seen as an apt exploration of the paradigmatic violence running through Irish history.5

Murphy’s own acts of archaeological sifting pre-date those of Heaney and involve a forensic recreation of a seventeenth-century military encoun-ter which still resonates with today’s divisions and distortions of history. Murphy’s achievement is not only artistic, but also historical and social, since his poem has given the battle a greater place in public conscious-ness. In addition, the poem draws on the work of some dedicated amateur historians in recreating the texture and atmospherics of the battle itself and the locale where it was fought. It was only in 1960 that a memorial cross was erected to the 7,000 soldiers who lost their lives on both sides and Murphy’s poem, published and broadcast in 1968, has spear-headed a renewed appreciation of the events of this momentous battle. Indeed, Murphy’s approach to the battle is kaleidoscopic, drawing together dif-ferent temporal and sectarian perspectives into one architectonic whole. Thus, the poem’s time scheme is carefully divided into events happening ‘Now’ (1960s), ‘Before’ (the battle in 1691), ‘During’ (the battle on 12 July 1691) and ‘After’ (the battle, in subsequent events and in popular memory after the Jacobite defeat). Murphy is careful also to balance Williamite and Jacobite perspectives with an emphasis on the interactions of native Irish

3 Eyler and Garratt, Preface, The Uses of the Past, 7.4 Richard Murphy, ‘Poetry and Terror’, New York Review of Books (30 September 1976)

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1976/sep/30/poetry-and-terror/> accessed 14 June 2014.

5 Ibid.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 161

and the international mercenaries and brigades brought to Irish soil for the military campaigns of 1690–91. As he reveals, the poem is ‘an equation of all the forces that met and decided those people’s fate and the future of the country at that time and place […] the poem is a complex equation of people, ideas, myths, legends, facts – all mixed up.’6

The motivating force behind Murphy’s poetic re-enactment of the battle is, as the poet admits, his personal search for origins and roots in the divided history of his own family and, by extension, those of Irish people at large. Murphy was born in 1927 into an Anglo-Irish landown-ing family (on his mother’s side) and spent his childhood in a large house named Milford in Co. Galway which his ancestors had obtained, along with 70,000 acres, from dispossessed Catholic families in the aftermath of the Battle of Aughrim. The central historical question of the poem is stated in the first line, which asks: ‘Who owns the land […]?’ and Murphy tells us in his 2002 memoir The Kick:

I had written enough externally about boats and the sea in Sailing to an Island [Murphy’s 1963 volume]. Now I wanted to look inward at the divisions and devas-tations in myself as well as in Ireland: the conflicts, legends, rituals, myths and his-tories arising from possession of the land – why we still had borders and bigotries.7

So The Battle of Aughrim is an externalisation of an identity crisis in Murphy himself, centred around his dual heritage as an Anglo-Irishman who enjoyed an English education but whose ancestors fought on both sides of the 1691 battle and whose present-day (1960s) sympathies lie as much with the Catholic Irish of contemporary Ireland as they do with his own (post)colonial class.

Indeed, one might suggest that the dual inheritance of Irish religious and social identity converge in the person of Richard Murphy and that his inheritance is ‘played out’ in the act of writing The Battle of Aughrim. The

6 Richard Murphy, ‘The Use of History in Poetry’, in Audrey S. Eyler and Robert F. Garratt, eds, The Uses of the Past: Essays on Irish Culture (Newark: UP of Delaware, 1988), 19.

7 Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Life Among Writers (London: Granta, 2002), 217.

162 Benjamin Keatinge

personal element in Murphy’s account of the battle allows the reader to feel the weight of history on the poet himself who feels ‘Bones and bullets fingering my mind’ and admits that ‘The battle cause […] / Has a beginning in my blood’.8 In his account of the battle, it is not something happening to other people in the distant past; rather it is happening to him, in the present moment, and by extension, to the reader as well.

The antinomies of Irish history find expression in the poem: victor and victim, power versus powerlessness, possession and dispossession, Protestant and Catholic. The atavistic tendency to recreate or re-enact historical scenarios in the present is factored into the poem, especially in the first section which deals with ‘Now’ or 1960s realities. In this section, ‘Green Martyrs’ of one poem are contrasted with the ‘Orange March’ of another. The ‘Bygone canon, bygone spleen’9 of both communities are seen to inhabit present-day consciousness. As Murphy’s poem suggests, there is an historiographical tendency for each community to reproduce certain narratives about itself, often simplifying or misrepresenting histori-cal events. By invoking contrasting perspectives simultaneously, Murphy shows how fact and mythology co-exist and cluster around the same events, differently told and understood differently by separate communities in the present moment.

Although The Battle of Aughrim was fought on Irish soil, the causes of the war, and its wider consequences, were European. They involved a power struggle between James II of England – the Catholic monarch who was trying to regain his throne with the aid of Louis XIV of France – and the Dutch King William III whose claim to the English throne in 1688 would be confirmed by victories in Ireland at the Boyne in 1690 and at Aughrim in 1691. This dynastic conflict was known in Irish as ‘the War of the Two Kings’ and the armies of both sides contained soldiers from France, Holland, England, Spain as well as from Ireland. Neither king was present on the battlefield – James II had fled Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and William of Orange had entrusted his army to the

8 Murphy, The Battle of Aughrim, 69.9 Ibid., 63.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 163

Dutch commander Godert de Ginkell. So it was a war fought by proxies and with broad coalitions: on the Jacobite side, a French-funded army led by the Marquis de St Ruth representing the Catholic interest; and on the Williamite side, a Dutch-led army representing the Protestant interest.

Murphy’s poem gives a vivid account of some of the major participants in the battle, including Saint Ruth, leader of the Jacobite army, and Patrick Sarsfield, the Irish cavalry commander, and Henry Luttrell, a Jacobite com-mander whose treachery contributed to the Jacobite defeat. In all of this, it is apparent that these historical figures are also acting as proxies for Murphy’s own ‘playing out’ of the battle in his mind so that the heroism of Sarsfield, the blundering of Saint Ruth in the execution of his battle plans, and the duplicity of Luttrell, appear as objectified anxieties in Murphy’s haunted sense of what was lost in that battle, for the Irish nation and for his own post-colonial sense of identity.

The contribution of France to the Jacobite cause is actually quite cen-tral to the poem, especially in its focus on the personality of Saint Ruth as commander-in-chief of the Jacobite army. Murphy underlines the multi-national coalition which Saint Ruth commands:

The army commander only speaksFrench and Italian:His officers know English,Their men only Irish.10

St Ruth is an unappealing character. He achieved renown as a persecutor of Protestant Huguenots following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; reputedly a wife-beater, his appearance is unprepossessing and Murphy notes his ‘peregrine eyes’, his ‘Heraldic mouth’, ‘Stiletto beard’ and ‘long forked nose’.11 He treats the Irish unsympathetically and he doesn’t disclose his battle plans to any of his fellow officers so that when he is decapitated by a well-aimed cannon ball midway through the battle, the Jacobite army rapidly disintegrates:

10 Ibid., 84.11 Ibid., 85.

164 Benjamin Keatinge

Chance, skill and treachery all hit the markJust when the sun’s rod tipped the altar hill:The soldier’s panicked, thinking God had struck.12

In spite of these limitations, St Ruth emerges from the poem not entirely without credit. He may be somewhat distant from the Irish soldiers he commands – Murphy’s description of ‘the Catholic flag / Blazoned with Bourbon lilies’ makes clear St Ruth’s allegiance to the French crown.Nevertheless, Murphy sees fit to reproduce in English translation ‘St Ruth’s Address to the Irish Army’ in which the Frenchman displays some rhetori-cal resourcefulness:

[…] you may be assured that King James will Love and Reward you: Louis the Great will protect you; all good Catholicks will applaud you; I my self will Command you; the Church will pray for you, your Posterity will bless you; Saints and Angels will Caress you; God will make you all Saints, and his holy Mother will lay you in her Bosome.13

St Ruth very nearly succeeded in defeating the Williamite army and Murphy describes the climactic moment of the battle as the moment when St Ruth declares a premature victory before losing his own life seconds later:

He throws up his hat in the air,The time is near sunset,He knows victory is sure,One cavalry charge will win it.‘Le jour est à nous, mes enfants,’He shouts. The next minuteHis head is shot off.14

Murphy’s use of the present tense underscores the instantaneous immediacy of these events as they unfold in the rapidity of battle. It also becomes clear that even historians hostile to the Jacobite cause, such as Reverend George

12 Ibid., 86.13 Ibid., 72.14 Ibid., 85.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 165

Story whose Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1693) is a major, if not unbiased, source of information on the battle, allow Saint Ruth a certain heroic centrality to the day’s events:

However, though the man had an ill characterAs a great persecutor of Protestants in France,Yet we must allow him to be very brave in his person,And indeed considerable in his conduct,Since he brought the Irish to fight a better battleThan ever that people could boast of before: They behaved themselves like men of another nation.15

What emerges in the poem is that the Jacobite army and its leader put up a gallant fight, even though militarily less capable and less well-prepared than their opponents. Military historians have emphasised the inadequacies of the Jacobite infantry and artillery–‘inferior equipment and inadequate training’ according to one account–while stressing that ‘The cavalry was much better. Well mounted, well led and well equipped, the “priding cav-alry” was the principal arm of the Jacobite army’.16

In Irish mythologies of the conflict, it is the cavalry commander Patrick Sarsfield who looms largest in the popular imagination and Murphy gives due weight to Sarsfield’s patriotism and courage. However, Sarsfield’s cavalry regiment is held in reserve–perhaps owing to a ‘personality clash’ between St Ruth and Sarsfield17–and so the Irish general is unable to play an influ-ential role in the battle until it is too late:

The saviour of Limerick knowsNothing of St Ruth’s plan,Not even that the battleOf Aughrim has begun.[…]

15 Ibid., 93.16 John Childs, ‘The Williamite war 1689–1691’, in Thomas Barlett and Keith Jeffery,

eds, A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 191.17 ‘The Horror of Aughrim’, Connaught Tribune (12 July 1991). <http://places.galway/

library.ie/history/chapter277.html> accessed 29 May 2014.

166 Benjamin Keatinge

He hears cries, groans and shrieks.Nothing he will do, or has doneCan stop this happening.18

Again, the reader is thrust into the instantaneous present, into the battle as Sarsfield experienced it, without the long view of history to give context and explanation to events. However, the benefit of Murphy’s panoramic approach can be seen in the contrasting vision of Sarsfield’s role in Section IV of the poem ‘After’ where the focus is on Sarsfield’s mythologised after-life as the patriotic leader of the Wild Geese who, having negotiated the terms of the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691, chose exile rather than submission to English rule:

You stood, while brother officers betrayedBy going, and six thousand Irish died.Then you assumed command, but veered about:Chose exile in your courteous conqueror’s boat.

‘Change kings with us, and we will fight again,’You said, but sailed off with ten thousand men;[…]We loved you, horseman of the white cockade,Above all, for your last words, ‘Would to GodThis wound had been for Ireland.’ Cavalier,You feathered with the wild geese our despair.19

These lines are full of historical resonance. Sarsfield, unlike the traitor Henry Luttrell (featured in Sections III and IV of the poem), stays loyal to the Jacobite cause and helps protect the Irish soldiers in their retreat from Aughrim. He chooses exile rather than submission. His white cockade is, of course, the Jacobite symbol and Sarsfield is ‘Cavalier’ in more than one sense. Apart from his taste for daring, but sometimes reckless, attacks on the enemy, he is also following the lineage of the English Cavaliers in defending the King’s prerogatives in preference to those of Parliament.

18 Murphy, The Battle of Aughrim, 87.19 Ibid., 98.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 167

An Historical Note to the poem in the 2013 edition of Richard Murphy’s poems supplies the following information about Sarsfield and St Ruth:

St Ruth arrived at Limerick in May, lost Athlone by vanity and carelessness in June, and decided to stand at Aughrim on July 12 to restore his position and redeem his name. Patrick Sarsfield disputed this hazardous strategy; his policy was to avoid risking the remnant of his nation in one great combat. St Ruth dismissed Sarsfield to the rear of the army, to command the reserve, and gave him no information about the battle. The Irish, strongly placed on the hill, held off the allied onslaught until St Ruth’s decapitation by a cannonball. Then a traitor, Colonel Henry Luttrell, with-drew his cavalry from a vital pass. Sarsfield could do no more than cover the retreat to Limerick, where he signed the Treaty, and in October sailed to France with ten thousand troops (known as the Wild Geese) to join the Irish Brigade. Two years later, as Maréchal de camp, he was mortally wounded at Landen in the French vic-tory over William of Orange.20

The historical disaster of Aughrim, from the Gaelic and Jacobite point of view, is tempered by the undying flame of Irish patriotism kept alight by Sarsfield and the Irish Brigades. Sarsfield is a conduit for the ongoing alli-ance between France and Ireland, a relationship of continued importance in the subsequent era of the Penal Laws and throughout the eighteenth century. Serving mainly under King Louis XIV of France, the military prowess of the exiled Wild Geese helped to maintain the dignity of an imagined Irish national identity and independence.

The hagiographical portrait of Sarsfield in Section IV of Murphy’s poem anticipates the exploits of the Irish Brigades in European engagements up to the French Revolution and beyond. Their most famous battle success was at the Battle of Fontenoy on 11 May 1745 when a French-led army faced an Anglo-Dutch army as part of the War of the Austrian Succession. Six bat-talions of the Irish Brigade led a successful charge against the Anglo-Dutch flank at a critical juncture of the battle, thus enabling a French victory. This feat of valour was celebrated by Bartholomew Dowling (1823–1863) in his

20 Richard Murphy, Poems 1952–2012, 259.

168 Benjamin Keatinge

poem ‘Battle of Fontenoy’.21 Indeed, the martial achievements of the Irish Brigades have been part and parcel of Irish cultural nationalist mythology, most famously, in Thomas Davis’s poem ‘The Battle Eve of the Irish Brigade’ which concludes with the lines: ‘For in far foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade, / Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade’.22 Harman Murtagh, in his guide to the battlefield of the Boyne, argues that: ‘In the nineteenth century the deeds of the Jacobite soldiers at home and abroad formed an important strand of Thomas Davis’s concept of an historic Irish nation.’23 Murphy’s celebration of the ‘horseman of the white cockade’ is in keeping with this tradition.

Not unrelated to the Wild Geese in Irish nationalist mythology are the rapparees, or guerrilla fighters, who played a major role on the Jacobite side during the Williamite wars. Indeed, legend has it that Patrick Sarsfield was aided and abetted by a rapparee called ‘Galloping Hogan’ in a raid on a convoy of military stores and artillery during the Siege of Limerick in August 1690. Murphy’s poem attributes a certain Robin Hood romance to the lives of these outlaws, as in Section II of the poem ‘Before’:

[…] At the drumming of a snipe each can disappearTerrified as a bird trapped in a gorse fire,To delve like a mole or mingle like a nightjarInto the earth, into the air, into the water.24

Against this elemental imagery, Murphy juxtaposes (in Section I ‘Now’) the modern day battlefield which has lost any romantic veneer, and the nationalist panache of the Wild Geese or the ribbonmen is supplanted by a farmer’s ‘field of ragwort’:

21 Bartholomew Dowling, ‘Battle of Fontenoy’, <http://www.poetry-archive.com/d/battle_of_fontenoy.html> accessed 24 January 2015.

22 Thomas Davis, ‘The Battle Eve of the Irish Brigade’, <http://www.bartleby.com/250/90.html> accessed 23 January 2015.

23 Harman Murtagh, The battle of the Boyne 1690: A guide to the battlefield (Drogheda: Boyne Valley Honey Company, 2006), 70.

24 Murphy, The Battle of Aughrim, 83.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 169

‘Rapparees, whiteboys, volunteers, ribbonmen,Where have they gone?

Coerced into exile, scatteredLeaving a burnt gable and a field of ragwort.’25

The poem closes with a vision of modern battlefield tourism, titled ‘Battle Hill Revisited’, to suggest that something is gained and something is lost when these momentous historical events fall under the auspices of Fáilte Ireland [Irish Tourist Board].

Strangers visit the townland:Called after wild geese, they fly through Shannon.26

In the final stanza, Murphy draws the reader, by way of the outbound tourist route, away from Ireland and back to France. The modern day Wild Geese are a somewhat post-heroic, tepid variety whose touristic itinerary lacks the high stakes of the original battle, with perhaps an oblique hint here at the European Union as an indirect solution to Irish historical problems. In this way, Murphy underlines his own sense of the battle’s centrality to his personal heritage (and to that of other Irish men and women) while sound-ing a note of caution about the branding of Aughrim as a tourist stopover:

Then try to imagineExactly what took place, what it could mean,

Whether by will or by chance:Then turn in time to catch a plane for France.27

Murphy’s poem thus points to what might be termed ‘theme-park’ trivi-alisation of history through which the weight and consequence of events in the 1690s are rendered harmless and are presented as sanitised products

25 Ibid., 62.26 Ibid., 99.27 Ibid., 100.

170 Benjamin Keatinge

for the modern tourist, like a Famine cottage which merely appears quaint in the eyes of the contemporary visitor.

Murphy’s poem does justice to the historical gravity of the issues at stake in the Williamite wars in Ireland. The question ‘Who owns the land […]?’ points to the great injustices of the Elizabethan plantations and Cromwellian expropriations which were confirmed at Aughrim so that by the end of the seventeenth century, less than 14 per cent of Irish land was owned by Catholics. From the perspective of 1967, Murphy’s poem clearly demonstrates how, right to the present, ‘The past is happening today’ in contemporary Ireland and he captures the extent to which we are prisoners of history on this island. In an elegy to his grandmother titled ‘The Woman of the House’, Murphy refers to the ‘impossible wrong’28 of Irish history and these wrongs are also captured in other Murphy poems. The darkly sinister ‘Droit de Seigneur’ is imagined in 1820, when ‘famine was spread-ing / Among the people’ and ‘The master’ abducts a young bride from ‘a wedding from the next parish’ while out ‘hunting for ‘Ribbonmen’.29 In his later sonnet sequence The Price of Stone (1985), which uses buildings and monuments to reflect on aspects of Murphy’s life, several poems evoke the happenstance of Irish history. In ‘Little Barn’, there is an allusion to ‘a blue-eyed Williamite’, actually a reference to Richard Murphy’s son by his then partner Anya Barnett.30. Other sonnets observe the human cost behind buildings and monuments across the Irish countryside. Thus, ‘Kylemore Castle’, Co. Galway was built by ‘wage-skeletons’ for a ‘Grotesquely rich’ industrialist from Manchester;31 ‘Family Seat’ reminds that the ‘grim, grey face’ of the building’s facade was ‘cut by famine workmen’.32

28 The poem ‘The Woman of the House’ was first published in Sailing to an Island (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). Richard Murphy, Poems 1952–2012, 30.

29 Murphy, Poems 1952–2012, 33.30 Ibid., 189. The birth of Murphy’s son, Richard William Barnett, on 29 January 1982,

is described in The Kick where Murphy explains that the birth of his ‘Natural Son’ was the inspiration for the final sonnet of the sonnet sequence The Price of Stone, Murphy, The Kick, 336–7.

31 Ibid., 211.32 Ibid., 195.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 171

Clearly, Murphy takes a longer view of Irish history and his poetic re-enactment of the Battle of Aughrim serves as a personal point of refer-ence and an originary ground for the injustices of modern (post-1600) Irish history. Murphy’s forebears are part of that foundational exclusion as can be seen from the sonnet ‘Gate Lodge’ where the setting is Murphy’s childhood home at Milford on the Galway-Mayo border:

I face my forebear’s relic, a neat styThat hovelled with his brogue some grateful clodUnearthed by famine; and I hear go byYour souper choir school voice defrauding God.33

Murphy’s own education at Canterbury Choir School and Wellington College adds weight, the poem implies, to the burden of responsibility of belonging to the Anglo-Irish caste. One might speculate that some of these allusions serve to expiate a sense of original sin on the part of the poet for his social origins.

It could be said that Murphy’s poetry is grounded in physical experi-ence34 and while strong in this respect, The Battle of Aughrim overlooks an important dimension of the Franco-Irish relationship in the 1680s and 1690s: the exchange of ideas in the fields of theology and learning and the intellectual confluence of Catholic teaching with Jacobite ideology. Raymond Gillespie notes in his study of Seventeenth-Century Ireland that:

Lists of books seized from Jacobites after 1690 and given to the library of Trinity College Dublin contain up-to-date works on a wide range of subjects from a variety of European countries […] In terms of religion also, the library of Luke Wadding, Catholic Bishop of Ferns, reflected a modern French-influenced spirituality as well as the more solid theological standbys of the Counter-Reformation […] Wadding purchased recently published small pious books in large quantities which he gave away to those in his diocese. Again the French influence is clear from these works

33 Ibid., 202.34 It is possible to see a measure of continuity and exteriority from his early poems of

seamanship, to the experience of battle in The Battle of Aughrim (1968) as well as his poems of landscape in High Island (1974) and of buildings and monuments in The Price of Stone (1985).

172 Benjamin Keatinge

[…] All this suggests a vibrant Old English culture, influenced strongly by the ideas of France in religion as well as in other areas.35

It must also be recalled that the Irish Colleges in France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal served the needs of disenfranchised Irish Catholics seeking education in their faith and that the period after 1691 saw the expansion and development of these Colleges once the Penal Laws were enacted. Thus, many Irish people turned to France for education, just as many of the Wild Geese sought engagement in the forces of King Louis XIV.

Part of Richard Murphy’s achievement in 1968 was to refocus historical attention on the Battle of Aughrim which has long been overshadowed in Irish cultural memory by the Battle of the Boyne. However, Richard Murphy is not an historian and while he draws on historical sources extensively in The Battle of Aughrim, he also draws on other aspects of historical remembrance which might be termed cultural or folk memory. For example, in Section IV of the poem ‘After’, Murphy includes a poem titled ‘The Wolfhound’ concerning a dog who apparently stood guard beside her dead master’s body long after the hostilities had ceased. The final stanzas of the poem read:

A redcoat, stalking, cocksHis flintlock when he hears the wolfhound growl.

Her fur bristles with fear at the new smell,Snow has betrayed her lair.

‘I’ll sell you for a packhorseYou antiquated bigoted papistical bitch!’

She springs. In self-defence he fires the gun.People remember this.

By turf embers she gives tongueWhen choirs are silenced in wood and stone.36

35 Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006), 279.

36 Murphy, The Battle of Aughrim, 92.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 173

Of course, such an event has no place in traditional history since it is not seen as bearing on the material outcome of the conflict. However, it can have a strong influence on folk memory and imagination. Murphy’s short, terse line, ‘People remember this’, indicates the strength and ubiquity of folk memory, especially in a traditionally oral culture such as that of Gaelic Ireland.

In Irish cultural memory, the defeat at Aughrim was part of the colonial legacy of defeat and dispossession for the Gaelic population and it earned the sobriquet Eachroim an áir or Aughrim of the slaughter. For English readers who are more accustomed to hearing about King Billy’s exploits at the Boyne, Murphy’s poem establishes the importance of the Aughrim battle. Thus, Murphy affirms in the English language the cultural, social and military disaster which the Battle of Aughrim was for Gaelic inhabitants of Ireland and, to a lesser degree, for the Old English population descended from the Normans. This is a valuable cultural intervention, but it cannot be registered as a formal contribution to academic history. Rather, it inhabits the more diffuse, but powerful domain of cultural memory from which the poem draws, and to which it contributes.

Since 1968, there has been an upsurge in memory studies, broadly conceived as an interdisciplinary domain with an indirect relationship to academic history, and owing its origins, in the main, to Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory or Les lieux de mémoire (1996).37 As Ian McBride explains:

Nora proclaimed that the relentless packaging of history in fact serves as an index of our memory loss […] the proliferation of archives, the heritage craze, the popu-larity of genealogical research and the obsession with anniversaries are all ways of compensating for the loss of an organic relationship with the past.38

Thus, Pierre Nora’s influential argument is that the apparent obsession with history and the use of locales of memory as heritage theme parks are the

37 See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989), 7–24; Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Volume 1), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP, 1996).

38 Ian McBride, ‘Memory and national identity in modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 11.

174 Benjamin Keatinge

outcome of a deracinated, postmodern divorce from actual folk memory which, he suggests, is all-pervasive in our own era. Nora’s identification of this loss is echoed by many Gaelic scholars who note the disappearance of the living oral culture which alone can preserve the place lore and folk memory of Gaelic civilisation.

Murphy’s poem is sensitive to these issues and conscious of the pre-carious difference between the fetishisation of realms of memory – the danger, for example, of an Aughrim heritage theme park – and the need to validate for a modern-day audience the experience of a battle which has had consequences for everyone living in Ireland today. Further, it seems that Murphy has steered an admirable middle course which has validated the folk memories associated with this battle but avoided academic fustiness, on the one hand, or jingoistic popularisation, on the other.39 At the same time, the mode and presentation of The Battle of Aughrim seems perfectly pitched to outflank Nora’s perception of degraded modern memorial cul-ture while also making a space for modern ears to hear about the ‘Legend’ of Aughrim as expressed in this poem from Section II ‘Before’:

The story I have to tellWas told me by a teacherWho read it in a poemWritten in a dying language.Two hundred and fifty years agoThe poet recalledMeeting a soldier who had heardFrom veterans of the warThe story I have to tell.40

39 In other words, Murphy avoids the fustiness of some academic historians while also steering clear of the simplistic jingoism of some battle poems such as that found in the two previously cited poems by Bartholomew Dowling and Thomas Davis or even in Tennyson’s valorisation of the heroic futility of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. It can be noted that none of these poems offer a panoramic or historically informed account of the battles they describe.

40 Murphy, The Battle of Aughrim, 70.

France, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause 175

Arguably, Murphy’s chosen format and voicings enable the voices of two hundred and fifty or three hundred years ago to be heard today, even if the oral culture to which they belonged no longer flourishes. This is surely a positive contribution to the forging of a healthy contemporary memorial culture.

In his comparison of historical and poetic perspectives on the battle, historian J. G. Simms remarks that ‘History and poetry need one another.’41 Indeed, Simms implies, historians may learn something from Murphy’s use of folk memory in presenting the battle and its aftermath. Academic historians have sometimes overlooked the importance of local detail and folk myth and memory in shaping the overall cultural influence of a major historical event such as the Battle of Aughrim. More recently, Ian McBride comments that: ‘As historians we need to scrutinise collective myths and memories, not just for evidence of their historical accuracy, but as objects of study in their own right.’42 Richard Murphy’s poetic sensibility has enabled him to approach his materials with a flexibility not always found among academic historians. Not only does Murphy integrate legend and anecdote into his poem – as, for example, in the three poems about local people in Section II ‘Before’ titled ‘A Wife’s Complaint’, ‘Martial Law’ and ‘The Sheepfold’ – he also takes a somewhat cavalier approach to history, as when he uses Reverend George Story’s An Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland as a kind of ‘found poem’ in Section IV ‘After’. Thereby, Murphy balances conflicting viewpoints without needing a narrative voice to knit the poem together and with-out having to appear himself as an authoritative voice within the poem. All of this gives additional credibility to Murphy’s statement that: ‘the poem is a complex equation of people, ideas, myths, legends, facts – all mixed up’ and it is a mixture masterfully handled by the poet, if maybe undervalued by the more traditional historian.

41 J.G. Simms, ‘The Battle of Aughrim: History and Poetry’, Irish University Review 7.1 (Spring 1977), 50.

42 Ian McBride, ‘Memory and national identity in modern Ireland’, History and Memory in Modern Ireland, 41.

176 Benjamin Keatinge

One might finally suggest that, in this act of inspired ventriloquism, Richard Murphy has reanimated a forgotten battle and re-enacted it poeti-cally as if it were ‘happening today’. In an era of sound bites about history and its lessons, Murphy’s painstaking act of reclamation deserves to find an audience among all those who are genuinely concerned with conflicts which have bedevilled Ireland since the poem was first published in 1968.

Arun Rao

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915

In August 1915, exactly one year after the start of the conflict, Debussy signed his Sonata for Cello and Piano – the first of his intended six sonatas for various instruments – Claude Debussy, musicien français. In Bertrand Dermoncourt’s L’univers de l’opéra, the opening lines of the entry on Debussy read:

He who became, by some regrettable nationalistic twist, known as ‘Claude of France’—as if his music embodied the national cultural identity—was in many respects an atypical artist in the French musical landscape of his time.1

These two statements evoke an apparent contradiction in the last crea-tive phase of this fascinating composer: how his yearning to contribute in a meaningful way to the war effort ended up with the composition of works whose features, both formal and stylistic, display the sort of mod-ernism that was castigated in nationalist discourses. Concurrently and paradoxically, Debussy’s correspondence testifies to his leaning towards the more extreme form of nationalism, while the writings he collected early in 1914 (under the title Monsieur Croche antidilettante) underline his obsession with setting himself apart from his compatriots. Just as his very personal take on French musical tradition produced mixed reactions in 1915, posterity judged his anti-boches ramblings quite severely until a clearer understanding of his idiosyncrasies came to light in more recent years.2 Ironically, in a curious twist of fate, Maurice Ravel’s moral issues with post-1918 patriotism had been slated by none other than Erik Satie,

1 Bertrand Dermoncourt: L’univers de l’opéra (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2012). 2 This took place thanks to the scholarship of Debussy authorities François Lesure

and Richard Langham Smyth. From the late 1990s, these contradictions were also

178 Arun Rao

who famously quipped that ‘Ravel refuses the Légion d’Honneur but all of his music accepts it’.3 That Debussy should have been spared such profes-sional backstabbing was possibly providential, for unlike Satie and Ravel, he did not survive the Great War. Diagnosed with bowel cancer before 1910, he died peacefully in March 1918 during a ferocious spell of German bombardment on the capital.

This study will posit that, while the entrenched xenophobia of the man tended to manifest itself in periods of relative sterility, the manner of Debussy’s ‘warpath’ became far more convoluted than he might have origi-nally intended. On the centenary of the composition of such a rich crop of musical masterpieces, this paper will offer insights into how Debussy’s sense of patriotic duty became articulated in those works.

Retreat

‘Y aura-t-il jamais un dernier Allemand?’4

Born in 1862, Claude Debussy was a relatively ‘senior’ citizen when the German troops invaded Belgium in early August 1914. This, along with his deteriorating health, forced him to be a bystander following Germany’s

analysed perceptively by a number of American scholars, including Jane Fulcher, Glen Watkins, Marianne Wheeldon, Barbara Kelly, and others.

3 Satie’s remarks appeared in the first issue of Jean Cocteau’s periodical Le Coq (1 May 1920). Comments by Satie in 1919 reveal another, more fundamental, contradiction: ‘Socially and politically, Debussy was far from having the same exacting sense of taste as musically. This revolutionary in Art was very bourgeois in his daily life. He did not like “eight-hour working days” or other social changes. I can assure you of it. He was not very favourable to a rise in salaries – except his own, of course- …’; Erik Satie, Écrits, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris : Champs libre, 1977) 50. (my translation).

4 ‘Will there ever be a last German? I’m convinced their soldiers reproduce among themselves!’ Debussy to Igor Stravinsky, 24 October 1915. Debussy Letters, selected and edited by Roger Nichols & François Lesure (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), 309.

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 179

declaration of war against France on August 3. Other slightly younger com-posers like Maurice Ravel (b.1875) or André Caplet (b.1878) and those of his generation like his friend Erik Satie (born in 1866), wore French Army uniforms with various degrees of pride. Repulsed by German mentality, Debussy nonetheless took a dim view of fellow composers Camille Erlanger (born in 1863) and Paul Dukas (born in 1865) and their readiness to ‘get [their] heads blown off as the next man’, declaring that he would himself be of very little use except ‘to man a barricade!’5

As the German offensive continued well into French territory, news of atrocities against Belgian civilians and the deliberate destruction of count-less medieval manuscripts in Louvain (Leuven) caused outrage in France, Britain and neutral Italy. On 30 August, a German plane dropped three bombs over the French capital, killing seven people. In the ensuing panic, Debussy’s wife Emma insisted on their leaving Paris. In early September, and after a difficult train journey, the family reached the town of Angers, a few hours from the Atlantic coast; they stayed there for the best part of a month. Upon hearing news of the bombardment of Rheims cathedral – a revered historical landmark since the days of Joan of Arc – Debussy vented his ire:

I won’t get on to the subject of German barbarity. It’s exceeded all expectations. They’ve even found it convenient not to distinguish between brutishness and intel-lectualism – a charming combination. […] I think that we are going to pay dearly for the right to not love the art of Richard Strauss and Schoenberg. For Beethoven, one made a happy discovery that he was Flemish! As for Wagner, it will be over the top! He will always be gloriously remembered for squeezing centuries of music into a nutshell. That is something, and, without question, only a German could have tried it. Our mistake was, for too long, to attempt to follow in his footsteps.6

5 Debussy Letters, 292. Debussy to Jacques Durand, his close friend and exclusive publisher since July 1905, on 18 August 1914.

6 Debussy to Nicolo Coronio, friend and former piano student, September 1914. Debussy Letters, 293. This influence was still strong by 1913 when, as Michael Taruskin comments, ‘Lili Boulanger’s prize cantata […] was not dangerously original: a salad of near quotations from Parsifal and Siegfried, it shows that the “default mode” for young French musicians, the style that came with the least resistance to a harried prize contestant working on a deadline, was still tinged with Wagnermania.’ Music in the early twentieth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 126.

180 Arun Rao

Was this a rather disingenuous rescuing of Wagner from the likely back-lash of nationalism? After all, back in 1908, Debussy had confided in the American violinist Arthur Hartmann his intention to write a ‘French Tristan’, suggesting that Wagner’s hero lacked the ‘manliness’ of a true warrior and dismissing his sentimentality.7 Wagner’s music had become less fashionable in France around the mid-1890s, at a time when Debussy’s music was starting to gain favour with audiences and critics. Defending Wagner at the height of nationalistic fever gave further proof of Debussy’s parti-pris against mainstream opinion, a parti-pris fully articulated in the collected writings he had planned for publication earlier in 1914 under the title Monsieur Croche anti dilettante:

I dared to tell him [Monsieur Croche] that men had tried, some in poetry, others in painting (I struggled to include a few musicians) to shake the dust of traditions and that this had only resulted in their being labelled symbolists or impressionists; handy words to despise your kindred … ‘They are reporters, men of the trade who labelled them so’, Croche went on unperturbed, ‘a beautiful idea, as it takes shape, can be ridiculous for imbeciles … Be sure that these men have a greater aspiration for beauty than that sort of herd of sheep which nonchalantly makes its way to the slaughter house.’8

Debussy was actually far from sectarian in musical matters. His animos-ity towards the Germans did not preclude a recognition of Wagner’s achievements, unlike the more senior Camille Saint-Saëns whose early enthusiasm for the Bayreuth master had turned to hatred following the debacle of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and the publication of a most incendiary pamphlet by Wagner.9 The letter above nevertheless conceded

7 Arthur Hartmann: Claude Debussy as I knew him and other writings of Arthur Hartmann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 15.

8 Claude Debussy: Monsieur Croche antidilettante [Mister Quaver, dilettante-hater] (Paris: Librarie Dorbon-aîné, 1921), 16. In this book, Debussy writes in the first person, so that whenever his alter ego Monsieur Croche makes an appearance, Debussy refers to him as a third party.

9 Wagner had chosen this inopportune moment to exact revenge for his failure to conquer Paris in the 1860s with Eine Kapitulation, ‘a cruel and tasteless parody of Parisian sufferings during the Prussian siege’. See review by Lisa Norris of Mark

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 181

that Wagner’s influence had hampered the regeneration of native talent, a well-trodden paradigm already formulated in the early 1900s by writers and critics Romain Rolland, Jean Marnold, and Paul Landormy among others.10 Beethoven’s relative safety from any associations with Kultur ‘warfare’ owed probably more to Rolland’s fervent tribute in the ‘roman-fleuve’ Jean-Christophe (1903–12) than to recent findings concerning his possible Belgian ancestry.11 Rolland’s pacifist pamphlet Au-dessus de la mêlée had caused adverse reactions but nonetheless earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915, proving that intellectuals could position themselves above petty nationalism with expressive elegance and clarity of thought, qualities that were conspicuously absent from Debussy’s private utterances.12

On his return to Paris in October 1914, Debussy welcomed his pub-lisher’s offer to prepare an original French edition of Chopin’s Piano Works, as German editions could no longer be imported. This would occupy him until the following August. Later that month, Durand asked if he would contribute a short piece to King Albert’s Book, a collection of testimonials by Western European artists and published by the Daily Telegraph in aid of

Weiner’s Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1997) <http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1318> accessed 13 December 2014.

10 Marnold defined Wagnerism as being essentially concerned with extra-musical mean-ings (textual, poetic, anecdotal, etc) which, in his opinion, denied a work its true musical significance. See Jacques Morland: Enquête sur l’influence allemande (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902), 533–4. It is noteworthy that Marnold, like d’Indy and Debussy, considered that Berlioz exerted a nefarious influence on French music.

11 Debussy was unconventional in his admiration of Beethoven’s music. For more on Beethoven’s origins, see The history of Beethoven’s family in <www.lvbeethoven.com> accessed 12 December 2014.

12 Written in September 1914, this pacifist text was originally entitled Au-dessus de la haine [Above hatred]. While the change attenuated the strength of Rolland’s senti-ments, it unwittingly carried a nuance that led to widespread condemnation since it was perceived as complacent, haughty and anti-patriotic. Its reception probably contributed to his decision to live in neutral Switzerland during the war. An eminent musicologist, Rolland had extolled the ‘authentic French declamation’ of Pelléas et Mélisande in the early 1900s and lauded Debussy as the one true perpetuator of French musical tradition. This enthusiasm waned by 1914, however, as he, like many others, grew tired of waiting for a second opera.

182 Arun Rao

the Belgium war relief, at the initiative of British author Hall Caine. Initially dismissive, Debussy set to work the next month on a small offering for solo piano: Berceuse Héroïque.13 One of a handful of overtly occasional pieces he produced in wartime, Debussy’s Berceuse depicts the plight of Belgium by squeezing a quote from its national anthem, La Brabançonne, between slices of menacing, heavy-footed march music. The solemn counterpoint of its beginning briefly alludes to what was then (and still is) considered a quintessentially German trait. After a reprise of the opening military motives – this time more restrained and subdued – the coda relaxes the tension completely by sounding a gentle clarion in the treble over a low dissonance, before the quiet, hopeful ending. The Berceuse was criticised in England for being both trite and contrived. A glance at the volume of tributes to the valiant king and his afflicted compatriots shows just how inadequate it must have seemed when seen alongside the choral numbers by Edward Elgar, Jules Massenet and Charles Villiers Stanford, or the rhetoric of Anatole France and American novelist Winston Churchill (his more famous British political namesake also appears), and the grand lithography of J. J. Shannon, Frank Dicksee and others.14 Although he went to the trouble of orchestrating the piece in December – perhaps in an effort to make it more palatable – Debussy was quick to recognise its shortcomings, arguing in his defence that ‘the Brabançonne stirs no heroic thoughts in the breasts of those who weren’t brought up with it’.15 Later

13 ‘If I dared to and if, above all, I didn’t dread the sense of going down a beaten track which haunts this kind of work, I’d be happy to write a Marche héroïque …but as I said, to play the hero while sitting peacefully a long way from the action seems to me ridiculous …’ Debussy to Durand, 9 October 1914, Debussy Letters, 294 (my translation).

14 Although he excelled in the genre and later wrote a song Honneur à l’Amérique (1917) and a Marche interalliée for piano (1918), the ‘patriarch’ of French music Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) sent no music, preferring to laud the royal couple in a letter. (King Albert’s Book, 128). 1915 was a relatively barren year for Saint-Saëns, although he played a part in the campaign to secure American entry into the war, with a work for orchestra, band and organ: Hail! California.

15 ‘Ça a été très dur, d’autant que la Brabançonne ne verse aucun héroïsme dans le coeur de ceux qui n’ont pas été élevés “avec”’. Debussy to Robert Godet, 1 January 1915.

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 183

in the same letter, he again confesses that he ‘wouldn’t know how to use a gun’. His distance from military matters added to the difficulty of making a statement on the horror of war while making use of a military-sounding national anthem.

This was not the only caveat: Debussy’s stance was also compromised by his profound aversion to the ‘obvious’. The loosely suggestive titles he had given virtually all his piano pieces up until the war are good examples: some are plainly confusing (Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fût or Ce qu’ a vu le vent d’ Ouest); others are deliberately vague (like Voiles or La Cathédrale engloutie). Arguably, such titles are best interpreted as reflecting sonorities in those pieces rather than functioning as inspiration towards their interpretation. Debussy’s own admission that the absence of a piano in Pourville helped his focus, as he was not at liberty to improvise, coupled with the absence of such descriptive titles from his wartime music, seems to be consistent with this theory.

Debussy, like the vast majority of artists, writers and composers on either side of the enemy lines, was consumed by the desire to participate in some capacity in the war effort. In his invaluable book on the state of world music during the war years, Proof Through the Night, Glen Watkins states that even the most progressive musicians (such as Ravel, Stravinsky, Webern, Schoenberg) were seized by nationalist frenzy.16 Not to be out-done, Debussy’s correspondence chronicles his own descent into base chauvinism. In creative terms, his procrastination tells of an enormous difficulty with producing the gravitas, the pity and the bombast intrinsic to war music. This was in complete contrast with Ravel (eager to enlist and obsessed until 1916 with becoming a fighter pilot) in whose wartime music these qualities feature prominently.17 Would Debussy eventually rally to the cause with similar panache?

English version in Debussy Letters, 295; French version in François Lesure, Claude Debussy. Biographie critique (Paris: Fayard -2003), 388.

16 Glenn Watkins: Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (University of California Press, 2002).

17 Completed in September 1914, Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor includes an eloquent clarion that reflects that eagerness to enlist; his rare efforts while on the front, where

184 Arun Rao

In truth, Debussy had been musically sterile since the sketching of a new work for the stage, Le Palais du silence, in January 1914. He eventually cast it aside along with a dozen-or-so other projects. Even had his intro-verted nature risen to the task of at least matching Ravel’s unfailing ear for effect, it is likely that a number of other extenuating factors would have kept him in this unproductive state. For instance, in December 1913, the relationship with his second wife Emma (Bardac, née Moyse) had been close to breaking point due to the emotional strain caused by his precari-ous financial situation; in addition, health issues made it more and more difficult for him to honour commitments abroad, in spite of his keenness to conduct his own works. Moreover, already isolated since the aftermath of his disastrous marriage to Lily Texier in 1905, Debussy’s working relations with a number of colleagues (such as Ravel, Satie, Diaghilev and Nijinsky) had notably deteriorated in recent times.

It stands to reason that, given such an unfavourable situation, Debussy might have considered joining the Front a form of escapism. This is coun-terbalanced by his self-confessed ineptitude in military matters, and his disdain for military engagement which he considered a complete waste of time. By 1916, the thought of taking up those same chauffeur duties that had been Ravel’s lot since November 1914 seemed to exhaust him:

If I could force my body to concentrate on avoiding accidents, perhaps the rest would follow? But I’m too old … I know nothing of the skills of using the terrain and I’d get myself killed like a rabbit in a field.18

The image is compelling: constricted by his lack of resolve, the man once called ‘Dieubussy’ by the great iconoclast Satie was indeed caught like a rabbit in the headlights. Ironically, in 1915, it was precisely in order to escape

he was appointed lorry driver, produced the songs for choir ‘a capella’, Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis, the completion of his Tombeau de Couperin for piano (notably the scintillating Toccata), and also Frontispice. In addition, he composed a short and very striking composition at the behest of poet and aesthete Ricardo Canudo, scored for two pianos on five staves (probably intended for a mechanical keyboard, the ‘Pianola’).

18 Debussy to André Caplet, 10 June 1916, Debussy Letters, 314.

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 185

from the malaise provoked (externally) and exacerbated (psychologically) by the war that Debussy found, albeit temporarily, the inspiration and the purpose that had been eluding him for some time.

Counter-Attack

Qui reste à sa place Et ne danse pas De quelque disgrâceFait l’aveu tout bas19

In January 1915, Debussy was staring down the barrel of ‘Dicke Bertha’20 as he contemplated his options. Writing the Berceuse Héroïque had certainly not brought him any joy; at least he was working again, and back at his Bechstein piano where he felt most comfortable and intuitive. There was renewed purpose in his playing too, for he now had the task – daunting, but relished by the pianist and interpreter that he was – of revising the vast array of Nocturnes, Waltzes, Polonaises, Preludes, Etudes and Mazurkas from his idol Frédéric Chopin.

The music of Chopin had always been held in the highest esteem in France, the country of adoption of the Polish genius.21 However, it was to another ‘honorary French’ artist that most young aspiring composers turned from 1850 onwards: Franz Liszt.22 Highly sought after as a virtuoso the

19 ‘He who stays put/ And does not dance/ Of some loss of face/ Confession he makes’. (my translation). Jules Barbier & Michel Carré, Roméo et Juliette, libretto for the opéra by Charles Gounod (Paris: Choudens Fils, 1867).

20 ‘Big Bertha’ was the nickname given to the heaviest German artillery by the Allies; the German nickname only really applied to the 12 calibre-length heavy mortar developed by Krupp in the early 1900s.

21 No doubt, it was an advantage that his father was French.22 Both Liszt and Chopin settled in Paris in their twenties: Liszt in 1827, Chopin in

1831.

186 Arun Rao

world over, Liszt had retained a string of French connections by the time he had settled in Weimar in the 1840s, and his efforts to promote new music were still earning him tremendous respect in France when Debussy was making his first attempts at composition. His pioneering work in formal matters, tonal relationships, the handling of orchestral textures as well as the deep mysticism of his instrumental works were a major influence on Franck, Saint-Saëns, Prokofiev, Skryabin, Busoni, and to an extent Ravel. Debussy was unusually reserved concerning the piano music of the Hungarian and equivocal in his assessment of his symphonic poem Mazeppa which he voiced through Monsieur Croche.23 Although, in his youth, Debussy had met the ageing legend, then a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici, his recall of the event was recorded just once, some time after the Chopin revisions.24

Debussy’s cult for Chopin was somewhat against the general grain of composers’ thinking at that time. His rejection of Liszt as a musical innovator went completely against the accepted notion that the ‘modern’ orchestra and the symphonic models of Liszt were the way forward. That said, Chopin was a figure of considerable influence but not necessarily in avant-garde circles and Debussy was very much avant-garde in his music. Chopin’s concentrated expression – the antithesis of Liszt and Wagner – had only aroused limited interest in France from a composing perspective, Gabriel Fauré being a notable exception. Compulsory study of Chopin’s piano works at the Conservatoire (especially the second Concerto and first

23 ‘This symphonic poem is full of the worst defects; it is even common in places, yet, the tumultuous passion that jerks it relentlessly, eventually seizes you with such force that one finds it very nice without needing to know why … The undeniable beauty in Liszt’s oeuvre owes to, I think, his love of music besides all other feelings. If he acts casually with it at times or goes as far as to put it on his knees, it still beats the affected mannerisms of those who act as if they have just met her. Very proper, admittedly, but lacking boldness. Boldness and sloppiness often touch genius with Liszt, that is more preferable than perfection, even dressed in gloves’. Monsieur Croche antidilettante, 85–6 (my translation).

24 ‘Chopin recommended practising without pedal and, in performance, not holding it on except in very rare instances’, Debussy stated ‘It was the same way of turning the pedal into some kind of breathing which I observed in Liszt when I had the chance to hear him in Rome.’ Debussy to Durand, 1 September 1915. Debussy Letters, 301.

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 187

Ballade) had shaped Debussy’s technique and sharpened his musicianship. However, it was Chopin’s predilections, particularly his profound aversion to effusive performances, with which both Debussy and Fauré shared the greatest affinity and which provided them with suitable artistic guidance, in addition to performing enjoyment.25

Unsurprisingly, virtually every piece Debussy wrote in his last years featured the piano, either exclusively or prominently. Less predictable was his scoring of the first of these, En blanc et noir, for not one but two pianos. Relatively few composers had given this combination much thought except the prodigal Saint-Saëns, whose best effort in the genre had been a typi-cally brilliant, Mendelssohnian Caprice Héroïque (Op.106) from the late 1890s. This was unlikely to inspire Debussy given the wretched history of bad relations between the two men. It is possible that Durand suggested that particular combination, since the provision of orchestral music was extremely limited in wartime as stage pits and concert halls had not been spared the general mobilisation, thereby making the piano duo (or duet) a necessary substitute. Moreover, another Caprice Héroïque would have been a fitting addition to his catalogue in that climate.26 Working vigor-ously through June and July, the composer at last submitted a composition worthy of his considerable talents.

Debussy’s choice of title (En blanc et noir) for ‘his’ Caprices gave rise to a multiplicity of interpretations, the most accepted being hinted at by the composer himself when he compared the ‘colour’ of the second piece (prefaced by François Villon’s Ballade contre les ennemis de la France) to the harsh chiaroscuro of the works of Spanish master Goya.27 British scholar

25 According to Satie, ‘nobody could play Chopin better than Debussy’. Erik Satie, Écrits, 67. Cited in Lesure, Claude Debussy, 28.

26 It is unlikely to have been a coincidence that those three movements were initially called ‘Caprices’ by both Debussy and Durand in their correspondence.

27 ‘I must confess I’ve made a slight change in the colour of the second Caprice; it was too profoundly black and almost as tragic as a “Caprice” by Goya!’ Debussy to Durand, 14 July 1915, Debussy Letters, 297. See also note 11 above.

188 Arun Rao

Jonathan Dunsby, in a study from 1992,28 perceives an element of pathos in the use of the preposition ‘en’, indicating that, unfortunately, the piece could only be scored for keyboards (black & white keys). Dunsby then investigates with utmost thoroughness some other, if arguably more tenu-ous, explanations including that the piece as a whole makes striking uses of black and white cinematic techniques which would explain the prolifera-tion of certain visual ‘assists’ such as lointain or en se rapprochant. These had been pointed out by Debussy himself in an article for the Revue SIM.29

Dunsby also unveils connections between this musical ‘yin & yen’ and each of the movements ‘sub-titles’ in the form of epigraphs. The first and most enigmatic, quoted in the title of this chapter, was from the opera Roméo et Juliette by Gounod. The second, rather lengthy one was ‘Prince, porté soit des serf Eolus En la forest ou domine Glaucus. Ou privé soit de paix et d’espérance Car digne n’est de posséder vertus Qui mal vouldroit au royaume de France’.30 The third sub-title, ‘Yver, vous n’êtes qu’un vilain’ 31 quoted poets from another age, respectively François Villon (the ‘bad boy’ of Renaissance poets) and Charles d’Orléans, whose grief with ‘enemies of France’ was considerably greater than that of Villon as he had lived as a captive of King Henry V on English soil for a quarter of a century.

It can be argued that the critical factor essential for achieving artistic credibility in the Parisian avant-garde was an overt embrace of classic French tradition(s) as had been defined and redefined in the later stages of the Belle Époque. This would allow yet another plausible reading of En blanc

28 Craig Ayrey & Mark Everist, eds, ‘The Poetry of Debussy’s En blanc et noir’, Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretations: Essays on Nineteen- and Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 149–68.

29 Revue SIM, November 1913. From 1907, the Revue SIM (Société Internationale de Musique) brought together some of France’s most perceptive music commentators and scholars when the bulletin of the Parisian section of the Society joined with the Mercure musical, founded in 1905 by Debussy’s ardent supporter and first biographer Louis Laloy.

30 ‘Prince, let thy be carried by the winds / To the forest where righteousness rules. / Or be deprived of peace and hope / For none are worthy of virtues / Who dare bid ill to the kingdom of France’. (My translation).

31 ‘Winter, you are such a rogue’. (My translation.)

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 189

et noir as referring to Pierrot, a key figure from the commedia dell’arte and ‘sanctioned’ by mainstream and nationalist opinions as an integral part of those traditions; the Pierrot white and black costume was, and still is, known the world over.32 The facetious nature of the music, its mood swings and extreme ‘gestures’ thus become part of a theatrical experience, captured in the ‘Caprice’ tag. This would also account for the first incipit, which speaks of being marginalised for not joining the ‘dance’ – a sensitive issue with Debussy since he was isolated both socially and professionally. Opening the piece with a torrent of triplets avec emportement [tempestu-ously], Debussy evoked less the sound-world of his beloved Chopin than that of Liszt, whose temperament was much closer to Latin exuberance. For now, his modernist stance was resolute: the absolute priority was to meet the enemy and its Kultur head-on; programmatic content had to override aspirations of ‘pure’ music. The homage to Chopin would have to wait a little longer.

It is clear that this multiplicity of meanings was carefully calculated. No doubt the failure of the rather one-dimensional Berceuse Héroïque had forced the composer to rethink his strategy. From the first bar to the last, En blanc et noir brims with heroic energy and passion, driving home the notion that the battleground had truly spread to music and other arts:

I must admit that I too […] am feeling the desperate anxieties of this war. It’s got to the point where I daren’t open a newspaper […]; I want to work-not so much for myself, as to provide a proof, however small, that 30 million Boches can’t destroy French thought, even if they’ve tried undermining it first, then obliterating it.

The music I’m writing will be a secret homage to them; what’s the use of a dedica-tion? Whichever you look at it, it’s the mark of an ego in a state of uncertainty and that won’t bring anyone back to life.33

32 To a native French speaker, the description ‘en blanc et noir’ can be readily understood to qualify the way somebody dresses up, or is costumed. For more on the Pierrot avatars during the Great War, see Arun Rao: ‘Pierrots fâchés avec la lune’: Debussy, Fauré & Ravel during World War I (2013) <www.arrow.dit.ie>.

33 Debussy to Durand, 5 August 1915, Debussy Letters, 298.

190 Arun Rao

In another U-turn, Debussy did actually dedicate the second movement to Durand’s young assistant Jacques Charlot, ‘tué à l’ennemi en 1915, le 3 mars’ [killed by the enemy, 3 March 1915].34 Dating a piece is usually per-functory, but the emphasis provided a compelling link to the famous Goya painting, El Très do Mayo (1808). Strikingly descriptive, the master stroke in this long central movement lies in the spectacular tactical change from the Berceuse; whereas the earlier piece had been somewhat weakened by its empathy for the victims, the appearance of Luther’s chorale melody Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott [A mighty fortress is our Lord], superimposed over an aggressive rumble in the second piano part, turned the Teutonic propaganda into a caricature.35

Shortly after its release, this triumph of sarcasm over pity inspired Stravinsky to similar tactics in a short piano piece intended for another relief publication, Le Livre des sans-foyer, the brain-child of American author and poet Edith Wharton whose compassion for orphaned children from war-ravaged Flanders had awoken America’s conscience. Although the book was meant to be apolitical, Stravinsky’s Souvenir d’une marche boche is so sarcastic as to make its presence slightly awkward, positioned as it was between a sonnet by W.B. Yeats entitled A reason for keeping silent and a stern portrait of the devout Catholic Vincent d’Indy by the Belgian artist Théo van Rysselberghe.36 The participation of Stravinsky and Leon Bakst, both pivotal to the success of the Ballets Russes and the implantation of the

34 It was rather a U-turn to ostentatiously dedicate this very programmatic piece of music to his dead friend Jacques Charlot, ‘killed on the front’. See also footnote 13 above.

35 Despite using the chorale melody for derisive purposes, Debussy did not consider it barbaric, claiming that its ‘poisonous vapours’ were caused by ‘what it represents, because it is still a fine tune’. See Debussy Letters, 299.

36 ‘I think it better that at times like these/ We poets keep our mouths shut, for in truth/ We have no gift to set a statesman right;/ He’s had enough of meddling who can please/ A young girl in the indolence of her youth/ Or an old man upon a win-ter’s night.’ See W.B. Yeats, A reason for keeping silent. Yeats’s ‘young girl’ might be an allusion to the patriotism that was stirring Ireland at the time. Vincent’d’Indy (1851–1931) had been a disciple of César Franck and a rival of Saint-Saëns from the 1880s. A religious, conservative anti-dreyfusard, he presided over the Schola Cantorum,

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 191

Russian avant-garde in France, reflected a confraternity of allied nations which then extended to Tsarist Russia. A few weeks earlier, Debussy had responded to this Franco-Russian entente by dedicating the first and third Caprices to, respectively, the Russian émigré conductor (and bassist) Serge Koussevitzy and to Stravinsky.

Would this be enough to reconcile him with the spirit of the Parisian avant-garde? One person who thought so was his arch-enemy Saint-Saëns, a man equally on a mission but quite a different one. Saint-Saëns’s acerbic opinion on modernism was a reliable gauge of one’s positioning in the ‘pecking order’ of the avant-garde. This was his verdict:

It is beyond belief, and we must at all cost bar the doors of the Institute to a Monsieur capable of atrocities of this kind; this must be placed alongside cubist paintings.37

This hostility by Saint-Saëns was exacerbated by a decision earlier that year that Debussy, the composer of La Mer, would be nominated for election to the Institut de France, the prestigious grouping of state academies. It is difficult to imagine how the luminous evocation of Cathedral stained glass, the crushing power of Luther’s melody and the resoundingly victori-ous final clarion could have so displeased Saint-Saëns, erstwhile protégé of the master of French programmatic music, Hector Berlioz. In truth, the formal liberty and strained harmonic relationships of the Caprices would have puzzled more progressive minds. Debussy recognised this, warning friends to ‘bring [their] brain to bear on En blanc et noir’.38 Remarkably for a musician forever determined to follow his own muse, this work dis-played an elemental rawness so far only witnessed in Stravinsky’s contem-porary ballets; yet Debussy’s Caprices remain true to the same ‘authentically French’ qualities which Rolland had seen in his music some years earlier:

an influential private establishment where music was taught somewhat archaically. The Schola was a beacon of anti-modernist thought through the 1900s.

37 Jean-Michel Nectoux. The Correspondence of Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré: sixty years of friendship (Ashgate -2004), Letter no. 109.

38 Debussy to Godet, 4 February 1916. Debussy Letters, 314.

192 Arun Rao

‘its clarity, its elegant simplicity, its naturalness, and especially its grace and plastic beauty.’39

Immediately after he had completed the Caprices, Debussy started on a much anticipated cycle of sonatas with a more deliberate and calculated aim: the rejuvenation of French chamber music, a genre that had been hitherto in steady decline, after two centuries of operatic precedence. There is more than a touch of irony in his sitting through the Conservatoire’s ‘lyrical declamation’ competitions in June as jury member (the notes he jotted were decidedly lukewarm). When Fauré, its director, invited him to sit on another jury for the light opera category the next month, Debussy stayed away, citing his daughter’s chickenpox. Around the end of July, having firmly turned his back on stage projects (albeit temporarily), he was safe from distractions in the little town of Pourville-sur-mer, a seaside resort near Dieppe where he would spend the next three months.40 Here, he resolutely set to work on a sonata for cello and piano, a work which he later claimed, not without pride, to have written ‘in the ancient form, so supple, void of the inflated grandeur of modern sonatas’.41 The speed with which it was completed – a mere two weeks – bears witness not only to his renewed appetite for composing (the absence of a piano helping his focus), but to a greater clarity of purpose and, no doubt, the realisation that time was against him. Indeed, virtually every letter from that period expresses his joy at ‘re-discovering’ music.

The decision to compose for the cello in wartime was not unique to Debussy: his was the first of four cello sonatas from that period – or five, if one includes that for violin and cello which Ravel undertook as his homage to Debussy shortly after the armistice.42 Surprisingly – and without prejudice

39 Romain Rolland: Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1908), 272.40 Debussy, Emma and Chou-Chou stayed at a friend’s villa from July 12 to October

12, which he nicknamed ‘Mon coin’.41 Debussy to friend and conductor Bernardo Molinari, 6 October 1915. In Lesure,

Claude Debussy, 391 (my translation).42 The others are: from 1916, the Sonata by English-born but French resident Frederick

Delius (written in London shortly after his departure from Paris); Sonata Op.66 by Charles Koechlin, a student of Fauré and friend of Ravel. From 1917, Fauré’s own

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 193

to the efforts of Albéric Magnard from 1908 and Louis Vierne from 1911 – it was also the first major work for those instruments since the Sonata from 1872 by Camille Saint-Saëns. In another unlikely ‘meeting of minds’, this too had been the instrumentation of choice in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War; coincidentally, both men were also mourning the loss of a close relative.43 The low range of the cello may have been entirely suited to the brooding character of the former, but Debussy was keen to eschew any sense of convention. His was a refreshingly atypical work, eliciting short flights of fancy and playful pizzicati rather than the long lyrical phrases generally associated with that instrument. Once again, morbidity made a cameo appearance in the Prélude and the Finale; the middle movement, ‘Sérénade’, bears the hallmark of another stylish and mischievous Pierrot. Once again, Debussy appropriated the main elements of the nationalis-tic canon, giving it a highly stylised and personal twist, and at the same time maintained his reputation as foremost avant-gardist. Miraculously, this tour-de-force was repeated in the twelve Études for piano, which took their cellular idea from his own Clair de lune from the 1890s (thus establishing a clear lineage with his earlier works, with those of Chopin, and with the Baroque masterpieces of ‘“nos” vieux maîtres clavecinistes’ as he called them in his foreword to the Durand edition)44 and again in the second of the Six Sonates pour divers instruments, scored for flute, viola and harp, which he also signed ‘Claude Debussy, musicien français’. Both these works display the same authoritative handling of this highly

Sonata Op.109 in D minor, the second of his wartime sonatas (after the Violin Sonata Op.108).

43 Debussy’s mother, Mme Victorine Debussy, passed away in March 1915; Saint-Saëns’s aunt Charlotte Masson, to whom he owed his musical education and spiritual guid-ance, died the year he wrote both the Cello Sonata in C minor Op.32 and the Cello Concerto in A minor Op.33.

44 Debussy alluded to Rameau whose revival had been instigated by the composer Albéric Magnard in 1894 and supported by Durand (publisher), Büsser (editor), Malherbe (texts) and Saint-Saëns (keyboard expert) from 1895; he particularly admired François Couperin’s poetic finesse, and that of others such as Daquin, Chambonnières, Lully, Destouches, Dandrieu.

194 Arun Rao

complex integration of seemingly contradictory elements – the miracle being the complete concealment of any agenda, be it artistic, personal or patriotic.

Conscious of the enormity of the task, and weakened by the growing cancer that hindered his every move, Debussy worked himself to the bone up until his return to Paris in October. To all intents and purposes, the holiday had given him the vital energy to not only carry out his ambitious plan, but to reconnect with the spirit of his youth – something he alluded to when comparing the sound of his latest sonata with his Nocturnes for orchestra from a now distant past. In his own poignant words,

I’ve been staying by the sea in a place which bemoans its lack of cosmopolitan bril-liance ( …). There I rediscovered my ability to think in music, which I’d lost for a year … Not that my writing is indispensable but it’s the only thing I know how to do, more or less well, and I confess its disappearance made me miserable … Anyway, I’ve been writing like a madman, or a man condemned to die the next morning. Certainly I have not forgotten the war during these three months … indeed I’ve come to see the horrible necessity of it. I realised there was no point in adding myself to the number of wounded and, all in all, it was cowardly just to think about the atrocities that had been committed without doing anything in return; by re-fashioning, as far as my strength allowed me, a little of the beauty these ‘men’ are destroying, with a meticulous brutality that is unmistakably Made in Germany.45

The last outpourings from that prodigal year were two more occasional pieces, composed with the same dispassionate spirit as the Berceuse Héroïque and almost a year to the day. The Elégie for piano was destined for another prestigious collection of accolades, this time in honour of British Queen Alexandra: Pages inédites sur la femme et la guerre, for the benefit of orphans of the war in France. Children were again the inspiration for his last work from 1915, Le Noêl des enfants qui n’ont plus de maison for soprano and piano, whose ‘soapbox’ success later caused him some irritation. Following medical examination by his doctors at the end of November, an operation which he feared might be his last finally ended this prodigious run of creativity, all the more heroic since it was undertaken by a man so disinterested in

45 Debussy to Robert Godet, 14 October 1915. Debussy Letters, 305.

‘Claude de France’: Debussy’s Great War of 1915 195

heroism.46 Despite constant pain, Debussy struggled through the com-pletion of a third sonata in 1916, that for violin and piano, which was less a testimonial to French musical heritage than a painful evocation of his hopeless predicament. It would be his last published work.

If his mission was, with genuine modesty and just a trace of affectation, to forge a lasting link to what he considered his essential musical inherit-ance (French or otherwise), the quality of his labour was such that, much more pertinently, Claude Debussy’s ‘Great War’ of 1915 came to probe not so much into the past as to advance the future of French music. For at no other point of that nation’s history did a voice so singularly capture the dichotomy of the French character, its passionate egocentricity and its insatiable curiosity.

46 The operation was one of the very first colostomies ever attempted and it was only partially successful. The composer complained of ‘suffering like a condemned man!’ a few weeks later. See Debussy Letters, 310.

Part IV

Dublin à la française?

Joe Kehoe

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin

Jean Martinon (1910–1976) is now best known as a French conductor who left a legacy of considerable merit in recordings of works by Debussy, Ravel and Prokofiev.1 However, in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, before he achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic, he had a significant impact on the Dublin musical scene through his involvement with the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra, with Our Lady’s Choral Society, and in giving master classes in composing and conducting in the city.

This story involves a local impact from the chance intersection of two spheres: the one global, momentous and the cause of relief to millions worldwide; the other personal, intimate and the occasion of misery for one individual.

At the end of the Second World War, because of its wartime neutral stance, Ireland found itself in a state of some isolation, devoid of friends on the international stage. In an effort to remedy this it was proposed, as a means of propaganda, to establish a short-wave radio station broadcast-ing initially to the United States. What the broadcasters had in mind by way of programmes was what a cultured Irishman might invite a cultured American to listen to.2 This was a high aspiration given that cultured Americans of a musical bent would have regularly heard orchestras under the direction of conductors such as Arturo Toscanini and Eugene Ormandy.

1 Jean Martinon was born in Lyon on 10 January 1910. He died in Paris on 1 March 1976.

2 Catriona Crowe et al. (eds), Documents in Irish Foreign Policy, Volume VIII, 1945–1948 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2012), 123.

200 Joe Kehoe

In this context, it was recognised that orchestral resources at Radio Éireann would have to be enhanced. Since its establishment in 1926, the broadcasting organisation had possessed a music ensemble, and this had grown from the original sextet to a group of thirty-nine players in 1943. Such a band was not adequate for a great range of orchestral art music and so had to be augmented on an ad hoc basis whenever symphony concerts were staged. In order to prove to the world that Ireland was a cultured nation, and in the context of the planned short-wave service, it was decided to establish a permanent orchestra with some sixty musicians, devoted exclusively to art music.3

And now, to change focus from the global to the personal: as broadcast-ing officials and radio engineers were making their plans in Dublin, it was a different story in Paris. Following the end of hostilities, Charles Münch – distinguished professor of conducting at the Paris Conservatoire – could look back with satisfaction at his honourable resistance to the Nazi régime4 but, in 1946, he could only be dissatisfied at the effect on him of a personal, physical problem that caused him to cancel conducting engagements in America and Europe.5 In particular, he had to withdraw from a concert with the Radio Éireann Orchestra in March 1946 in Dublin. Several weeks in advance of the date, it was announced that Münch would be unable to fulfil his contract but that his assistant at the Conservatoire, Jean Martinon, would act in his place.6

3 Dáil Debates, 23 April 1947, columns 1296–7.4 D. Kern Holoman, Charles Műnch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 59.5 Holoman, Charles Műnch, 75. At the time in question, Műnch suffered from the

painful and discommoding condition of abscessed fistula-in-ano.6 Irish Independent (13 March 1946), 3.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 201

Martinon’s First Dublin Concert

The Martinon concert in the Capitol Theatre, featuring works by Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy and Dukas, was a huge critical success, and was a crucial factor in making the conductor an obvious choice for later Dublin appoint-ments. Of the performance of Debussy’s La Mer – incidentally the Dublin premiere of that work – Walter Beckett in the Irish Times wrote that ‘The conductor succeeded brilliantly in this work [. . .] he brought out all the colour and sensuous beauty of the score, but did not overlook the more subtle shades of feeling that are so typical of the composer.7 Grace O’Brien of the Irish Press claimed that the La Mer performance was ‘so excellent as to make it a musical event of real importance.’8 Some favourable com-ments were, perhaps, symptomatic of low expectations for the orchestra: significantly both Beckett in the Irish Times and Joseph O’Neill in the Irish Independent praised the precision of attack of the players, a possible indication of past ragged performances.9

Between September 1946 and June 1951, Martinon visited Dublin on eight separate occasions for periods of varying durations, ranging from single concert engagements to a six-month contract. His longest episode as conductor of the Dublin orchestra was for the period from April to September in 1947. This was a transitional phase leading to the establish-ment of the enlarged orchestra in early 1948. Apart from rehearsing and conducting concerts, Martinon was contracted to assist in the selection of personnel for the expanded orchestra and for its general organisation.10

7 Irish Times (1 April 1946), 6. 8 Irish Press (1 April 1946), 2. 9 Irish Independent (2 April 1946), 2. 10 Article 3 of contract between Martinon and Minister for Posts and Telegraph dated

3 March 1947, on file 229/56(2), RTÉ Written Archive.

202 Joe Kehoe

Martinon’s 1947 Contract

The early expectation was that Martinon would conduct one concert in each of the twenty-six weeks of his residency in Dublin in 1947. However, it was soon conceded that twenty concerts would be an adequate contribu-tion. His contract vaguely stipulated that he would conduct ‘up to twenty concerts’ during the six-month term.11 How this particular clause was to be interpreted would develop into an issue within Radio Éireann when it became obvious that the provision of even that number of concerts might not be possible. The Department seemed to adopt the implausible stance that Martinon was legally obliged to conduct no less than twenty concerts. However, at a meeting with the conductor at the end of June, the relevant government minister, Patrick Little, agreed that eighteen concerts would be sufficient.12

Leon Ó Broin, who was in charge of broadcasting at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs when Martinon was first engaged,13 claimed that continental musicians were to be had at the time for ‘two a penny’, and cer-tainly, compared with the astronomical sums now routinely paid to some conductors, Martinon’s fee for the six-month 1947 engagement was very modest.14 The initial offer by Radio Éireann was for £500 for the six-month contract (equivalent to £1000 per annum), but the conductor, citing the high cost of accommodation in Dublin, asked for £600 (an annual rate of £1200) and this was accepted.15

One contemporaneous transatlantic comparison gives some context to the level of Martinon’s fee, and adds support to Ó Broin’s assessment: several years previously Toscanini had secured a contract with NBC in

11 Ibid., Article 1. 12 Note of meeting on 30 June 1947, dated 1 July 1947, file 229/56(2), RTÉ Written

Archive.13 Radio Éireann at that time was an integral part of the Department of Posts and

Telegraphs.14 Leon Ó Broin, Just Like Yesterday (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), 171.15 Note of Leon Ó Broin dated 11 December 1946, File 229/56(2), RTÉ Written Archive.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 203

America for the dollar equivalent of £10,000 for ten performances, or £1000 per concert.16 By contrast, Martinon’s fee of £600 for eighteen concerts worked out at £33 per concert. In addition, of course, as already mentioned, Martinon assisted in the process of transition to the new enlarged orchestra.

Summer 1947 Public Concerts

It was natural that Radio Éireann would wish to arrange for Martinon to conduct some of his concerts at a public venue rather than in the studio. Since October 1943, the Radio Éireann public symphony concerts had been held in the Capitol Theatre, which had a greater seat capacity than former venues such as the Gaiety Theatre or the Mansion House.17 As the Capitol operated as a cinema, with evening screenings on seven days a week, Sunday concerts at that venue had to be held in the afternoon. In February 1947, Director of Broadcasting Séamus Ó Braonáin expressed reservations about the forthcoming public symphony concerts now, for the first time, scheduled for the summer months to coincide with Martinon’s term. He felt that summer afternoon concerts had several marked disadvantages: they were inherently risky, as those away on holiday would diminish the pool of available patrons, and the possibility of fine weather would have the same effect; the fact that afternoons were not part of the regular broadcasting times imposed extra costs for concerts mounted at such times by way of extension of normal broadcasting hours, and filling in the gap left in the ordinary schedules by the consequent absence of the orchestra; furthermore,

16 David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 154.

17 ‘Experiment of transferring to Capitol justified’, Irish Times (18 October 1943), 3.

204 Joe Kehoe

he believed that provincial listeners who liked symphonic music were more likely to listen in the evening than in the afternoon.18

These factors led Ó Braonáin to the conclusion that it would be pru-dent to have no more than one or two Sunday afternoon concerts in the Capitol for the coming summer season, while several more might be staged in the Mansion House or the Metropolitan Hall as part of the Sunday even-ing schedules. He felt that it would be preferable to have people ‘fighting for seats’ rather than to have a surplus number of seats left unfilled. He was apprehensive that a failure to fill the theatre would have a bad psycho-logical effect, and that such a failure would hang over the winter season which they would certainly want to plan for with the expanded orchestra. Past experience had demonstrated that Capitol attendances seem to have ‘steadied down to about 1400 [85% occupancy]’, even with star attractions such as Leon Goosens and Denis Noble, and that there was no hope of improving on that.19

The Director’s reservations were acknowledged by Ó Broin who insisted however that there was no alternative to having the summer con-certs in the Gaiety.20 Clearly the rationale for the provision of the summer public concerts was the desire to show off the new star acquisition, Jean Martinon, in a venue with a capacity much greater than the Mansion House.

The selection of concert dates for the summer season had to take account of the station’s commitment to relay significant GAA games, all on Sunday afternoons, and also the dates of Celebrity Concerts planned for the Theatre Royal. The GAA factor ruled out the entire month of August, and so two concerts were planned for June 8 and June 22, and a further

18 Note dated 5 February 1947, File 62/59 (1), RTÉ Written Archive. When Ó Braonáin was writing his comments, Ireland was enduring the harshest winter in living memory and he may have felt that potential patrons, avid for the sun, would be unwilling to spend weekend afternoon indoors during the coming summer. See Kevin C. Kearns, Ireland’s Arctic Siege: The Big Freeze of 1947 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2011).

19 Note of 5 February 1947, referred to in footnote 18. 20 Manuscript note inscribed on Ó Braonáin’s note of 5 February 1947, File 62/59(1),

RTÉ Written Archive.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 205

two for July 6 and July 20.21 It was known that the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent was to appear in the Theatre Royal on 28 June and the following day, but this was seen as a complication that could not be avoided in the context of other constraints.22

A Musical Success but a Financial Failure

The response of the critics to each of the concerts in the summer series was uniformly positive. Following the first concert on 8 June, Joseph O’Neill in the Irish Independent wrote of Martinon’s ‘ability to bring forth the best possible playing from the orchestra.’23 An equally enthusiastic review of that concert in the Irish Press declared that ‘The rich tone and the splendid animation of the orchestra [. . .] distinguished the entire concert under Jean Martinon’s baton.’24 The conductor’s skill in bringing out the best in the orchestra was referred to again in a review in the same paper of the concert on 6 July. Of the performance of Symphony No. 40 in G Minor by Mozart, the reviewer wrote that ‘Jean Martinon secured a performance of remark-able delicacy; the orchestra played with a vitality, sensitivity and perfection of phrasing such as they never achieve under any other command.’25 The maestro’s electrifying effect on the ensemble was once again referred to at the end of his 1946 engagement when ‘Tatler’, in the Irish Independent, wrote that ‘This was not only a new conductor we heard, but, in effect, a new orchestra.’26

21 As in message from Director of Broadcasting to Ó Broin, 24 February 1947, File 62/59(1), RTÉ Written Archive.

22 Ibid. 23 Irish Independent (9 June 1947), 6.24 Irish Press (9 June 1947), 5.25 Irish Press (7 July 1947), 5.26 Irish Independent (25 September 1946), 4.

206 Joe Kehoe

Martinon’s interpretation of one work in particular drew especial praise. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was featured in the programme for the second concert on 22 June and the critical response was superlative. The reviewer in the Irish Times claimed that ‘Even if one had heard [Beethoven’s] Fifth Symphony a thousand times, yesterday’s performance would have been worth coming to, so great were the vitality and breadth of the interpre-tation, and so full of beauty was the playing.’ It was ‘a performance that will remain in the memory and will bear comparison with performances by orchestras considerably higher both in numbers and reputation than our own.’27 Commenting on a ‘notable performance’, Joseph O’Neill in the Irish Independent wrote that ‘From the dominating opening phrase to the triumphant ending of the symphony, this epic work was given with a dramatic intensity, an attention to detail, and an expressive feeling that marked it as an outstanding performance by this orchestra.’28

While the broadcasting authorities must have felt gratified that the summer series was such a musical success, from the financial perspective the series was a catastrophe. Each concert imposed a loss on the Station.29 Ó Braonáin’s fears of empty seats were fully borne out. Occupancy rates (on average 54 per cent over the four concerts) did not reach anywhere near the 85 per cent level that he had considered as a best-case scenario. And it is likely that he did not contemplate that demand for seats would reach the abysmal depth of 33 per cent occupancy at the last June concert. The late-June and early-July concerts were especially disappointing. The poor uptake of seats on 22 June (33 per cent) and 6 July (55 per cent) can probably be partly explained by a factor which had been anticipated as problematic: that is, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s concerts in the Theatre Royal on 28 June and the following day. Such concerts at a venue with twice the capacity of the Capitol probably attracted many who would have otherwise gone to the Martinon concerts on 22 June and 6 July. The Sunday concert given by the Liverpool orchestra included the

27 Irish Times (23 June 1947), 5.28 Irish Independent (23 June 1947), 3. 29 Table appended to note dated 26 July 1947, file 62/59(1), RTÉ Written Archive.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 207

popular ‘New World’ symphony, and also Rachmaninoff ’s second piano concerto. The latter may have been a particularly strong attraction, as it would have been known to a wider range of people than those familiar with the classical or romantic canon from its use in the film soundtrack of David Lean’s very popular Brief Encounter screened in Dublin cinemas two years previously.30

Our Lady’s Choral Society

As a composer of choral music Martinon’s interest was aroused, when, in September 1946, he received an invitation from Vincent O’Brien, chorus master of the newly established Our Lady’s Choral Society, to come along to see the choir rehearse Messiah. Impressed by the standard of singing, the French maestro gave substantial support and encouragement to the society over the following years.31

Between 1947 and 1951 Martinon conducted several major choral events with the Radio Éireann Orchestra and the choir. In March 1947, the Dublin premiere of César Franck’s Les Béatitudes was presented;32 in October of the following year, Martinon was in charge of the same forces with Verdi’s Requiem,33 and the Verdi performance was repeated in April 1950.34 The first performance of the Verdi Requiem in October 1948 merits comment on several accounts. It was not, as was erroneously reported at the time, the Dublin premiere: the Requiem had previously been performed in the city on several occasions with choral groups such as the Culwick Choral

30 The financial failure of the public concerts did not deter the broadcasting authori-ties from engaging Martinon for further engagements; he would conduct with the orchestra in each of the following years up to 1951.

31 Irish Press (20 September 1946), 5. 32 Irish Times (31 March 1947), 3.33 Irish Times (4 October 1948), 5.34 Irish Times (22 April 1950), 4.

208 Joe Kehoe

Society and the Dublin University Choral Society. However, it certainly merited Robert Johnson’s description in the Irish Press as ‘one of the most important musical events in Dublin for many years’ in that it was the first Dublin performance of the work with a choir of adequate size to balance the considerable orchestral forces provided for in the score.35

Apart from its musical significance, the 1948 Verdi event is also remark-able for what occurred before the performance, and, with historical hind-sight, is a striking indication of the nature of Irish society at the time. The choreographed entrance to the auditorium of the patron of the Choral Society, Roman Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, was cap-tured by Robert Johnson’s obsequious description in the Irish Press: ‘As most Rev. Dr. McQuaid entered the theatre the great audience rose and the choir sang ‘Ecce Sacerdos Magnus’ [‘Behold, A Mighty Priest’] with great effect.’36 This specific paragraph of the report was given bold font, to express editorial approval. All the evidence points to the fact that Martinon was a reasonably devout Catholic – he had, for example, set several bibli-cal texts to music – nevertheless, coming from the markedly more secular tradition of France, we may speculate that he would have been surprised, indeed amazed, by such a blatant manifestation of a personality cult sur-rounding a bishop. The audience, and the members of the orchestra, may not have been all that surprised. The theatricality of McQuaid’s entrance to the Capitol Theatre had been a regular feature of several choral concerts in the city in previous years.37

Martinon was also responsible for arranging for the choir to sing the Verdi Requiem in Paris in October 1950 with the Conservatoire Orchestra. The venue was the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, which 37 years previously had been the setting for the historic and riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Three thousand persons packed the theatre for the choral event which was broadcast on the French national radio network. The

35 Irish Press (4 October 1948), 6. 36 Ibid., 6.37 Irish Independent (17 December 1945), 4; Irish Press (15 April 1946), 4; Irish Press

(16 December 1946), 7.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 209

choir must have been delighted to attract laudatory comment from foreign sources: according to Venice-based critic Christina Thoresby, friend and confidante of Peggy Guggenheim, the Paris performance was ‘an over-whelming success’.38

Given the particular circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that an Irish, rather than a French choir, should have been chosen for the performance. The event was, after all, organised to commemorate the death of the French violin virtuoso Ginette Neveu, whose career had ended prematurely in a plane crash the previous October.39 In that context, it might have seemed more appropriate that the Verdi performance would have involved only French musicians. The fact that the Dublin Choir was chosen by Martinon is a mark of the very high esteem in which the conductor held the singers.

Martinon’s involvement with Our Lady’s Choral Society was not without problems. As an episode from his later tenure with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra would demonstrate, he lacked diplomatic skills. Obviously unaware that the term was one of the most toxic in the American political lexicon, Martinon innocently asked Chicago principal oboe Ray Still if he were a ‘communist’, something which may have been a factor in the eventual breakdown in relations between the two musicians.40 This aspect of the conductor’s personality came to the fore in Dublin also on the occasion of the April 1950 performance of the Verdi Requiem. A crisis arose when chorus master Oliver O’Brien (son of Vincent O’Brien), who had responsibility for initially rehearsing the work with the choir, was criticised by Martinon in the presence of the members of the choral group. O’Brien tendered his resignation, and it took the intervention of Archbishop McQuaid to persuade him to change his mind.41

38 Irish Independent (16 October 1950), 7. 39 Irish Times (29 October 1949), 1.40 John Von Rhein ‘Ray Still, legendary CSO oboist and teacher remembered’, Chicago

Tribune (12 March 2014) <www.chicagotribune.com> accessed 24 September 2014.41 Letter from Fr T. Condon, Pro-Cathedral, to Archbishop McQuaid dated 23 May

1950; Dublin Diocesan Archive, file reference XXI/99/8.

210 Joe Kehoe

Contemporary Works

During his various stints in Dublin, Martinon conducted fifty-five concerts including seven public concerts. He gave special prominence to twentieth-century works, and programmes frequently featured Dublin premieres of such compositions. These included Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Debussy’s La Mer (already mentioned), three of Honegger’s symphonies, and works by his composition teacher at the Paris Conservatoire Albert Roussel. Stravinsky was represented on pro-grammes by Pulcinella, Jeu de Cartes, Petrouchka, Firebird, but significantly not The Rite of Spring. However, a work which, in its final movement ‘Danse de l’effroi’, somewhat anticipated the discordant primitivism of The Rite, Florent Schmitt’s 1907 composition, La Tragédie de Salomé, was per-formed.42 In addition, his programmes contained works by contemporary Irish composers such as Larchet, Fleischmann, Beckett, Boyle and Duff.

Although canonic works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky were regularly featured, the frequent performance of twentieth-century compositions did not please everyone. Irish Press critic Grace O’Brien suggested that ‘it would be generally appreciated if there were more classical works on our programmes’.43 While most concerts were studio events, the inclusion of contemporary little-known works in public symphony concerts, for which Radio Éireann was under pressure to show a profit, was particularly problematic. Noting that the presence in programmes of works by Moeran and Roussel had coincided with very poor attendances, Music Director Fachtna Ó hAnnracháin subsequently advised Edmund Appia, who succeeded Martinon as guest conductor in October 1947, to ‘refrain from including too many obscure modern works in future public concerts.44

42 Irish Press (1 July 1947), 5. 43 Irish Press (13 March 1948), 4.44 Letter from Director of Music to Appia, 26 September 1947, File 229/56(5), RTÉ

Written Archive.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 211

There was also some concern that unfamiliar modern works dominated rehearsal time and consequently obtained better performances in concert than works in the canon. Music critic John O’Donovan recalled asking two members of the orchestra why it had given such a poor performance of Brandenburg 6 under Martinon. The explanation he received was that the orchestra had spent the entire week rehearsing the conductor’s own Sinfonietta, with the result that the performance of the Bach work was played on sight. As this was probably the first time that the orchestra had performed this work – baroque works being a rarity in Radio Éireann programmes – it is perhaps not surprising that the Brandenburg Concerto had an inadequate performance.45

Master Classes

Martinon’s impact on the music scene in Dublin in mid-century was not confined narrowly to his role as a practitioner conductor. His influence also extended to teaching. The success of the initial March 1946 concert led to his engagement by the Department of Education to provide master classes in orchestral conducting (with the Radio Éireann Orchestra) at the Summer School of Music held in Dublin in August 1946. For the following two years he gave courses in composition as well as orchestral conducting.46

Frederick May, one of his students in the orchestral conducting class, wrote of his teacher: ‘Every score M. Martinon interpreted blazed into an incandescent flame of beauty, and without doubt he has left an indelible impression on the minds of his students’.47 Apart from May, those who

45 John O’Donovan, ‘Music On the Air’ in Louis McRedmond, ed., Written on the Wind (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1976), 138–52; (147). The concert was held in the Phoenix Hall, Dublin, on 16 April 1948, Irish Times (17 April 1948), 5.

46 Department of Education Annual Reports: 1946/47, 25; 1947/48, 12; 1948/49, 11.47 Frederick May, ‘The Composer in Ireland’ in Aloys Fleischmann, ed., Music in Ireland:

A Symposium (Cork: Cork University Press, 1952), 164–9; 165.

212 Joe Kehoe

took these classes included Brian Boydell, Dermot O’Hara and Éimear Ó Broin, who would some years later be appointed to the post of Assistant Conductor of the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra.48

The budding conductors were given exacting pieces such as Debussy’s Prélude à l’après- midi d’un faune.49 For aspirant composers however, the great advantage was that they had a rare opportunity to assess how their works would sound, not just on the piano or in their aural imagination, but in the reality of an orchestral performance. Brian Boydell conducted the first performance of his In Memoriam Mahatma Ghandi at the school,50 and the Irish premiere of Frederick May’s Songs from Prison was given there also.51

Martinon Thin Skinned?

Over the entire period of Martinon’s involvement in Dublin, critical reaction was almost uniformly positive. There were occasional minor quibbles, for example Walter Beckett’s comment that those who did not like Beecham’s interpretation of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony would not like Martinon’s either.52 And, in his satirical column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ for the Irish Times, Myles na gCopaleen gently poked fun at Martinon’s practice of conducting without a score, with a fanciful scenario of the columnist demanding the removal of all books from the shelves of the Reading Room of the National Library.53 It is therefore somewhat sur-prising to learn from Leon Ó Broin, who was in charge of broadcasting

48 Irish Press (2 August 1947), 8.49 Irish Times (13 July 1948), 3.50 Irish Press (6 July 1948), 4.51 Irish Press (24 September 1946), 3. The newspaper report leaves open the possibility

that the work was conducted by Martinon. Dr Mark Fitzgerald has pointed out that this work had its first performance in London in 1942.

52 Irish Times (12 March 1949), 5. 53 Irish Times (23 July 1947), 4.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 213

at the time, that he had to dissuade Martinon from taking an action for libel against some newspapers for their comments.54 This would suggest that he was remarkably thin-skinned. Such sensitivity did not serve him well later in his career when, as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s, he had to endure for several years the onslaughts of Claudia Cassidy, critic at the Chicago Tribune, before he left that city.55

Departure of Michael Bowles

One unfortunate, and unforeseen, consequence of the involvement of Martinon with the Radio Éireann Orchestra was the departure of Captain Michael Bowles, who had made a major contribution to music at the broad-casting station. Bowles had been seconded in 1942 from the Army School of Music to act as Director of Music and Conductor. He was instrumental in instituting a series of fortnightly public symphony concerts which ran from 1942 to 1947. As part of the reorganisation of musical resources, it had been decided in 1947 that Bowles would be given paid leave of absence for two years.56 It was envisaged that, after spending some time on the con-tinent recruiting musicians, he would take up conducting engagements in Europe in order to broaden his experience, prior to his eventual return to Radio Éireann as Chief Conductor. Between June and November 1947, he visited foreign centres to audition and select players for the symphony orchestra. By November he was back in Dublin, and, when ordered by Radio

54 Leon Ó Broin, Just Like Yesterday (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), 205.55 Richard Christiansen, ‘Former Tribune Critic Claudia Cassidy’, Chicago Tribune (22

July 1996), at <www.chicagotribune.com>; William Grimes, ‘Claudia Cassidy, 96, Arts Critic Did Not Mince Words in Chicago’, New York Times (27 July 1996), at <www.nytimes.com>; both accessed 24 September 2014.

56 Dáil Debates, 23 April 1947, column 1296.

214 Joe Kehoe

Éireann to resume his foreign tour, he resigned.57 The basis for this decision seemed to be his belief that he was being pushed out of the broadcasting organisation and his doubt that he would, after the designated period of leave, be reinstated in his former post. The upshot was that Bowles applied for the position of conductor of the New Zealand Orchestra, and, with a recommendation from Sir Adrian Boult of the BBC, was appointed to that position.58

Conclusion

During his time in Dublin, Martinon had a major impact on orchestral music through his roles as conductor and as teacher. He brought new music to the capital, including compositions by his compatriots Messiaen and Roussel, and he provided a platform for contemporary Irish composers; he gave inspiration to students of composition and conducting at the Summer School of Music; and his involvement with Our Lady’s Choral Society in its early years added much to that choir’s reputation.

One of the glories of western civilisation, the art music orchestra, has evolved over a period of almost four centuries, and France has featured greatly in the story of that development. Indeed, one of the progenitors of the modern symphony orchestra was the Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roy which was part of the royal court at Versailles in the early seventeenth

57 Maurice Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967), 170; Irish Times Pictorial, (24 January 1948), 3.

58 Irish Times (24 March 1950), 5; Tanya Buchdahl Tintner, Out of Time: The Vexed Life of Georg Tintner (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2011), 90.

Maestro, Magician, Midwife: Jean Martinon in Dublin 215

century.59 Accordingly, it was entirely appropriate that a French conduc-tor, Jean Martinon, should play such a pivotal role in the establishment of the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra, the state’s first professional symphony orchestra and the predecessor of the present RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.60

59 John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 70.

60 I wish to thank Dr Mark Fitzgerald for his reading and comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Cathy McGlynn

‘Play it in the original’: Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’

Through examining the links between music, language and writing in the ‘Sirens’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this chapter will seek to demon-strate that for Joyce, music is comprised of the same differential effects that permeate language. Reference to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau will serve to highlight the deconstruc-tive effects produced by Joyce’s treatment of music in ‘Sirens’, and it will also emphasise the role that music plays in Joyce’s text as it subverts what Derrida terms the logocentric bias in the history of Western philosophy. While the significance of musical allusions in Ulysses is nothing new, and critics have long emphasised the thematic importance of musical motifs in Joyce’s work,1 this study aims to do something different: it will show that music in Joyce’s Ulysses foregrounds the play of differential traces, or diffé-rance as Derrida would have it, in the production of meaning in language.

As is well known, James Joyce was an accomplished singer and musi-cian. His contemporary, Oliver St. John Gogarty, who appears as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, published an essay on Joyce’s musical background, entitled ‘James Joyce as a Tenor’. Gogarty says that Joyce ‘was devoted all his life to music’ and that ‘Joyce was more intent on becoming a singer than a writer’.2 Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses in Paris, wrote of Joyce in her memoir: ‘He would seat himself at the piano, drooping

1 Most prominent amongst these is Zach Bowen, who in Bloom’s Old Sweet Song identifies the myriad musical allusions in Joyce’s work and links this to themes in his writing.

2 Oliver St. John Gogarty, ‘James Joyce as a Tenor’, Intimations (New York: Abelard Press, 1950), 58–69; 59.

218 Cathy McGlynn

over the keys, and the old songs, his particular way of singing them in his sweet tenor voice, and the expression on his face, these were things one can never forget’.3 It is no surprise then that Joyce’s devotion to music is evident in his literary work; musical allusions permeate his compositions from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. It can be argued that the logic that governs music is used by Joyce as an analogy for the logic that determines the process of signification in language. Indeed, according to Louis Gillet who knew Joyce in Paris, ‘For Joyce, a sentence was not severeable [sic] from its melodic qualities’.4 The composer and conductor Otto Luening, who knew Joyce in Zurich, observed that ‘Joyce enjoyed giving literary interpretations of the contrapuntal techniques in music. This turned into a kind of intellectual exercise in which he professed to use the devices for his own purposes in his own medium’.5 The nature of this link between music and language will now be explored.

In the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, Joyce employs what he terms in the schemata as the technique of a ‘fuga per canonem’ or a ‘fugue according to the rule’.6 The idea of a fugue is important as, at its most basic, a fugue consists of a melody line that develops and mutates into alternative con-figurations with a play between multiple voices. Its technique derives from ‘contrapuntal experiments of mediaeval monks’.7 The Homeric story sees the hero Odysseus and his men tempted by the song of beautiful Sirens; Joyce’s parallel episode is set in the bar of the Ormond hotel, where Leopold Bloom as Odysseus, tries and succeeds to resist the temptation of the barmaids – Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce – and also the prostitute

3 E.H. Mikhail, James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, (London: Macmillan, 1990), 95.

4 Louis Gillet, ‘The Living Joyce’ in Willard Potts, ed., Portraits of the Artist in Exile (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 170–204; 196.

5 Otto Luening, The Odyssey of an American Composer: the Autobiography of Otto Luening (New York: Scribner, 1980), 197.

6 James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 735.

7 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Fugue’, in J.A. Fuller Maitland, ed., Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. II (Boston: Macmillan, 1906), 114.

Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 219

at the end of the episode. Bloom manages to resist the Siren song and this reflects his loyalty to Molly; ultimately Bloom wants to return home.

There has been some debate amongst Joycean critics as to the accuracy and appropriateness of Joyce’s choice of a ‘fuga per canonem’ as a musical parallel for the episode.8 While this debate will not be addressed here, it is sufficient for the purpose of the argument to note Marilyn French’s view that

Sirens is frequently censured for its ‘overture’ and because it does not conform to Joyce’s description of it as a ‘fuga per canonem’. But all of Joyce’s descriptions of technique on the Gilbert chart are metaphors […] Sirens is a kind of fugue […] its themes are the emotions of the characters in the bar as presented and commented on by the narrator, the actual dialogue, Bloom’s interior monologue, and the phrases alluding to characters outside the bar. As these are placed in alternating passages and are juxtaposed with each other, this chapter […] is contrapuntal.9

French’s defence of Joyce is based on the idea that the episode draws on a ‘contrapuntal’ style. I would argue that this contrapuntal style foregrounds the notion of difference, and it is the disruptive effect of difference that is common to both music and language in the writings of Joyce and Derrida. Both Joyce and Derrida emphasise the absence that always disrupts the full presence of meaning.

The connection between Joyce and Jacques Derrida is not an arbitrary one: throughout his work, Derrida repeatedly alludes to the influence of Joyce on his philosophy. At the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt (1984), Derrida claimed that ‘Joyce is one of the most power-ful preconditions of deconstruction’.10 In his essay ‘Two Words for Joyce’, Derrida explicitly discusses his links with Joyce: ‘every time I write, and

8 For an overview and analysis of this debate, see Susan Brown, ‘The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Solved’ in Genetic Joyce Studies 7 (Spring 2007). http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS7/GJS7brown.html.

9 Marilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 128.

10 Ellen Carol Jones, ‘“Writing the Mystery of Himself ”: Paternity in Ulysses’, in Bernard Benstock, ed., James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 77–9; 79.

220 Cathy McGlynn

even in the most academic pieces of work, Joyce’s ghost is always coming on board’.11 In ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, Derrida refers to ‘the book of all books, Ulysses or Finnegans Wake’.12 Both Joyce and Derrida, in their different ways, challenge the notion of origin, truth, unity and fully self-present meaning through confronting what Derrida terms logocentric discourse with difference. Importantly, this is related to their respective views on music.

Derrida’s early work on deconstruction begins with his identification of a logocentric bias in the history of Western metaphysics; this is most evident in his early texts such as Of Grammatology and Dissemination (1967). Derrida’s views on music can only be understood in relation to this. In Derrida‘s view, writing is, in philosophical discourse, an inferior supplement that cannot match the immediacy, purity and full presence of the spoken word, or logos. Writing happens in the absence of speech. This privileging of speech and subordination of writing constitutes adherence to essentialist notions of fully self-present meaning. Derrida seizes upon this hierarchical opposition between speech and writing, and by exten-sion, presence and absence, and goes on to demonstrate how writing can become as central a concept as speech.

In Of Grammatology,13 Derrida’s analysis of Ferdinand De Saussure’s linguistics focuses on Saussure’s groundbreaking claim that meaning is entirely arbitrary and language is a system of signs that exist in a differen-tial relationship with one another. He shows how Saussure’s association of speech with the full presence of meaning, and subsequent relegation of writing to an inferior position, is undermined by his own theory of lan-guage. If, as Derrida observes, following Saussurean logic, all language is comprised of difference, then speech too, must be comprised of the same

11 Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, in Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, eds, Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 145–69; 149.

12 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 253–309; 293.

13 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak, trans. (Baltimore; London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 221

differential effects of writing, and cannot be fully present. Therefore, the play of difference in speech is similar to the play of difference in writing, and so speech, inhabited by absence, becomes a form of writing, what Derrida terms ‘archi-écriture’ or archewriting, and thus incorporates its other. Derrida states: ‘from the moment that there is meaning, there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs’.14 Thought, therefore, is ruled by the same logic and procedure as writing, and it is with this idea that he demonstrates how a term in an opposition always carries what he terms the ‘trace’ of its opposite term. And so, he suggests that ‘[t]he alleged deriva-tiveness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the “original”, “natural”, etc. language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing’.15 So if writing is an inferior supplement to speech, then, follow-ing Derrida’s logic, the supplement is the origin.

Derrida follows his critique of Saussure by his engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions,16 and here the link between logocentrism and music becomes explicit. It is this connection which, it will be argued, is explored by Joyce in ‘Sirens’. In his study of Rousseau, Derrida observes how Rousseau draws an analogy between the speech-writing hierarchy and the relationship between melody and harmony in music. Thus, music is seen as subject to the same laws that operate in the creation of mean-ing in language. In his Essay on the Origin of Languages,17 Rousseau uses the example of music to illustrate his view on the corruption of natural language; in fact, Rousseau’s view of music is entirely analogous to his concept of language and writing. This connection between music and language draws on, in Derrida’s view, logocentric assumptions; Derrida observes that for Rousseau ‘the growth of music, the desolating separation of song and speech, has the form of writing as “dangerous supplement”: […] the history of music is parallel to the history of language, its evil is in

14 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 50.15 Ibid., 56.16 Rousseau’s autobiography, first published posthumously in 1782.17 Published posthumously in 1781, Rousseau’s essay uses music as a metaphor to describe

the evolution of language.

222 Cathy McGlynn

essence graphic’.18 Rousseau identifies a similarity between the origin of speech and the origin of the voice of song; natural untainted speech, as yet undisturbed by the effects of writing, is then equated with simple melody before the disruptive intrusion of harmony. Just as the pure presence of the spoken word is disrupted by the differential effects of the written word, so too does harmony introduce difference to melody through intervals and spacing. Indeed the more convoluted harmony becomes, the more it relies on graphic notation to make music possible. In this sense, melody is supplemented by a form of writing; this is necessary to indicate intervals and spacing that make a harmonised melody possible. In Derrida’s view, however, Rousseau inevitably subverts his own argument when he states: ‘[melody] has its principle in harmony’.19 Rousseau is forced by his own logic to dissolve the opposition he constructs between melody and harmony, and this admits the supplement of harmony at the very origin of melody. As Christina Howells contends, ‘the primacy of melody over harmony […] ends up by demonstrating that melody itself has an inherently har-monic element’.20 Focusing on the notion of the interval in music notation, on which the relationship between melody and harmony is dependent, Derrida argues that ‘the interval is a part of the definition of song. It is therefore, so to speak, an originary accessory […] like writing.21 Harmony in music is interpreted by Derrida as a form of archewriting; it inscribes origin with difference. The fact that melody ‘has its principle in harmony’ means that melody cannot exist in an essential form, and thus the spacing caused by harmony operates in accordance with the (n)either (n)or logic of deconstruction. Even in cultures where melody exists without harmony (in certain folk cultures for example), it is the potential for harmony that Derrida draws attention to; a pure line of melody always and necessarily exists in relation to the intervals and spacing that separate it from other melody lines.

18 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 199.19 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 212.20 Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Oxford;

Malden, MA: Polity Press; Blackwell, 1999), 60.21 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 200.

Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 223

In sum, Derrida’s critique of Saussure and Rousseau dismantles firstly, the logocentric privileging of speech over writing, and in turn, the privileg-ing of melody over harmony. Since Joyce viewed music as an analogy for language, it is interesting to see that in the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses he foreshadows Derrida’s liberation of writing from its traditionally margin-alised position, and by extension, demonstrates that melody indeed has its principle in harmony. The effect of this double deconstructive gesture is to dismantle the notions of origin, purity and essence. The origin is difference.

The ‘Sirens’ chapter is famed for its sound effects; indeed, Joyce stresses in the schemata that the organ of the episode is the ear;22 however, it can be argued that the weaving of sound effects is undermined by the effects of writing, and that the speech/writing hierarchy is consequently decon-structed by Joyce. The music of the Sirens must be listened to, and the open-ing passage mimics accordingly the sounds of a prelude that foreshadows the aural logic and narrative ‘chords’ which structure the episode. However, according to the Homeric parallel, this music is a threat to Odysseus and he resists the song of the Sirens. Maud Ellmann argues that ‘As magicians of the voice, the Sirens stand for the enchantments of the audible. To resist them, Bloom must discover a new lure, and open an alternative modality. While the ear surrenders to the blandishments of voice, the roving Odyssean eye pursues the letter, and it is through writing that Bloom begins to make his getaway.23 In Joyce’s text, Bloom resists the song by managing to write a letter, even though ‘It is utterl imposs […] To write today’,24 and conse-quently, the apparent emphasis on sound is undermined by writing. This marks a contrast between Joyce’s text and its Homeric counterpart. As Colin MacCabe explains:

In Homer’s Odyssey, the Sirens represent a pure voice which cannot be described by the text, for the text is implicated in the differential production of writing. Within Joyce’s text, however, the Sirens episode does not function as an example of the power

22 Joyce, Ulysses, 735.23 Maud Ellmann, ‘To Sing or to Sign’, in Mary T. Reynolds, ed., James Joyce: A Collection

of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 159–62; 158.24 Joyce, Ulysses, 267.

224 Cathy McGlynn

of the voice and the spoken word, but undertakes the decomposition (in the musical sense of compose) of the voice and sound into the same play of material difference […] which constitutes writing.25

Joyce’s foregrounding of writing in this episode of Ulysses disrupts the ‘pure voice’ in the Homeric parallel. The effects of writing disrupt the origin of pure speech in a ‘decomposition’ of a musical composition and this can be interpreted as Joyce’s subversion of logocentric tradition. MacCabe observes that ‘[w]riting in The Sirens subverts any notion of a full presence in the act of reading through an attention to, and a dramatization of, the exteri-ority and the materiality of writing’.26 This ‘materiality’, and visual impact of writing, is stressed in a number of places throughout the episode; for example, in the difference between ‘Bloo mur’, and ‘Bloom mur’, which eventually, becomes ‘[m]urmured’,27 and ‘Böylan’ and ‘Boylan’.28 The frag-mented narrative is interspersed with phrases in a stream-of-consciousness style, indicated by parenthesis, which cannot be fully articulated through speech: ‘[s]hebronze, dealing from her jar thick syrupy liquor for his lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and syrupped with her voice’.29 Joyce also employs parenthesis to indicate speech within the third-person narrative; for example, in: ‘[a]ll flushed (O!), panting, sweating (O!), all breathless’, and ‘[a]nd flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly’.30 The written nature of the episode is particularly evident in what appear to be random punctuation marks, which are located not just between words, but within words themselves. So, for example: ‘[l]eave her: get tired […] Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair un comb : d’.31 Note the difficulty of saying this aloud. The spacing and punctuation here has a strange effect, only recognisable in writing; ‘Uncombed’ becomes ‘un

25 Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, (London: Macmillan, 1978), 82.

26 MacCabe, Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 83.27 Joyce, Ulysses, 267; 268.28 Ulysses, 266.29 Ibid., 254.30 Ibid., 249, 250.31 Ibid., 266.

Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 225

comb: d’ and the traditional association of writing as an inferior supple-ment to speech is disrupted.

Joyce here raises writing from its traditionally marginalised position in relation to speech by demonstrating how certain aspects of language can only be read. The relation between Joyce and Derrida is evident in their common desire to decentre speech by demonstrating how difference and absence are as much a part of speech as writing. The inability to hear cer-tain aspects of language in the ‘Sirens’ episode is indicative of the absence and undecidability of meaning that can occur in speech. The full presence traditionally associated with speech in Western philosophy is undermined. This is an episode that must be listened to and yet the full meaning is lost if the written word is ignored.

Joyce further disrupts the notion of an original presence by fore-grounding a mutation of meaning and this can be interpreted in relation to Derrida’s concept of différance. Différance refers to an originary differ-ence, a form of archi-écriture, or writing at the origin. The word différance sounds the same as the French word for difference, and so the term delib-erately undermines the spoken word in favour of writing; as the difference in spelling can only be discerned in writing. Différance, Derrida claims in Margins of Philosophy, ‘is located […] between speech and writing’32 and it suggests a perpetual deferral of meaning. Signs can only be defined in relation to ‘other’ signs, from which they differ, so meaning is never total or complete, and full presence of meaning is always supplemented and rendered unstable, by absence. In Joyce’s ‘Sirens’, this mutation of mean-ing is particularly evident in the conversion of proper names to common nouns and verbs, while common nouns are accorded the status of proper names. This is where the fugal structure comes into play; consider Bloom’s various transformations; he is ‘Blue Bloom, Bloowho, Bloowhose’, ‘grea-seabloom’, ‘Bloohimwhom’ and ‘Bloo mur’.33 Miss Douce becomes ‘[a] haughty bronze’ and ‘Miss bronze’ and she ‘douced her arm away’.34 She

32 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), 4.33 Ulysses, 245, 247, 249, 249, 253, 267.34 Ibid., 247, 248, 250.

226 Cathy McGlynn

finally becomes ‘Bronzedouce’ and as she flirts with Blazes Boylan, their names are merged in an uneasy combination of proper and common nouns: ‘[s]parkling bronze azure eyed Blazure’s skyblue bow and eyes’ Original meaning, or the original melody, is constantly mutating into alternative ‘other’ configurations, mimicking the process of signification in language; once again, Joyce’s musical technique aligns the logic of music with lan-guage. Both are comprised of the movement of différance, and of defer-ral, and this makes the notion of an original fixed meaning, or melody, impossible.

The ‘overture’, or prelude to the ‘Sirens’ episode, also refutes totality and foregrounds the process of supplementation on which meaning is dependent, according to Derrida’s (non)concept of différance. The simi-larities between music and language are anticipated in the opening over-ture, which details the development and mutation of various figures and phrases. A written transcription of oral sound, it emphasises the difference and division inherent in music. So, foregrounding the narrative content of the chapter in the overture, ‘Blew’ becomes ‘Blue Bloom’, ‘Bloo’ ‘bloom-ing’ and ‘Bloom. Old Bloom’, while ‘Bronzelydia by Minagold’ transforms into ‘By bronze, by gold’ and finally, ‘Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar?’.35 The overture concludes with the command ‘Begin!’ which signals the ‘beginning’ of the fugue.36 The overture then, can only be understood in the context of its supplement; that is, the actual musical episode itself. On its own, the process of signification cannot be complete. French notes that ‘[b]y using language that is for the most part recogniz-able English and recognizable syntactic units, yet arranging those units so that they make no sense at all, Joyce is again thrusting in the reader’s face the arbitrariness of language, the void at its core […]. Because it makes no sense, the prelude topples order’.37 Thus, Joyce again foregrounds the ‘void’ at the origin of language by arresting the easy passage of signification from signifier to signified.

35 Ibid., 245–6.36 Ibid., 246.37 French, The Book as World, 128–9.

Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 227

This notion of difference and the disruption of origin can be dis-cerned in Joyce’s treatment of melody and harmony. Prefiguring Derrida’s deconstruction of Rousseau, Joyce demonstrates how intervals and spac-ing are common to both harmony and melody, and that therefore, origin is disrupted by difference. When Simon Dedalus begins to play the piano to accompany his own singing, Father Cowley tells him to ‘[p]lay it in the original. One flat’, after which, ‘[t]he keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused’.38 The ‘original’ key contains ‘one flat’, and this emphasises the division and difference that underlie all keys in music; this is indicated later in the episode when the recapitulation of the song in a different key is echoed by Ben Dollard’s choice of the key ‘F sharp major’ with ‘[s]ix sharps’.39 The point is there is no ‘original’ – a song can be sung in any key and there is no one key to which all others can be referred. The mutation of phrases, together with alternative keys, ensures that an original melody is an impossibility. It cannot exist autonomously because it can always be harmonised or recapitulated in a different key, or developed into a slightly altered musical phrase. The breakdown of words and meaning in this episode is analogous to the relationship between melody and harmony. Rousseau is forced to admit that ‘[melody] has its principle in harmony’,40 and in ‘Sirens’ this is reflected in the multitude of potential keys available to the singers. There is no original key, just as there is no pure melody. Instead, there is difference at the origin of melody and this is suggested in the contrapuntal play of language throughout this musical episode: the multiple varied voices and keys foreground difference.

The conclusion to the ‘Sirens’ chapter evokes the ‘last words’ of Robert Emmet spoken on the eve of his execution, which in their original format read as: ‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done’.41 In Ulysses, Bloom views these ‘last words’ on a picture of Emmet ‘in Lionel

38 Ulysses, 261.39 Ibid., 271.40 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 212.41 ‘The Speech from the Dock’ <http://www.robertemmet.org/speech.htm.accessed>

accessed 6 February 2015.

228 Cathy McGlynn

Marks’s antique saleshop window’.42 However, as ‘Greaseabloom’ reads these last words, he interrupts them with a fart that marks the end of the ‘Sirens’ episode in the closing command ‘Done’, which coincides with Emmet’s ‘Done’.43 This fart inserts difference in the form of fragmenta-tion at the conclusion of the episode and the passage is worth quoting at length:

Robert Emmet’s last words. Seven last words. […]Seabloom, Greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her place among.Prrprr.Must be the bur.Fff. Oo. Rrpr.Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgundy. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaaaa. Written. I have.Pprrpffrrppfff.Done.44

This passage is significant in the context of this argument as it undermines not just the privileging of speech over writing, but the easy reversal of binary logic that would accord a privileged position to writing. Foreshadowing Derrida’s deconstruction, Joyce altogether refutes hierarchy in his final dis-ruption of both speech and writing. In his analysis of this passage, MacCabe explains that Emmet’s spoken words literally ‘deny any possibility of writing until the achievement of nationhood’ and that ‘Emmet, and nationalism, wish to fix meanings and abolish writing’.45 This fixity is confronted with Bloom’s fart, which is neither spoken nor written. It is fitting that this undermines Emmet’s last words; his speech is dispersed into fragments and his insistence that writing be stopped is interrupted by Bloom’s fart.

42 Ulysses, 278.43 Ibid., 279.44 Ibid., 278–9.45 MacCabe, Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 87–8.

Music, Language and Difference in James Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ 229

Thus, the logocentric bias of Emmet’s final instructions is deconstructed by a gesture that is neither speech nor writing.

This musical episode, then, does not simply stage a confrontation between the audible (voice) and the visible (writing) in order to effect a deconstruction of logocentric hierarchy. Instead, Bloom’s fart breaks down binary logic and emphasises deconstructive play. Ellmann makes a significant connection between the fart and Bloom’s use of a Greek ‘ee’ when he signs his letter to Martha. Bloom attempts to mask his identity by remembering to ‘write Greek ees’ and he signs the letter ‘Henry. Greek ee’.46 Ellmann argues that ‘Bloom, […] must uncover a new language which eludes both voice and eyes, both music and writing: a language which evades antithesis itself ’.47 In Ellmann’s view, Bloom’s use of the ‘Greek ee’ inserts undecidability into the binary opposition between speech and writ-ing: ‘The Greek E belongs to this new discourse, for it does not confine itself to one modality. Indeed, it crosses both and double-crosses their duality […] we only read the E in its transliterated form: ee […]. Besides, Bloom listens for the E as well as reading and writing it’.48 In other words, Bloom’s use of the Greek ee disrupts both speech and writing because neither can adequately fix its signification, due to the necessity of translit-eration. Significantly, Bloom’s fart is juxtaposed with a double ‘greek ee’ when it is foreshadowed earlier in the episode: ‘Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom’s little wee’ (U 246). The conflation of the fart and the greek ‘ee’ consolidates the notion that the fart at the conclusion of the episode is a disruptive gesture that injects an undecidability into logocen-tric discourse. As Ellmann observes, ‘This is an E that Bloom neither sings nor signs. He farts it […] A new voice, its eeee belongs to music, but it also seeps into the written word, to vex the opposite modality’.49 The use of a musical style in this episode allows Joyce to prefigure Bloom’s fart in the earlier section of the ‘fugue’ and in doing so, he effects a contrapuntal play

46 Ulysses, 267, 268.47 Ellmann, ‘To Sing or to Sign’, 160.48 Ibid., 160–1.49 Ibid., 161.

230 Cathy McGlynn

of difference between opposite modalities by foregrounding a gesture that transcends the binary logic that forms logocentric discourse. In this way, Joyce makes a link between music and language in ‘Sirens’ which looks forward to Derrida’s contention that ‘[t]he history of music is parallel to the history of language’.50

50 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 199.

Sarah Balen

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’: Reading Hélène Cixous in the ‘Breath’ of Paula Meehan’s Poetry

In ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays (Entre l’écriture), French writer Hélène Cixous urges others to accept ‘the anguish of submersion’, to be ‘of a body with the river all the way to the rapids rather than with the boat’.1 This involves danger, a particular ‘feminine pleasure’, according to Cixous, and provides the writer with alternative perspectives and renewed creative scope.2 It is a state of writing which moves beyond what is steadfast and known, giving primacy to the inspirational surge of writing rather than to the structures of poetic form. This chapter will examine the work of the recently appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paula Meehan, in terms of such Cixousian conceptions of writing, making reference to poems from the 2009 collection Painting Rain and the 2000 collection Dharmakaya.3 In many of her poems, Meehan engages with what is elemental and in flux – breath, water – rather than following what is constant, whole or steady, as the boat in the example above might be viewed. Moving towards

1 Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, Deborah Jensen, ed., Sarah Cornell and Deborah Jensen, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 57.

2 ‘Coming to Writing’, 57.3 Appointed by President Higgins in September 2013: ‘The Ireland Chair of Poetry

Trust was set up in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is jointly held between Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon’, The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, http://www.artscouncil.ie/Initiatives/The-Ireland-Chair-of-Poetry-Trust/.

232 Sarah Balen

the rapids as the river, rather than as the boat, as Cixous outlines, means identifying, and identifying with, all the twists and minute changes of the journey, being aware of current and diversion, tempo change and cre-scendo as the pulse and pace increase: one’s progress is uncontrollable in comparison to that of the boat. Meehan’s oeuvre has been analysed from various perspectives, including in terms of her use of memory4 but this chapter proposes that with its soundings of breath and marking of pulse, its movement and release of tears, its tracing of scars, a fluid, bodily music is established by Meehan’s verse, one in which the sounds of the body become word music – a Cixousian ‘soundsense, singsound, bloodsong’ (‘sonsens, chantson, sangson’).5

Meehan’s verse is alert, as Cixous’s theory of écriture feminine pro-pounds, to writing the body, and writing with the body. An awareness of Cixousian theories of writing allows for a particularly close reading of Meehan’s poems, and appreciation of the intricacies of the breath patterns, the ‘soundsense […] bloodsong’ which she establishes therein. Her poems locate moments on the cusp and in between, where breath and water rise, possibly for the last time. Cixous describes this rising up of writing inside her, the moment of text, in terms of the movement of music: ‘[i]n me the song which, from the moment it’s uttered, gains instant access to language: a flux immediately text. No break, soundsense, singsound, bloodsong’.6 The immediacy of Meehan’s writing allows for a subtle music of breath and tears, ‘tears, beyond comfort of song or poem’, but full of music and poetry despite themselves, aware of the indomitable pulse of the past, and of the poem which will not be put down or silenced by time.7 The breath used to communicate and the sounds of language combine ‘[w]hen you go to write’, and as Meehan has noted, writing is a transcription of ‘the music you’re carrying in your head’.8 The music of Meehan’s measured breaths will

4 By Anne Fogarty and Anne Mulhall, amongst others.5 ‘Coming to Writing’, 58.6 Ibid.7 ‘From Source to Sea’, Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcenet, 2009), 70.8 Jody Allen Randolph, ‘The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan’, in An

Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, 5.1–2 (2009), 239–71; 257.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 233

be read in conjunction with Cixous’s theories of writing, with the music carried in Meehan’s head transported by blood, marked down in its own version of the notion of a ‘flux immediately text’.9 What is most striking about Meehan’s version of this flux is that she so often stalls and silences it as it builds, finding a way to make time and peace in an almost lost moment.

Born in 1955 in Dublin north inner city, Meehan’s voice, compared to that of the established Irish poetic voice, was that of an outsider – as Cixous’s was in terms of representing an emergent writing voice.10 In her essay ‘The Author in Truth’, Cixous discusses both the mystery and free-dom of identity which she argues ‘is easier to convey through music than through writing, because music is not subject as the text is to the fearful imperatives of language that force us to construct sentences with gram-matical correctness, to attribute genders properly’. She notes that ‘writers of fictional texts are called to account. It is in the poem, hybrid of music and language, that something of mysterious and unstoppable life can be produced […] the poem that invents the other tongue within the tongue’.11 Indeed, Baudelaire, embarking on and helping define a new form, the prose-poem, wrote:

Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience ? C’est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes […] que naît cet idéal obsédant.12

[Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of con-sciousness. This obsessive idea is above all a child of giant cities.]

9 ‘Coming to Writing’, 58.10 Cixous (born 1937) grew up in colonial Algeria. Her mother was German, her father

died when she was eleven, she later studied in France and wrote in French.11 ‘Coming to Writing’, 148.12 Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris ‘À Arsène Houssaye’ in Œuvres Complètes I (Paris :

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Éditions Gallimard, 1975), 275–6.

234 Sarah Balen

Baudelaire’s dreams of a supple form, able to accommodate the swells and sudden disconnects of soul and consciousness, are elaborated in Cixous’s delineations of the union of ‘music and language’, where the ‘hybrid’ form is not beyond poetry, but remains, more than a hundred years later, ‘the poem’ itself.

Meehan’s public and commissioned poetry, including ‘Prayer for the Children of Longing’ and ‘From Source to Sea’, which will be mentioned below, attests to the ‘unstoppable life’ which can be produced by poetry:13 the life and music which she can give back to herself, and give back to the disenchanted communities and dead youths of her much-referenced (north inner) city.14 She acknowledges that ‘[p]oetry is public speech, no matter how private or intimate the material’, that it is written in the ‘hope that what you make transcends the maker’; that the ‘manipulation of breath’ on the poet’s part is capable of ‘changing other people’s energy’, giving life.15 Jefferson Holdridge notes that since ‘her first stirrings as a poet’ Meehan ‘has been seeking salve for the troubles life brings’.16 ‘Prayer for the Children of Longing’ is one of Meehan’s commissioned poems, performed at a public ceremony. The epigraph informs the reader: A poem commissioned by the community of Dublin’s north inner city for the lighting of the Christmas tree in Buckingham Street, to remember their children who died from drug use. The poem prays: ‘Grant us the forest’s silence’.17 The silence will give back a moment of the past as present, ‘the other tongue within the tongue’,18 a language of breath and song:

In that silence let us hearThe song of the children of longingIn that silence let us catchThe breath of the children of longing.19

13 ‘Coming to Writing’, 148.14 ‘The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan’, 246–7.15 Ibid., 251.16 ‘The Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya and Painting

Rain’, in An Sionnach, 5.1–2, (2009), (156–68), 165.17 ‘Prayer for the Children of Longing’, Painting Rain, 47.18 ‘Coming to Writing’, 148.19 Painting Rain, 47–8.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 235

The silence will provide ‘one moment to freeze / The scream, the siren, the knock on the door / The needle in its track’, permitting a measure of a song, a breath, separated from the deadly desire for drugs. The moment of silence allows both the freezing of sound and the promise of song and breath — ‘the fearful imperatives of language’ suspended as we,20 poet, reader, com-munity, the inclusive ‘us’, catch these children before they were caught by the city streets, ‘The streets that defeated them […] That spellbound them […] That led them astray, out of reach of our saving’. The silence will allow for echoes and the emergence of imagined, fluid songs:

The echo of their voices […]Let their names be the wind through the branchesLet their names be the song of the riversLet their names be the holiest prayers.21

The blood of the sound and the silence, rushing in ecstasy then terror, is not mentioned here but the reader is given several elements which go towards producing the haunted final journeys of these children. Evocations of the Christmas tree begin and end the poem. Initially it is ‘Still rich with the sap of the forest’, the lifeblood, ‘Here at the heart of winter / Here at the heart of the city’. The flow is being chilled, however, as the speaker calls for the ‘snow’s breathless quiet’, a freezing of breath in an effort to momentarily suspend the finality of death. The lines ‘Here at the heart of winter / Here at the heart of the city’ are repeated to provide the concluding two lines. The tree described in the penultimate couplet basks in natural and unnatural light, the lives and unnatural deaths of these remembered children, as the lights of the Christmas tree are switched on: ‘Under the starlight, under the moonlight / In the light of this tree’.22

The act of writing and what it means to both Meehan and Cixous can also be connected: the act is not something approached as woman only, but there is a consciousness in both writers’ work of being woman, of

20 ‘Coming to Writing’, 148.21 Painting Rain, 47–8.22 Ibid.

236 Sarah Balen

connecting with the breath and song of womanhood, and of writing beyond these restrictions. Referring to Gary Snyder’s influence on her development as a poet, Meehan comments on learning to ‘root it back down in breath-ing, in actual breathing into your lines, breathing into your poems’.23 She outlines the importance of the physical development of poetry, apart from the ‘intellectual practice’, the need to ‘root it in the physical which is your body, to pull it back in there, which is where we all start from’, noting, ‘[p]hysically to make a poem is to shape breath in space’.24 In ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, Cixous locates her reasons for writing: ‘Maybe I have written to see; to have what I never would have had; so that having would be the privilege not of the hand that takes and encloses, of the gullet, of the gut; but of the hand that points out, of fingers that see, that design’.25 It can be argued that Meehan in her work identifies with this ‘not having’, and inscribes the power of the bodily intake of breath and an oral and physical pointing, the exhalation of breath. In doing this, she is often guided by the wisdom of figures such as her grandmother and, at times, her mother.26 Like Cixous, she writes to see this wisdom, to pass it on and to point on paper to the paths outlined in her youth. Writing presents a vantage point, an opening out from self and a departure from closed or enforced societal or gender roles.

For Cixous, the seeing and having that are enabled by writing is ‘a having that doesn’t withhold or possess […] where separation doesn’t sepa-rate; where absence is animated, taken back from silence and stillness.’27 Similarly, Meehan’s poetry does not seek to possess, but to restore. She writes up to and including the space ‘where separation doesn’t separate’, as Cixous puts it, where, for Meehan, breath meets no more breath and a clap only half sounds. Using her body to ‘shape breath in space’, Meehan faces silence and stillness, profiting from them, as demonstrated, for example, in

23 Jody Allen Randolph, ‘The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan’, 250.24 Ibid., 250.25 ‘Coming to Writing’, 4.26 See, for example, ‘The Ghost of My Mother Comforts Me’, Mysteries of the Home

(Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1996).27 ‘Coming to Writing’, 4.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 237

‘Prayer for the Children of Longing’.28 She dwells on breath, the necessary intake and expulsion, dwelling on the moment in between where opposites can be examined. In Meehan’s own words, ‘breath is at the heart of poetry […] the manipulation of breath, the changing of breath, the regularising of breath, the disruption of regular breath’ – and she refers to these effects as the ‘technical impulses in poetry’.29

Meehan comes to writing following in the wake of many generations of storytellers in her family where only the voice sounded, traced in air and breath. In her poetry, she often displays an awareness of the permanence of writing as opposed to speaking or oral storytelling, and writing’s abil-ity, for example, to address the unwritten histories of Dublin’s inner city. Cixous also theorises the entrance into written language, and postulates the perceived threat of a woman writer to the tradition of patriarchal lan-guage systems. She even considers pulling back from her written presence and statement, aware of its impact, asking how she can remove its inherent threat. She asks: ‘Could I say: ‘It’s not me, it’s the breath!?’30 This is similar to Meehan’s emphasis on the primacy of the breath in her writing process, of the breath carrying content, carrying the past in an exhalation which she then manipulates. Both Meehan and Cixous connect breath and writing, the flow of one into the other, and the impossibility of stepping outside of this process or of repressing this breath / this writing – since for both writers the breath is as potent as the poem it produces. They are also con-nected by an awareness of the role of the written word and the fact that once in writing, that which has been thought or brought to life cannot be silenced. Indeed, as quoted above, the poem, once breathed / written, continues to breathe, ‘changing other people’s energy’.31

Death, which features quite extensively in Meehan’s writing, is arguably a way of writing life, with breath and the reconsideration of last breaths being part of a method of engaging with life. In writing the deaths of others,

28 ‘The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan’, 250.29 Ibid., 250–1.30 ‘Coming to Writing’, 7.31 ‘The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan’, 251.

238 Sarah Balen

Meehan faces their questions along with her own, breathing in to reorder the distorting music of the past. In ‘Fist’ she defines her writing as a way of rewriting – a method of revisiting the past:

If this poem, like most that I write, is a way of going back into the past I cannot live with and by transforming that past change the future of it, the now.32

She opens the ‘points of death’ of the past, brings her ‘bloody mouth’ to the present where the second and final stanza, four lines long after the first stanza of twenty-one, alerts the reader to the now: ‘Look! It’s spread wide open / in a precise gesture of giving’ – and the reader observes the possibil-ity of the open fist, the flowing blood, the resolution of the journey from past to present and the gift of ‘this poem’.33 At just after halfway through the first long stanza, that which energises the adult poet and connects her to her ‘little child’ self, is not just breath or song, but the very basis of both, ‘the pulse at her wrist’. The ‘threat’ and ‘weapon’ which provoked the mix-ture of terror and ‘fury’ in the child made that pulse sound from ‘under the thin thin skin’, becoming a combination of breath and song: ‘this poem’.34 Meehan questions the violence the child witnessed not with a question but by answering with an open fist, an open poem, an open ‘bloody mouth’, the present journeying from the past, conserving the ‘pulse’ of the child in a new bodily movement and bodily statement, ‘in a precise gesture of giving, of welcome’.35

One of the quotations included before the contents page of Meehan’s 2000 collection refers to the volume’s title, ‘[a]t the actual moment of death, one has an overwhelming vision of Dharmakaya […] the Dharmakaya is identical with the experiencer’s own consciousness, which has no birth and no death, and is by its nature the Immutable Light’.36 The title poem

32 ‘Fist’, Dharmakaya, (Manchester: Carcenet, 2000), 13.33 Dharmakaya, 13.34 Ibid.35 Ibid.36 Ibid., 6.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 239

is dedicated to Thom McGinty, better known to Dubliners as the mime and street artist the Diceman.37 It addresses the moment of both life and death, or as Meehan terms it, the moment ‘Between breath and no breath / your hands cupped your own death’.38 Meehan uses ‘breath / death’ and its inversion as end rhymes in the first two lines of the first and fifth of six stanzas. The second stanza ends with silence and breath, and a capitalised ‘Breathe / slow-’, which carries on to the next stanza, ‘ly out before the foot finds solid earth again’. Thom is placed at the end, to

become a still pool in the anarchic flow, the street’s unceasing carnival of haunted and redeemed.39

His death brings, and it is almost presented as, the final performance. The first line of the fourth stanza is a second remembering, added to that of the second stanza, carrying on from the first line of the poem: ‘When you step out into death / with a deep breath’. It is a step into the past with a breath of the present:

When you step out into death […]Remember a time in the woods, a path you walked so gently no twig snapped no bird startled.40

37 The Diceman, Thom, defined himself thus: ‘I saw myself as a walking picture […] a creative performing artist. […] Dublin has a strong history of street characters and street presences. I think I’m a street character, a street presence. People do see me as part of the history of street life in Dublin’. This was despite his Scottish birth. Quoted in Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Street Life and Lore: An Oral History of Dublin’s Streets (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1997), n.p., Google ebook. <https://books.google.ie/books?id=REpfBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT211&lpg=PT211&dq.>, accessed 20 February 2015.

38 Dharmakaya, 11.39 Ibid.40 Ibid.

240 Sarah Balen

The silence of his performance and street persona reign in this vignette, where there is a reversal of sound for the reader, where the onomatopoeic ‘snapped’ is taken back, ‘no twig snapped’, and where the poet presents the ‘footfall and the shadow / of its fall – into silence’, with ‘the city rain’ coming to wash away traces that are surely already invisible, have never been. Anne Fogarty posits that

[b]reathing and pedestrianism in ‘Dharmakaya’ act as tropes for the cancellation of death as well as for the lingering, spectral presence of the deceased not on some other-worldly plane but on the very streets in which he performed while alive.41

Meehan’s ‘Prayer for the Children of Longing’ also uses breath to bring the ‘spectral’ children back from ‘some other-worldly plane’.42 This allows the ‘echo of their voices through the city streets’ before she sends them out to nature, ‘branches […] river’,43 as she did with Thom McGinty, before he was brought back to the possibility of the ‘street’s / unceasing carnival / of haunted and redeemed’.44

In ‘Take a breath. Hold it. Let it go.’, the twice contained ‘I hold my breath.’ manages to stall the moment of concern, despite the prevalence of short sentences combined in each stanza and even within some lines of this poem.45 The speaker uses the holding of breath to still herself as she watches, impotent, as her sister wobbles, literally and figuratively. ‘Mistle Thrush’ also focuses on breath, depicting the sycamore’s ‘weeping leaves of fire’ and the pulse of the descending mistle thrush who call:

with urgent and with fatal news: Dying is simple. You breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out and you don’t breathe in again.46

41 Anne Fogarty, “Hear Me and Have Pity”: Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of Paula Meehan’, in An Sionnach, 5.1–2 (2009), 213–25; 222.

42 Ibid., 222.43 Painting Rain, 47–8.44 Dharmakaya, 11.45 Ibid., 15.46 Ibid., 48.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 241

The speaker regards the ‘flock of mistle thrush’, noting their gestures, alarmed by the contents of their song: ‘They acted like this was cause for celebration / – the first minor chord of my winter blues’.47 Their music and wing-sound as they descend, ‘a deputation / from the wingéd world’, are heard and interpreted. The ‘minor chord’ of their composite music is taken inside the body of the poetic speaker, their movement alarming in its connection to death, the combined pulse of their movement and song understood as breath, and the loss of breath, amongst the fallen leaves of autumn death.

There is a palpable grief in many of the poems in Painting Rain, as well as a loss of breath or the threat to breath – the seeing and hearing of it. ‘The Following Message Will Be Deleted From Your Mailbox’, a poem with all words in the title capitalised, sounds its monotone and threat from the outset. Its subtitle reads: [‘message … from … an … unidentified … source …’]. The poem places the breath and then seeks to set up the scene of before, before that last recorded breath: is it after or, as the end of the poem considers:

Before your cup of tea

and your smokes running low […] before you draw the blinds

on summer forever, you called me up and left your breath. Breath I listened to again and again and again days after you were ash on the tide, turned in the tide’s arms.

A week to the moment you sent it – the following message will be deleted … – gone with the static of wires, held fast in memory until my own breath fails.48

Meehan focuses on the power of the breath, where its ability to pronounce and to contain, and to challenge – as the poet does until her own last one

47 Ibid.48 Painting Rain, 23.

242 Sarah Balen

– is as important as its final non-sound / unsounding. The breath is as important as what is said, or not said with it:

Your last phone call. Which I wasn’t there to answer. So the last breath of yours I’d ever hear. Or half

a breath rather. The intake. Not the exhale.49

Here the breath is broken in half, with half in one stanza, the rest in the next, with the intake and exhale, divided, a broken music.

The poem which follows, ‘Sea’, carries these ashes to the sand, ‘At the tide’s edge your name – going, going / gone with the turning tide’ and ‘breath / death’ are again united as end rhymes, four lines apart.50 The poem ends with ‘the drowned forever singing their last breath’, the Cixousian ‘soundsense, singsound, bloodsong’ again emerging, this time from the water in breath.51 Meehan posits, while lamenting:

O the sea neither gives nor takes as we fancy. The sea has no needs, nor worries and wants. If we call it ‘she’ -an ur-mother – it is because salt lives in our blood. And grief drops salt like seeds; brings home shells in pockets – memory.52

‘[W]e’ are included in the poem, and it is the salt of our blood which runs as tears, although in the image Meehan provides, the tears have a more solid shape and substance, ‘like seeds’. The sea will be examined in relation to ‘From Source to Sea’ further on.

Cixous combines the drive to write and the role of mother noting: ‘What moves me to write – is analogous to what moves the mother to write the universe so that the child will grasp it and name it’.53 There is arguably a

49 Ibid.50 Ibid., 24–6.51 ‘Coming to Writing’, 58.52 Painting Rain, 24–6.53 ‘Coming to Writing’, 51.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 243

mothering comfort provided by many of Meehan’s poems, particularly those which address loss and death. Meehan’s focus on the soft movement and music between inhale and exhale gives the reader, the ‘child’, a weighted, measured experience where the unknown is paused and opened, where space is made for contemplation, and time given so that the unnameable and ungraspable, the extendable, expendable drift between breaths and death may be ‘cupped’, as Meehan phrases it in ‘Dharmakaya’.54 A slightly different treatment of loss is found in ‘Ectopic’, a poem where the speaker grapples with physical and emotional distress as ‘The four full moons of the yellow sky / pulsate […] and I need / morphine’. There is no pulse or breath just pain, no weight or name, just ‘rain’.55 This personal loss finds no relief, but somehow she stills the moment between having and not having, holding and not holding a child: ‘I am a woman with a sieve carrying sand // from the beach’. The in-between cannot be sustained, but the unbearable, in that opened moment of falling through, combined perhaps with the morphine, allows for a moment of the elsewhere to reverse the image of the sieve, almost giving breath, a ‘blossom’:

O somewhere there is a beautiful myth of sorting,Of sifting through a mountain of dross to find the one seedWhose eventual blossom is such would make a god cry.56

The ‘ur-mother’ from ‘The Sea’ brings a prenatal music of fluid comfort but Meehan’s poems also portray a mother she had to care for, a mother she had to mother, while including the mother as a figure of projected, adult strength. Part three of ‘Troika’, ‘This is not a confessional poem’ begins:

I write it in the light of ancient Greeceor in the ancient light of this mountain.I write it in the shadow of the mythsor in the shadow of the people who made them.

54 Dharmakaya, 11.55 Ibid.56 Ibid., 32.

244 Sarah Balen

I do not know that I’ve the right to say such things.I only know I must.57

The saying and the writing are combined here by the need to make new space for the in-between and the unconsidered, the mother figure a ques-tion she must ask and answer:

I found her in the cold light of Finglas,my mother curled to a foetal question.58

This links to the beginning and to the first section of the poem, ‘How I discovered rhyme’, which she sets very clearly in Dublin and in desolation:

I think it was then my mother gave up:pre-natal, post-natal who knows now.

The before and the after the first breath, the foetal and the pre and post-natal, connect the question being posed to an answer caught in breath, unanswerable at the time. Meehan returns to rewrite what was previously unquestioned. ‘[W]ho knows now’ is written and there seems, with this lack of question mark, the silencing also of its companion question, which comes to the reader in this newly opened past – who knew then? For Meehan, the broken breath or a question beyond answering is both a place of commencement and a place of return. Meehan considers a poem’s abil-ity to provide clarity, understanding or comfort, but also addresses what is beyond the reach of a poem, what the poem, as a form, can only breathe or sing towards.

Cixous describes the connection between language, meaning and form, claiming:

while I gaze, I listen. What happens takes place simultaneously in song. In a certain way, an opera inhabits me. What flows from my hand onto the paper is what I see-hear […] A music floods through me […] Song and sorrow, blood and song!59

57 Painting Rain, 74–80.58 Ibid., 74–80.59 ‘Coming to Writing’, 53.

‘The music you’re carrying in your head’ 245

Meehan, in a commissioned work for Amnesty International against tor-ture, ‘From Source to Sea’, in gazing finds the source of song and the ends of song. The first stanza reads:

The light makes a river of the scars on your back. I trace it from source to sea. It spills off my page into silence, from the mouth into salt bitterness of tears, beyond comfort of song or poem.60

Here she deems the very form and genre ineffectual and almost immate-rial. The mouth of the river becomes the poetic mouthpiece, the words becoming silence as a tracing of movement and of time, the past and the torture, is undertaken. As before, the salt of the sea and the salt of tears work themselves together. There is an openness to the flow and a combi-nation of the light and the river and writing as ‘It spills / off my page into silence’. Meehan traces and follows, and is this spilling, from mouth, and river mouth, to tears – and is a ‘body with the river’,61 before the thrice-repeated ‘light’ of the repeated first three stanzas’ opening lines ‘makes a river of the scars’.

The poet sees the ‘song of sorrow … and blood’,62 but does not break; she submerses herself in what is most painful, what is ‘beyond comfort of song’ to find the ‘songs of pools’, the past pleasures which may now be remembered, swum, breathed back into possibility:

I trace its course from neck to hip, its silken touch, Its pearly loveliness, its dream of shallows,Its song of pools, its memory of curlewAnd nightingale, of heron and grebe.63

60 Painting Rain, 70.61 As in: ‘Being of a body with the river all the way to the rapids rather than with the

boat’, ‘Coming to Writing’, 57.62 ‘Coming to Writing’, 53.63 Painting Rain, 70.

246 Sarah Balen

The tracing of ‘bloodsong’ has become the ‘soundsense’ of which Cixous writes.64 The elemental substances are allowed to combine in the tracing of the scar, the light, river and sea, and are ‘beyond comfort of song or poem’, echoing the primal gestures which combined in her mother’s foetal ques-tion, beyond answers, beyond comfort.65

Cixous’s dangerous feminine pleasure can be perceived in Meehan’s identification with liminal spaces, thresholds, and the bodies that go and come there. In the poem ‘Liminal’, she embraces what she terms ‘thresholds, the stepping over’ and finishes with a question, pondering the very nature of thresholds, this ‘passage between inner and outer’. She asks ‘what is the sound / of one hand clapping? Is that the door opening or closing?’66 Meehan listens for these pre or half sounds and is unafraid to go beyond words and waves, beyond tears and tides, beyond breath and death in search of a music which both consoles and confronts.

64 ‘Coming to Writing’, 58.65 Painting Rain, 70.66 Ibid., 33.

Notes on Contributors

Sarah Balen is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Arts Management in IADT, Dublin. Awarded a research fellowship at the National Centre of Franco-Irish Studies in the ITT Dublin, she completed a doctoral thesis entitled ‘A City Rooted Out of Time: A Rhizomatic Analysis of Woman and the City in the Poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Fernando Pessoa, T.S. Eliot and Peter Sirr’. She has published a number of papers on the work of these poets.

Joanne Burns recently completed an interdisciplinary PhD study enti-tled ‘Music in the Life and Works of Thomas Moore, 1779–1852’. Her research at the Schools of English and Music at Queen’s University Belfast concerns exploration of various musical aspects pertaining to Moore’s career and song-books. A particular focus is on investigation of Moore’s musical knowledge and the possibility of repositioning both Moore and his song-books Irish Melodies, National Airs and Sacred Songs within the contemporary Romantic music and literary culture.

Una Hunt is one of Ireland’s leading authorities in performance-led music research. She has undertaken consultancies at the National Library of Ireland and established The National Archive of Irish Composers: <http://www.naic.ie> (2010). Among her fourteen-CD discography is the world-premiere album of George Alexander Osborne’s music (Shower of Pearls, RTÉ Lyric FM, 2004) and the National Library collection Fallen Leaves from an Irish Album (2006). In 2012, she edited and published the facsimile of William Vincent Wallace’s rare 1854 music album along with CD. A multiple contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013), she is currently completing a book on Moore’s Irish Melodies.

Benjamin Keatinge is Dean of the Faculty of Languages, Cultures and Communication at South East European University, Macedonia. He

248 Notes on Contributors

is co-editor of France and Ireland in the Public Imagination (2014) and Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey (2010) and he has published widely on twentieth-century Irish literature. In 2014–15, he is a recipient of an International Research Fellowship from the New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania, where he is conducting research on Samuel Beckett and philosopher Emil Cioran. He is also editing a volume of critical essays on Richard Murphy’s poetry.

Joe Kehoe is a PhD student at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama researching the early history of the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra. He graduated from NUI Maynooth with an honours Bachelor of Music degree in 2007, and he also holds an honours degree in philosophy from the University of London. In 2008, he was the winner of the first CHMHE Undergraduate Musicology Competition for his final year dissertation The Place of Ethics in Musicology. He contributed several articles to the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013).

Axel Klein is an independent scholar based in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied at Universität Hildesheim and Trinity College Dublin (1984–90), and received a PhD in musicology at Hildesheim (1995). He is author of Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (1996), Irish Classical Recordings (2001) and O’Kelly – An Irish Musical Family in Nineteenth-Century France (2014), and co-editor of Irish Music in the Twentieth Century (2003) and The Life and Music of Brian Boydell (2004). He has contributed to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1996–2008), the Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009) and the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013).

Eamon Maher is Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in IT Tallaght, Dublin, and editor of the Reimagining Ireland and Studies in Franco-Irish Relations book series, both with Peter Lang, Oxford. His most recent book, co-edited with Eugene O’Brien, is From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and its Aftermath (2014) and he is currently working on a monograph on the twentieth-century Catholic novel.

Notes on Contributors 249

Cathy McGlynn lectures in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Limerick. She is co-editor of New Voices in Irish Literary Criticism: Ireland in Theory (2007) and she has published a number of essays on James Joyce and Modernist literature. Her chief research interests are in Joyce Studies, women modernist writers, ageing women in literature and culture, and women’s travel writing. She is the current editor of the ASTENE (The Association for Travel in Egypt and the Near East) news bulletin.

David Mooney is Head of Keyboard Studies at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, Dublin. His research interests focus principally on performance practice issues, aesthetics relating to French music in the period 1870–1930, and in particular, the life and works of Poldowski (Lady Irène Dean Paul). Other research interests include musico-textual issues in French art song and the history of piano pedagogy. A contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland, he is also a choral arranger and author of David Mooney Irish Choral Series.

Brian Murphy is a lecturer on hospitality, beverage studies and gas-tronomy at IT Tallaght, Dublin. He has extensive experience of manage-ment in the hospitality sector both in Ireland and abroad. In addition to his academic qualifications, he has successfully achieved a number of professional wine qualifications in recent years, culminating in the award of the WSET Diploma in Wines and Spirits. He has a particular interest in wine and gastronomy research, with special emphasis on exploration of the role that place and heritage can play in perception and reception of food and beverage products.

Maguy Pernot-Deschamps, now an independent scholar, has had a lengthy teaching career, initially at second level and subsequently at the University of Burgundy where she lectured on translation, Irish studies and phonology. Her doctoral thesis focused on Neil Jordan’s works and she is the author of The Fictional Imagination of Neil Jordan, Irish Novelist and Film Maker (2009). A long-time member of the Association for Franco-Irish

250 Notes on Contributors

Studies (AFIS), she remains deeply involved in Franco-Irish studies and has an ongoing research interest in Irish short stories, especially by new writers like Mary Costello and Claire Keegan.

Mary Pierse has taught at the School of English and on the Women’s Studies MA courses at University College Cork. Compiler of the five-volume anthology Irish Feminisms 1810–1930 (1910), she is also the editor of George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds and co-editor of George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature and of France and Ireland in the Public Imagination. She has published on Moore’s works, on Franco-Irish artistic connections and on contemporary Irish poets and women writers. She is a board member at the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies and serves on editorial boards for publications in France and Spain.

Arun Rao is a cellist and lectures at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, Dublin. His 2013 dissertation on the French avant-garde between 1914 and 1918, Pierrots fâchés avec la lune: Debussy, Fauré and Ravel during World War 1 (published online: arrow@dit.ie), reflects his research inter-ests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French music, politics and cul-ture. His current doctoral studies involve investigation of the influence of Hellenism on French musical circles between 1850 and 1914.

Laura Watson (Maynooth University) is a musicologist specialising in French musical cultures in the period 1870–1940, and she also researches gender and sexuality in music from 1900. Her work has appeared in the Musical Times, the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. She has edited a selection of articles by the French composer Paul Dukas for the Francophone Music Criticism Digital Repository. She was a contributor to the programme on Rhoda Coghill in the RTÉ Lyric FM Women of Note series in 2012.

Index

Alyssa 95–6Anglo-Irish Treaty 109Aran Islands 6, 79, 82–4, 89–90archewriting 221–2Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit 20, 21, 23Aughrim, Battle of 7, 8–9, 159–75

Baggini, Julian 148–9Balfe, Michael William 17, 22 n.28 Ballets Russes 100, 190Barthes, Roland 135Baudelaire, Charles 233–4Beach Boys, The 152Bécaud, Gilbert 5, 6, 79–90Bécaud, Kitty 80 n.5, 85, 90Bergson, Henri 138, 139, 140Bériot, Charles de 17–18, 21, 23Berlioz, Hector 3, 6, 11, 34, 35, 181 n.10,

191, 210Neuf Mélodies irlandaises 91, 92, 93relationship with Osborne 18, 19,

32–3 relationship with Harriet

Smithson 32–3 Blake, Raymond 156Blake, William 56Blanchot, Maurice 141Bowles, Michael 213–14Boyle, Susan 155Boyne, Battle of 159, 162, 168, 172, 173Brabançonne, La 182Broderick, John 77

Catholicism 57, 66, 102

cello 114, 119, 192, 193compositions for 18, 97, 120, 177, 192,

193Celtic 6, 29 n.54, 92, 95, 109Celtic fantasias 28–9Celtic Revival 98, 99Chabanon, Michel Paul Guy de 41–2, 49Chappell, Publishers 29 n.54, 34Charters, Steve 143 n.1, 150Château Margaux 149, 158Cherubini, Luigi 18, 20, 21, 22 n.28, 23,

95 n.12Chimay, Princes of 20, 21, 22, 23 Chopin, Frédéric 3, 15, 18, 19, 23–7, 31, 35,

120, 145, 185–7, 193Churchill, Winston 182Cixous, Hélène 11, 231–7, 242, 244, 246Clancy, Tomás 156Coward, Noel 56

Davis, Thomas 168, 174 n.39 Dean Paul, Irène (Poldowski) 4, 53–62Debussy, Claude 2 n.3, 9, 10, 177–95,

199Berceuse Héroïque 9, 182, 185, 189–90,

194En blanc et noir 9, 187–91folk material 105La Mer 201, 210Monsieur Croche antidilettante 177,

180, 186, 191Pelléas et Mélisande 104Prélude à l’après- midi d’un faune

2 n.3, 212

252 Index

settings of Verlaine poetry 53, 56, 59–61deconstruction 217, 219–20, 222, 223,

227, 228–9Deleuze, Gilles 138, 140Derrida, Jacques 10, 217–30Diceman (Thom McGinty) 239différance 217, 225–6D’Indy, Vincent 54, 102, 181 n.10, 190Ditterich Shilakes, Kirsten 144Dowling, Bartholomew 167–8, 174 n.39drugs 57, 234–5Dublin music audience 94, 199–215Dublin social problems 234–5Dublin street theatre see DicemanDukas, Paul 104, 105, 179, 201

écriture feminine 11, 232Elgar, Edward 182Éluard, Paul 131, 141Emmet, Robert 227–9empty nest 114exile 118, 166, 167Exoticism 6, 92, 99, 100, 103, 107Exposition universelle (1889) 95

Fauré, Gabriel 53, 56, 59, 60, 186–7, 192Feis Ceoil 94Field, John 15–16Flaherty, Robert 84Fragonard, Jules-Honoré 4, 59fugue 218–19, 226, 229

Gaiety Theatre 203, 204gastronomy 143–58Gounod, Charles 185 n.19, 188 Goya, Francisco 187–90Gregory, Lady Augusta 98, 108, grief 7, 114–17, 122, 124, 126

Hallé, Charles 3, 35–6Hayes, Catherine 18, 28 n.50, 34–5

Heaney, Séamus 160, 231 n.3Hennessy, Swan 6, 96–7, 109history 2, 9, 39, 46, 68, 99, 100, 127,

135, 144, 159–62, 166, 171–3, 175French history 195history of language 10, 221–2, 230 history of music 5, 10, 53, 79, 93, 102,

221–2, 230history of philosophy 217, 220history of reception 3, 90Irish cultural history 6, 79oenological history 146see also theme park

Holmès, Augusta 6, 93–5, 97, 100, 109Home Rule 98–9Hoyt Wiborg, Mary 61Hugo, Victor 62, 107, 125

impressionism 97, 180Ireland Professor of Poetry see Meehan,

PaulaIrish Brigade 167–8Irish Independent 201, 205, 206Irish Literary Revival 97, 98Irish Times 90, 94, 201, 206, 212

James II, King 159, 162Jean-Aubry, Georges 58–9, 60, 61Jordan, Neil 113–4 Joyce, James 217–30

Ulysses 10, 17, 217, 220

Kalkbrenner, Frédéric 22–5, 35King Albert’s Book 181, 182

La Scala 11, 70–3, 74, 85Laurel Hill 65, 77Le Braz, Anatole 62Le Figaro 87, 98, 107, 109Le Monde 88Lefèvre, Françoise 7–8, 113–14

Index 253

Limerick 3, 18, 19, 65, 66, 99Limerick, Treaty of 99, 159, 166, 167, 168Liszt, Franz 18, 25, 29, 51 n.51, 185–6, 189

music and wine 145, 146London 16, 18, 30, 34, 35–7, 54, 55 n.3loss 5, 7, 113–26, 173–4, 193, 243Loti, Pierre 107Louis XIV, King 162, 164, 167, 172Luttrell, Henry 163, 166–7Lyle, Watson 60–1

Maeterlinck, Maurice 62, 103–4McGahern, John 77McGinty, Thom see DicemanMcKillen, Paddy 145–6McQuaid, Archbishop John Charles 208,

209Malibran, Maria Garcia 18, 21, 35 n.76Manchester 21, 26–7, 35, 170Martinon, Jean 10, 199–215Martyn, Edward 98Massenet, Jules 181Maus, Octave 54 n.2, 60Meehan, Paula (Ireland Professor of

Poetry) 10–11, 231–46mélodie (French art song) 53, 60–1, 108memory 118–26, 127–41, 232,

241, 242 folk memory 97, 160, 172–5involuntary memory 129, 130, 132,

134, 138, 139music and memory 45, 51Realms of Memory /Lieux de

mémoire 173–4Milhaud, Darius 101, 104mixolydian mode 104, 106monsters, sea 113, 114, 121, 126Moore, Thomas 3–4, 11, 28, 39–52

Irish Melodies 6, 28–9, 32, 45–6 n.27, 74, 91, 95 n.13, 108

mortality 123, 132, 137

Münch, Charles 200Murphy, Richard 9, 159–76

Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan 8, 127, 129–32, 137, 140, 141

Nora, Pierre 173–4

Ó Braonáin, Séamus 203–4, 206O’Brien, Kate 5, 65–77

The Ante-Room 65, 66–8The Land of Spices 65, 68–9As Music and Splendour 5–6, 65,

70–7O’Brien, Oliver 209O’Brien, Vincent 207Ó Broin, Leon 202, 204, 212–13O’Donoghue, Bernard 8, 127, 132–4, 140O’Driscoll, Dennis 8, 127, 134–7Odysseus 218, 224O’Kelly, Seán T. 109Opéra d’Aran, L’ 5, 6, 81–90 Ormandy, Eugene 199Osborne, Bessie 32Osborne, George Alexander 3, 12, 15–37

Isabella Valse 31La Pluie de perles 3, 36–7La nouvelle pluie de perles 37

Our Lady’s Choral Society 10, 207–9, 214

Paganini, Niccolò 21Paris 15–37 passim, 49, 54, 70, 98, 100–4

passim Parkhurst-Ferguson, Priscilla 146–7Pettigrew, Simone 150Piaf, Edith 80pianist-composer 15, 16, 21, 23, 26 n.43, 37pianos 16, 23, 28, 34 n.72 Pierrot 189, 193Pierse, Mary 93 n.4, 95 n.13poetry 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 39, 127–75, 180

254 Index

see also Baudelaire; Heaney, Seamus; Meehan, Paula; Moore, Thomas; Murphy, Richard; Ní Chu-illeanáin, Eiléan; O’Donoghue, Bernard; O’Driscoll, Dennis; Verlaine, Paul; Yeats, William Butler

Poldowski see Dean Paul, IrènePontallier, Paul 149Poulenc, Francis 87, 88Prêtre, Georges 85Prix de Rome 6, 95–6Proust, Marcel 126, 129, 132, 138–9

Rabaud, Henri 6, 91–109L’Appel de la mer 5, 6, 91–2, 101–9Mârouf, savetier du Caire 101–2

Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra 1990 215

Ranz-des-vaches 50–1Ravel, Maurice 60, 61, 96, 97, 184, 186,

192music heard by Dublin audi-

ences 199, 210patriotic sentiments 177–8, 179,

183, 184 settings of Verlaine poetry 53, 60

Realism 92, 103, 105, 106, 107–8, 135rebirth 117, 118Reynolds, Lorna 72, 76Rimbaud, Arthur 55, 125romanticism 4, 48, 51–2Rossini, Gioachino 18, 21Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3–4, 11, 42–52,

217, 221–3, 227Confessions 221 Devin du Village 49Dictionnaire de Musique 50Dissertation on Modern Music 44Essay on the Origin of Languages 51Lettre sur la musique françoise 47

influence on Thomas Moore 42–52

Royal Irish Academy 41, 42 n.9

Saint-Saëns, Camille 180, 182 n.14, 186, 187, 191, 193

St Ruth, Marquis de 8, 163–5, 167Salle Pleyel 23, 24, 28salon 24, 26, 28–31, 45–6

salon music 36, 37, 109Sarsfield, Patrick 9, 12, 163, 165–8Satie, Erik 101, 177–8, 179, 184Saussure, Ferdinand de 220–1, 223Schubert, Franz 7, 120Schumann, Clara Wieck 18, 66Schumann, Robert 66–7, 68Scott Moncrieff, C.K. 128 n.2Scruton, Roger 143, 145 n.5Sean-bhean bhocht 99sean-nós 105sensibility 4, 46Shakespeare, William 32–3, 128–9silence 7–8, 118–19, 123, 127–41, 233,

234–5, 236, 240, 245 silence of death 137, 239silence and loss 113–15, 118, 119, 124

‘Sirens’ 10, 217–30Smith, Clark 151–3, 155, 157Smithson, Harriet 3, 32–3, 34Spence, Charles 144 n.2, 153–4,

155, 158Stanford, Charles Villiers 182Stevenson, Sir John 47, 50Stravinsky, Igor 100, 101, 183, 190–1, 208,

210Swift, Jonathan 133symbolism 55, 92, 99, 104, 107, 131Synge, John Millington 5, 6, 7, 91, 98,

100, 102–3 Riders to the Sea 91–2, 98, 100–4,

105–9

Index 255

Tailhade, Laurent de 56, 62Théâtre des Champs-Élysées 81, 100theme park 169–70Third Republic (France) 6–7, 91–109Toscanini, Arturo 199, 202–3Turner, J.M.W. 7

Sunset with Sea Monsters 121

Ughetti, Eugene 154United States of America 36, 54, 56, 199

Varriano, John 145, 157Vaughan Williams, Ralph 84 n.10, 92Verlaine, Paul 4, 53, 55–62

‘Art poétique’ 58Vermeer, Johannes

The Milkmaid 121, 122vers impair 58Viardot, Pauline Garcia 18, 35 n.76Villon, François 187, 188

Wagner, Richard 96, 179–81, 186Walshe, Éibhear 65, 72, 75, 76–7Watteau, Antoine 4, 59Wharton, Edith 190White Feather Brigade 131 n.8White, Hayden 135Wieniawska, Irène see Dean Paul, IrèneWieniawski, Heinrich 18, 34, 53 Wieniawski, Josef 18Wild Geese, the 159, 166, 167, 168–9, 172William I (of Holland) 20 William III (of Holland) 20William of Orange (King William III of

England) 3, 159, 162–3, 167Wood, Sir Henry 54Wordsworth, William 8, 127, 129World War I 9, 10, 54, 100, 131World War II 10, 199

Yeats, William Butler 84, 98, 190

Reimagining IrelandSeries Editor: Dr Eamon Maher, Institute of Technology, Tallaght

The concepts of Ireland and ‘Irishness’ are in constant flux in the wake of an ever-increasing reappraisal of the notion of cultural and national specificity in a world assailed from all angles by the forces of glo-balisation and uniformity. Reimagining Ireland interrogates Ireland’s past and present and suggests possibilities for the future by looking at Ireland’s literature, culture and history and subjecting them to the most up-to-date critical appraisals associated with sociology, literary theory, historiography, political science and theology. Some of the pertinent issues include, but are not confined to, Irish writing in English and Irish, Nationalism, Unionism, the Northern ‘Troubles’, the Peace Process, economic development in Ireland, the impact and decline of the Celtic Tiger, Irish spirituality, the rise and fall of organised religion, the visual arts, popular cultures, sport, Irish music and dance, emigration and the Irish diaspora, immigration and multiculturalism, marginalisation, globalisation, modernity/post-modernity and postcolonialism. The series publishes monographs, comparative studies, interdisciplinary projects, conference procee-dings and edited books.

Proposals should be sent either to Dr Eamon Maher at eamon.maher@ittdublin.ie or to ireland@peterlang.com.

Vol. 1 Eugene O’Brien: ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse’: Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies

ISBN 978-3-03911-539-6. 219 pages. 2009.

Vol. 2 James P. Byrne, Padraig Kirwan and Michael O’Sullivan (eds): Affecting Irishness: Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and

Beyond the Nation ISBN 978-3-03911-830-4. 334 pages. 2009.

Vol. 3 Irene Lucchitti: The Islandman: The Hidden Life of Tomás O’Crohan

ISBN 978-3-03911-837-3. 232 pages. 2009.

Vol. 4 Paddy Lyons and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds): No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature

ISBN 978-3-03911-841-0. 289 pages. 2009.

Vol. 5 Eamon Maher (ed.): Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland ISBN 978-3-03911-851-9. 256 pages. 2009.

Vol. 6 Lynn Brunet: ‘A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials’: Bacon, Beckett and Spurious Freemasonry in Early Twentieth-

Century Ireland ISBN 978-3-03911-854-0. 218 pages. 2009.

Vol. 7 Claire Lynch: Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation

ISBN 978-3-03911-856-4. 234 pages. 2009.

Vol. 8 Victoria O’Brien: A History of Irish Ballet from 1927 to 1963 ISBN 978-3-03911-873-1. 208 pages. 2011.

Vol. 9 Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten (eds): Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture

ISBN 978-3-03911-859-5. 208 pages. 2009.

Vol. 10 Claire Nally: Envisioning Ireland: W.B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism

ISBN 978-3-03911-882-3. 320 pages. 2010.

Vol. 11 Raita Merivirta: The Gun and Irish Politics: Examining National History in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins

ISBN 978-3-03911-888-5. 202 pages. 2009.

Vol. 12 John Strachan and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds): Ireland: Revolution and Evolution ISBN 978-3-03911-881-6. 248 pages. 2010.

Vol. 13 Barbara Hughes: Between Literature and History: The Diaries and Memoirs of Mary Leadbeater and Dorothea Herbert

ISBN 978-3-03911-889-2. 255 pages. 2010.

Vol. 14 Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe (eds): Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics

ISBN 978-3-03911-894-6. 256 pages. 2010.

Vol. 15 John Walsh: Contests and Contexts: The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socio-Economic Development

ISBN 978-3-03911-914-1. 492 pages. 2011.

Vol. 16 Zélie Asava: The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television

ISBN 978-3-0343-0839-7. 213 pages. 2013.

Vol. 17 Susan Cahill and Eóin Flannery (eds): This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann

ISBN 978-3-03911-935-6. 189 pages. 2012.

Vol. 18 Brian Arkins: The Thought of W.B. Yeats ISBN 978-3-03911-939-4. 204 pages. 2010.

Vol. 19 Maureen O’Connor: The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing

ISBN 978-3-03911-959-2. 203 pages. 2010.

Vol. 20 Rhona Trench: Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr

ISBN 978-3-03911-964-6. 327 pages. 2010.

Vol. 21 Jeannine Woods: Visions of Empire and Other Imaginings: Cinema, Ireland and India, 1910–1962 ISBN 978-3-03911-974-5. 230 pages. 2011.

Vol. 22 Neil O’Boyle: New Vocabularies, Old Ideas: Culture, Irishness and the Advertising Industry

ISBN 978-3-03911-978-3. 233 pages. 2011.

Vol. 23 Dermot McCarthy: John McGahern and the Art of Memory ISBN 978-3-0343-0100-8. 344 pages. 2010.

Vol. 24 Francesca Benatti, Sean Ryder and Justin Tonra (eds): Thomas Moore: Texts, Contexts, Hypertexts

ISBN 978-3-0343-0900-4. 220 pages. 2013.

Vol. 25 Sarah O’Connor: No Man’s Land: Irish Women and the Cultural Present

ISBN 978-3-0343-0111-4. 230 pages. 2011.

Vol. 26 Caroline Magennis: Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel

ISBN 978-3-0343-0110-7. 192 pages. 2010.

Vol. 27 Dawn Duncan: Irish Myth, Lore and Legend on Film ISBN 978-3-0343-0140-4. 181 pages. 2013.

Vol. 28 Eamon Maher and Catherine Maignant (eds): Franco-Irish Connections in Space and Time: Peregrinations and Ruminations

ISBN 978-3-0343-0870-0. 295 pages. 2012.

Vol. 29 Holly Maples: Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration and the Contemporary Abbey Theatre

ISBN 978-3-0343-0137-4. 294 pages. 2011.

Vol. 30 Maureen O’Connor (ed.): Back to the Future of Irish Studies: Festschrift for Tadhg Foley

ISBN 978-3-0343-0141-1. 359 pages. 2010.

Vol. 31 Eva Urban: Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama

ISBN 978-3-0343-0143-5. 303 pages. 2011.

Vol. 32 Mairéad Conneely: Between Two Shores / Idir Dhá Chladach: Writing the Aran Islands, 1890–1980

ISBN 978-3-0343-0144-2. 299 pages. 2011.

Vol. 33 Gerald Morgan and Gavin Hughes (eds): Southern Ireland and the Liberation of France: New Perspectives

ISBN 978-3-0343-0190-9. 250 pages. 2011.

Vol. 34 Anne MacCarthy: Definitions of Irishness in the ‘Library of Ireland’ Literary Anthologies

ISBN 978-3-0343-0194-7. 271 pages. 2012.

Vol. 35 Irene Lucchitti: Peig Sayers: In Her Own Write ISBN 978-3-0343-0253-1. Forthcoming.

Vol. 36 Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (eds): Breaking the Mould: Literary Representations of Irish Catholicism

ISBN 978-3-0343-0232-6. 249 pages. 2011.

Vol. 37 Mícheál Ó hAodha and John O’Callaghan (eds): Narratives of the Occluded Irish Diaspora: Subversive Voices

ISBN 978-3-0343-0248-7. 227 pages. 2012.

Vol. 38 Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds): Celtic Connections: Irish–Scottish Relations and the Politics of Culture

ISBN 978-3-0343-0214-2. 247 pages. 2013.

Vol. 39 Sabine Egger and John McDonagh (eds): Polish–Irish Encounters in the Old and New Europe

ISBN 978-3-0343-0253-1. 322 pages. 2011.

Vol. 40 Elke D’hoker, Raphaël Ingelbien and Hedwig Schwall (eds): Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives

ISBN 978-3-0343-0249-4. 318 pages. 2011.

Vol. 41 Peter James Harris: From Stage to Page: Critical Reception of Irish Plays in the London Theatre, 1925–1996

ISBN 978-3-0343-0266-1. 311 pages. 2011.

Vol. 42 Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Gerald Porter and Joakim Wrethed (eds): Beyond Ireland: Encounters Across Cultures

ISBN 978-3-0343-0270-8. 342 pages. 2011.

Vol. 43 Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena (eds): Urban and Rural Landscapes in Modern Ireland: Language, Literature and Culture

ISBN 978-3-0343-0279-1. 238 pages. 2012.

Vol. 44 Kathleen Costello-Sullivan: Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín

ISBN 978-3-0343-0753-6. 247 pages. 2012.

Vol. 45 Lesley Lelourec and Gráinne O’Keeffe-Vigneron (eds): Ireland and Victims: Confronting the Past, Forging the Future

ISBN 978-3-0343-0792-5. 331 pages. 2012.

Vol. 46 Gerald Dawe, Darryl Jones and Nora Pelizzari (eds): Beautiful Strangers: Ireland and the World of the 1950s

ISBN 978 -3- 0343-0801-4. 207 pages. 2013.

Vol. 47 Yvonne O’Keeffe and Claudia Reese (eds): New Voices, Inherited Lines: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Irish Family

ISBN 978-3-0343-0799-4. 238 pages. 2013.

Vol. 48 Justin Carville (ed.): Visualizing Dublin: Visual Culture, Modernity and the Representation of Urban Space

ISBN 978-3-0343-0802-1. 326 pages. 2014.

Vol. 49 Gerald Power and Ondřej Pilný (eds): Ireland and the Czech Lands: Contacts and Comparisons in History and Culture

ISBN 978-3-0343-1701-6. 243 pages. 2014.

Vol. 50 Eoghan Smith: John Banville: Art and Authenticity ISBN 978-3-0343-0852-6. 199 pages. 2014.

Vol. 51 María Elena Jaime de Pablos and Mary Pierse (eds): George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature

ISBN 978-3-0343-1752-8. 283 pages. 2014.

Vol. 52 Aidan O’Malley and Eve Patten (eds): Ireland, West to East: Irish Cultural Connections with Central and Eastern Europe

ISBN 978-3-0343-0913-4. 307 pages. 2014.

Vol. 53 Ruben Moi, Brynhildur Boyce and Charles I. Armstrong (eds): The Crossings of Art in Ireland

ISBN 978-3-0343-0983-7. 319 pages. 2014.

Vol. 54 Sylvie Mikowski (ed.): Ireland and Popular Culture ISBN 978-3-0343-1717-7. 257 pages. 2014.

Vol. 55 Benjamin Keatinge and Mary Pierse (eds): France and Ireland in the Public Imagination

ISBN 978-3-0343-1747-4. 279 pages. 2014.

Vol. 56 Raymond Mullen, Adam Bargroff and Jennifer Mullen (eds): John McGahern: Critical Essays

ISBN 978-3-0343-1755-9. 253 pages. 2014.

Vol. 57 Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher (eds): ‘Tickling the Palate’: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture

ISBN 978-3-0343-1769-6. 253 pages. 2014.

Vol. 58 Heidi Hansson and James H. Murphy (eds): Fictions of the Irish Land War

ISBN 978-3-0343-0999-8. 237 pages. 2014.

Vol. 59 Fiona McCann: A Poetics of Dissensus: Confronting Violence in Contemporary Prose Writing from the North of Ireland

ISBN 978-3-0343-0979-0. 238 pages. 2014.

Vol. 60 Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack, Lindsay Janssen and Ruud van den Beuken (eds): Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

ISBN 978-3-0343-0903-5. 357 pages. 2014.

Vol. 61 Katarzyna Ojrzyn’ska: ‘Dancing As If Language No Longer Existed’: Dance in Contemporary Irish Drama

ISBN 978-3-0343-1813-6. 318 pages. 2015.

Vol. 62 Whitney Standlee: ‘Power to Observe’: Irish Women Novelists in Britain, 1890–1916

ISBN 978-3-0343-1837-2. 288 pages. 2015.

Vol. 63 Elke D’hoker and Stephanie Eggermont (eds): The Irish Short Story: Traditions and Trends

ISBN 978-3-0343-1753-5. 330 pages. 2015.

Vol. 64 Radvan Markus: Echoes of the Rebellion: The Year 1798 in Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction and Drama

ISBN 978-3-0343-1832-7. 248 pages. 2015.

Vol. 65 B. Mairéad Pratschke: Visions of Ireland: Gael Linn’s Amharc Éireann Film Series, 1956–1964

ISBN 978-3-0343-1872-3. 301 pages. 2015.

Vol. 66 Una Hunt and Mary Pierse (eds): France and Ireland: Notes and Narratives

ISBN 978-3-0343-1914-0. 272 pages. 2015.

Established in 1970, the Irish University Review is the leading journal of Irish literarystudies. It publishes the best current criticism and scholarship, an extensive review

section, and the IASIL annual bibliography of Irish Studies.

The ‘special issues’, published annually, and devoted to the work of a particularauthor, or a topic of current interest in Irish Studies, have shaped and defined the field.

To find out more, and for details of how to subscribe, please visit our website.

www.irishuniversityreview.ie