Music and the Irish Literary Imagination

M U S IC AND T HE IRIS H L I T ERARY IM AGINAT IO N This page intentionally left blank Music and the Irish Literary...

Author: Harry White

55 downloads 1136 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

M U S IC AND T HE IRIS H L I T ERARY IM AGINAT IO N

This page intentionally left blank

Music and the Irish Literary Imagination HARRY WH IT E

1

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Harry White 2008 extracts from the works of James Joyce © the Estate of James Joyce The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data White, Harry. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination / Harry White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–954732–6 1. English literature–Irish authors–History and criticism. 2. English literature–Irish authors–Musical settings–History and criticism. 3. English literature–19th century–History and criticism. 4. English literature–20th century–History and criticism. 5. Music and literature–History–19th century. 6. Music and literature–History–20th century. 7. Music–Ireland–19th century– History and criticism. 8. Music–Ireland–20th century–History and criticism. I. Title. PR8722.M85W45 2008 820.9'35780899162–dc22 2008036149 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Kings Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–954732–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Brian Friel

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

In 1994 the Irish poet Eavan Boland published a shrewd and affectionate memoir of her friendship with Derek Mahon, which began in April 1964. Thirty years later Boland could recall that their reactions to the early years of the Northern Irish crisis were very different: Mahon was ‘trapped’ in the emerging debate on the obligations of Irish poetry at a time of political and social collapse ‘simply by being a Northerner’. For Boland herself, things were otherwise: ‘As a woman poet, I had the opposite experience. I found myself without a discourse.’1 Such marks of identity (‘northerner’, ‘woman poet’) indicate modes of inclusion and exclusion which still prevail in the discourse about Irish writing, and as a musicologist I feel acutely aware of them both. To be oppressed by the ‘bright, imperious music’ (Mahon) of a poetic tradition, or to ﬁnd oneself without a discourse, are predicaments which have a strangely familiar ring about them, at least to me. That is one reason why this book is preoccupied by the inclusion and exclusion of music as a formative agent in Irish writing from 1800 to the present day. But this preoccupation would not count for much were it not for the discovery that it originates and endures in the Irish literary imagination itself, notwithstanding its frequent (and general) absence from the aftermath of critical commentary. Given this discovery—as I hope to show here— the musical discourse which pervades Irish writing becomes more difﬁcult to overlook, if only because its striking presence redeems the long absence of musical works from Irish cultural history, to the extent that Irish poetry, drama, and ﬁction have functioned as objective correlatives of musical genres which originated elsewhere. Certain Irish writers are explicit on this point (Bernard Shaw and James Joyce are good examples), but the discourse itself deserves an exposition and a history. It is a discourse of musical beginnings and verbal endings. This progression obtains with such frequency (particularly in Moore, Synge, Shaw, and Joyce), that one could be forgiven for mistaking the part 1 Eavan Boland, ‘Compact and Compromise: Derek Mahon as a Young Poet’, in Brian Donnelly (ed.), Irish University Review, special issue on Derek Mahon, 24: 1 (Spring–Summer, 1994), 61–6, at 65.

viii

Preface

for the whole: an immersion in music and the serious consideration of music as a profession are preliminaries which inform the work of such writers, but the presence of music and the absorption of musical genres in their work are not exhausted by these vital overtures. On the contrary: it is often a determination to represent the poem, the play, or the novel as an imperative expression or outgrowth of musical thought that animates the imagination and accounts for the rehabilitation of musical forms in Irish writing. But the abiding presence of musical thought also attains to a discourse of symbolic projection, dispossession, and repossession which is variously (if unmistakably) related to the presence and absence of the Irish language in the work of Irish writers. This apposition between language and music (as in Yeats’s declaration of ‘the supreme theme of art and song’) is underwritten by the retrieval and reception of Gaelic cultural history in the late nineteenth century, not least by Yeats himself. In that retrieval, music and language are idealized to the point where they are synonymous. In such a projection, music itself acquires a radical symbolic importance (speciﬁcally with regard to the poetic imagination), partly because it cannot otherwise be distinguished from the literary works which it inspires, except by casual reference to ‘folk song’. But decades before Yeats had written a line, Thomas Moore would realize (with spectacular success) the arch-romantic project of translating Irish music into English verse. In that enterprise, Moore established a conventional understanding of music in relation to literature that would abide long after Irish writers had embraced the European musical artwork in preference to traditional Irish music. If this book does nothing else, I hope it will help to identify Moore’s achievement as an inherent presence in Irish writing precisely on this account, in addition to his remarkable inﬂuence (likewise often eclipsed) on the development of French and German musical romanticism. Moore’s impact on Berlioz and Schumann, decisive though it was, would not be sufﬁcient to justify the comparison I have tendered in this book as between the canonic sovereignty of European art music in the nineteenth century and the no-less striking (and formative) inﬂuence of Irish writing in the twentieth. But the abiding presence of European music in Irish literature is another matter, and it is this presence which has allowed me to relate one tradition to the other, especially in regard to Beckett’s subversion of Joyce, and Friel’s recovery of tonal music (after Beckett) as a fundamental narrative of extra-musical meaning. I have found it illuminating to read Beckett’s work in relation to Joyce, spe-

Preface

ix

ciﬁcally through the agency of a musical likening, as between Arnold Schoenberg’s heroic modernism and the scrupulous reductionism of Anton Webern. But I have also advanced Friel’s reception of nineteenthcentury music, not as a ‘repudiation’ of Beckett, but more instructively as a means of pressing home the operatic condition of Irish dramaturgy which Synge and Shaw both promote. In this respect, the readings of Synge and Shaw offered in this book are only completed in the chapter on Friel. With regard to Friel’s own plays, I have also argued that they repossess the European musical work to the extent that it becomes essential (rather than peripheral) to a dramatization of Irish experience. When Chopin and Mendelssohn thus preoccupy the literary imagination, the presence of music is actual as well as symbolic. There is another reason for the canonic explorations tendered in the Introduction to this book, but it is not fully disclosed until the ﬁnal chapter. I hope it is sufﬁcient to remark here that I have written this exposition of musical discourse in Irish writing with the history of European art music at my elbow (as it were). The postmodern critique of that music which the new musicology represents in its radical deconstruction both of the autonomous musical work and the hegemony of Eurocentric musical traditions is, perhaps, a reﬂection of the diminished condition (and circulation) of art music written since 1945. In other media (in ﬁlm, for example, and in literature), the creation of new works appears to entail an untroubled expansion of the canon, at least insofar as reception and critical commentary are concerned. Closer to home, the concept of ‘Irish classics’ (Declan Kiberd) remains admissible, particularly in that postcolonial climate which has allowed us to reclaim James Joyce as an Irish writer, notwithstanding his position as an avatar of European modernism. By contrast, the sense of an ending looms large within the domain of recent music history. There are many more monuments torn down than are raised up by the new musicology, and chief among those fallen is the hitherto privileged autonomy of the musical artwork. This intellectual revolution has liberated musicology from its obeisance to art history, and vigorously opened up the whole enterprise of musical meaning, speciﬁcally with regard to the extra-musical narratives which music conveys in and through history. Without this liberation, most of my own research would be impossible. Nevertheless: ‘perfection of the work’ remains (by contrast) a paramount consideration in Irish writing, to judge by Seamus Heaney’s defence of this Yeatsian principle, most notably when it is assailed by his own political and social conscience. In that consideration, articulated by Heaney’s own sustained commitment

x

Preface

to the currency of ﬁxed forms, and to the pre-eminence of a literary technique which afﬁrms a far-reaching continuity that is explicitly European, the discourse of musical autonomy is raised anew. It ﬁnds a correlative in Irish poetry. This discovery too is worth a moment’s scruple, not least from the cultural historian’s perspective. In this book I have tried to follow the development of this discourse in Irish writing over a considerable time period, but I have not attempted to exhaust, as it were, the presence of music therein. My principal claim rests on the validity of the idea itself, although I realize that much more could be said (and, with luck, will be said). The whole question of a musical afterlife for Irish writing, for example, which is only partly addressed in the (very long) chapter on Moore, remains to be comprehensively addressed. Robert Schumann’s response to Moore is echoed by the unmistakable presence of Synge and Oscar Wilde in the operas of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Richard Strauss, to cite two prominent instances of this afterlife. Likewise, my observations on Derek Mahon in the course of the Introduction could, as I think, be developed into a much more sustained consideration of Mahon’s recourse to music, to say nothing of the wider presence of music in contemporary Irish poetry (Paul Muldoon is one poet among many who would surely feature prominently in such an assessment). The continued presence of music in Irish ﬁction after Joyce summons immediately the names of Bernard McLaverty and Patrick McCabe. And so on. If there is a musical discourse at work in the Irish literary imagination, it endures to the present moment. But I would sooner not have the last word on this subject: my hope is rather to establish the formative inﬂuence of music as a decisive consideration in Irish writing which bears scrutiny for its own sake. The reader of an early draft of this study queried my failure to include at least one woman writer, but gender isn’t always a reliable criterion in writing cultural history. In truth, the criterion on this occasion had nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with music. Irish women writers, as Eavan Boland indicates, have had other problems to solve. My problem was to identify those writers who carry forward ‘the thread’ of music (as Mozart called it in a letter to his father) in the Irish literary imagination. In that respect at least, the challenge of representing the discourse of music in Irish writing, and the discovery of a discourse of womanhood, are strikingly similar, and just as strikingly distinct. I am certain that the latter discourse is much better understood (both as to its presence and its repression) as a result of the work of writers such as

Preface

xi

Angela Bourke, Declan Kiberd, and Boland herself. The work presented here is offered in the same emancipatory spirit. The ﬁrst inkling of this book occurred in the epilogue to my study of music in Irish cultural history from 1770 to 1970, entitled The Keeper’s Recital. In the decade since that book appeared I have incurred many debts to friends and colleagues whose generosity and expertise have richly contributed to my own reading of music in Irish literature. I hope that this book will repay those obligations in some small measure. Errors that remain are all my own. In particular I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and its chairperson, Dr Maurice Bric, for the award of a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship in 2005–6, which allowed me a year’s leave of absence from University College Dublin in order to begin work on this book in earnest. I am likewise grateful to my colleagues in the UCD School of Music for having made my return to the fold so easy: it is hard to imagine a more congenial environment for research, notwithstanding the challenges presented by university reform which affect us all. In this climate of change, the intellectual autonomy which the study of music at UCD enjoys is not something to be taken for granted, and I am very glad to acknowledge this autonomy here, given its positive impact on my own work. I am especially grateful to the Head of the UCD School of Music, Wolfgang Marx, for his sympathetic interest in this project. Melissa Devereux, Administrator of the School, protected this book from the technical ineptitude of its author (in the nick of time), and with characteristic warmth and professional efﬁciency made its production much easier (and much more pleasant) than it otherwise would have been. One advantage of intellectual autonomy is that it promotes interdisciplinary collaboration on equal terms, and as an instance of this I cite the hospitality afforded to music by the UCD School of English, Drama and Film over the past several years, and in particular by the late Augustine Martin, Christopher Murray, Andrew Carpenter, Brian Donnelly, Anthony Roche, and Seamus Deane. My debt to them is immense, expressly with regard to the relationship between music and literature in Irish cultural history, and I recognize and salute their intellectual presence in what follows here. As editors, mentors, colleagues, and friends, they have shaped (and not infrequently tested) my own deliberations on this relationship. In this regard I owe a special debt of gratitude to Declan Kiberd, who read and extensively commented on the ﬁrst three sections of this book and whose encouragement at every

xii

Preface

turn fortiﬁed my conﬁdence, above all in relation to writing about Yeats, Synge, and Joyce. Further aﬁeld, I should like to thank the Cambridge Irish Studies Group, and its convenor, Dr Ray Ryan, for having invited me to speak on music and the Irish literary imagination in February 2007. My thanks are also due to the President and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for their hospitality on that occasion. I am likewise grateful to Anthony Roche (once again) for the opportunity to rehearse my thoughts on Synge and music at the Synge Summer School in Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow in July 2007, in the course of which I had the great good fortune to discuss this topic with Ann Saddlemyer. I am very grateful to Caireann Shannon, whose work on Ralph Vaughan Williams (particularly in relation to RVW’s setting of Synge’s Riders to the Sea) was particularly helpful to me. Joan Dean, convenor of the midwest chapter of the American Conference for Irish Studies, invited me to deliver a plenary address on the subject of this book in Kansas City in October 2007. This provided an invaluable sounding-board for the ideas proposed in this study, and I am enormously grateful to her and the other conference delegates for having so generously received them. In this connection, I am also greatly indebted to William Everett for his gracious introduction to my work. At the University of St Louis, Missouri, the Irish cultural historian and musician Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin was a gracious host and a stimulating and sympathetic interlocutor when I lectured there on the problems of traditional music in relation to Irish literature and art music. Without Robin Elliott, whose friendship has given me so much over the past twenty-seven years, my work would be much less than it is: my own homecoming in European art music owes a great deal to his inﬂuence. Among those whom I must also thank for material assistance in the preparation of this book are Timothy Martin (on Joyce), Matthew Campbell (on Moore), Adrian Scahill (on the sources of Moore’s Melodies), and Jeremy Dibble (on Stanford). Axel Klein, whose knowledge of art music in Ireland is Faustian, has been very generous in placing his research on opera in Ireland at my disposal. Stanislav Tuksar, editor of the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (Zagreb), is another close friend, whose work on music in Croatia has sharpened my own reading of music in Ireland precisely in connection with those problems of identity which arise when a smaller state seeks a degree of artistic recognition independent of a larger political entity.

Preface

xiii

I am also very grateful to Maria Patricia O’Connor for her singular reaction to the Introduction, and to Julian Horton for several stimulating conversations on the rival claims of Irish literature and AustroGerman music, directly in relation to this book. To have such a brilliant colleague (and friend) a few doors down the corridor richly merits acknowledgement here. My gratitude also extends warmly to Richard Taruskin, whose recent (and monumental) history of western music directly inﬂuenced this study (notwithstanding our good-humoured debates on the dangers of ‘Germanocentric’ musical thought), and to Lorraine Byrne Bodley, whose research on Goethe and music has also enriched my thinking on music and literature in Ireland. A conversation with the great Irish playwright Thomas Murphy (whose own preoccupations with Faust feature in this book) helped me to clarify the musical nature of his work and to understand, as it were, its strong operatic leanings. I am extremely grateful to him on that account. My colleagues in the Society for Musicology in Ireland have been a constant support. The society’s President, Jan Smaczny, and its Honorary Secretary, Michael Murphy, have both enhanced the arguments in this book not least by their own notably European perspective on music in Irish cultural history. This perspective is one which I share. It ﬁnds expression in their recent book Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, published as the ninth volume of the series Irish Musical Studies (Dublin: Four Courts Press) in 2007. I owe heartfelt thanks to many of the contributors to that book, and especially to Barra Boydell, with whom I work so closely in our current enterprise of editing the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. Gareth Cox, the editor responsible for twentieth-century music in that project, and reviews editor for the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, has, through the agency of his own monographs and edited volumes, materially inﬂuenced the climate of musical studies in Ireland. My debt to his work, and to the work of Barra Boydell, Michael Murphy, and Axel Klein in this regard, is thereby all the greater. The debt which I owe to the joint general editor of Irish Musical Studies, Gerard Gillen, extends far beyond the purview of this study. From the outset I have proﬁted from his cherished friendship, his unwavering loyalty, and his tutelage, to say nothing of his extraordinary prowess as a musician. To Michael Adams, the publisher of Irish Musical Studies, I express profound gratitude for his assiduous promotion of musical scholarship in Ireland, which has done so much to facilitate the integration of musicology with Irish studies. I am no less grateful on this

xiv

Preface

occasion to Andrew McNeillie, senior commissioning editor at Oxford University Press. It is a signal pleasure to thank him and his editorial colleague Jacqueline Baker, in addition to the Readers and Delegates of the Press, for their expression of conﬁdence in this work. Richard Aldous, whose wise counsel has saved me from many a calamity over the past decade, shrewdly supported this book from the beginning. To say much more might be intolerable (at least to him), but on dark days he is a very good man to have in your corner. My most personal and deeply felt thanks are reserved for my wife, Xiao Mei, and for my sons, Fiachra and Dara. My debt to Eithne Graham is heartfelt and lifelong. Finally, it is indeed a pleasant obligation here to thank Brian Friel most warmly for having accepted the dedication of this book. It is difﬁcult for me to express the extent of my gratitude to him, other than to remark that the inspired representation of music in his plays was the motivation for this study. Harry White Dublin, December 2007

Copyright Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is due to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for excerpts from Shaw’s Music. The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: the Bodley Head, 1981); Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949); Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman. A Comedy and a Philosophy (London: Constable and Company, 1927); the James Joyce Estate for excerpts from Dubliners, edited by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and from Ulysses, edited with notes and an introduction by Jeri Johnson [reprint of the ﬁrst edition, 1922] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats for excerpts from ‘All Things Can Tempt Me’, ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, ‘After Long Silence’, and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ published in Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Yeats Reader (revised edition) (London: Palgrave, 2002); The Estate of Samuel Beckett and Grove/Atlantic, Inc. for excerpts from ‘Film’ and ‘Nacht und Träume’ as published in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume III: Dramatic Works. This collection copyright © 2006 by the Estate of Samuel Beckett. Faber and Faber, Ltd for excerpts from Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Aristocrats, and Translations in Selected Plays of Brian Friel (London: Faber and Faber, 1984); Making History (London: Faber and Faber, 1989); Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber and Faber, 1990); Brian Friel, excerpts from The Home Place (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2005) (by permission of the author) and from Performances (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2003) (by permission of the author). Faber and Faber, Ltd, for excerpts from Seamus Heaney, ‘The Flight Path’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996); Seamus Heaney, ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, ‘The Augean Stables’, and ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, in Electric Light (London: Faber and Faber, 2001); Seamus Heaney, ‘The Redress of Poetry’ and ‘The Government of the Tongue’ in Finders Keepers. Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Introduction: Words for Music: In Search of the Irish Omphalos

1

1. The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

35

2. W. B. Yeats and the Music of Poetry

79

3. Why J. M. Synge Abandoned Music

110

4. Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw and ‘The Brandy of the Damned’

133

5. The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of James Joyce

153

6. Words after Music: Samuel Beckett after Joyce

187

7. Operas of the Irish Mind: Brian Friel and Music

206

8. Words Alone: Seamus Heaney, Music, and the Jurisdiction of Literary Forms

228

Select Bibliography

244

Index

251

He [Yeats] read aloud his last poem. A ﬁne affair, as I remember it. He asked Hilda to make a tune for it. She went out of the hotel, and she and I walked up & down in the darkness & and rain trying the tune. When we came back she sang the air; he seemed pleased. His last projective thought seems to me to be this wish for ‘words for melody’. (From a letter by Dorothy Wellesley to Sir William Rothenstein, 6 February 1939, cited by R. F. Foster in W. B. Yeats: A Life. II: The Arch-Poet (Oxford, 2003), 650)

Introduction: Words for Music: In Search of the Irish Omphalos

I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. (Seamus Heaney)1

What is the stone that marks the centre of the Irish world? Some remembrance would surely be graven upon it. Some formula, or incantation, that if repeated often enough would return all things to one thing, and all expression to one mode of expression. A bardic impulse to recall and convey might be discerned in this motif at the Irish epicentre. If we could adequately imagine such a thing, such a phrase rich in its ﬁnespun capacity to generate the future tense of all experience within its own remembrance, the ‘blunt and falling music’ of a pump would be synonymous with its description, and not only in English. The music of language and the language of music would be one and the same thing. Perhaps, as some historians of language suggest, they once were.2 No one, in any case, could dispute the growth of music in western culture as a provisional support for language. If our guesswork about music in the ancient world (the musical formulas that aided memorization, for example, or the status of music in Homeric poetry) is primitive and hazardous, we know a lot about the coterminous functions of music and 1

‘Mossbawn’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (London, 1980), 17. The status of music in relation to language has recently and controversially been reassessed in the work of writers such as Steven Pinker and Steven Mithen. Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals (London, 2005) challenges many of the assumptions about music’s secondary position in relation to language made by Pinker in The Language Instinct (London, 1994). 2

2

Introduction

language in the prayers of the early Christian Church. ‘To sing is to pray twice.’ Or to pray more effectively, to judge by the development of music in European culture as a primary instrument of religious worship. The intimacy between music and language in Europe is not only instinctive and notional, but often exact. A thousand years of plainchant, no small matter in itself, is permanent testament to this intimacy.3 These commonplaces underpin, even now, our technical apprehension of music and language, so that terms such as ‘phrase’, ‘structure’, ‘tone’, ‘metre’, ‘rhythm’, and ‘melody’ apply with equal force and precision to language and music, even if we know that they are no longer the same thing, if they ever were. But this longing for ‘Omphalos’ endures and perhaps increases in proportion to the extent to which music and language live separate lives in the European imagination. The notion that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’ is the quintessence of this longing in the nineteenth century. Our contemporary gloss on this aspiration is that music remains ‘the supreme mystery in the science of man’. A more local mystery surrounds the Irish Omphalos. The preoccupation with language that dominates the Irish imagination, speciﬁcally in relation to the quest for identity, voice, and authenticity of expression in Irish and English, has long been brilliantly resolved in the world at large by a body of literature that easily rivals in its lustre and prestige those canonic episodes which deﬁne European culture. The climate of critical anxiety which now surrounds that culture, which indeed subverts it to good purpose (as in the proposition that high culture axiomatically entails and depends upon the ruthless satisfaction of privilege), is nevertheless ineffectual against the persistent need for identity and recognition. In Ireland, certainly, the scrutiny of cultural expression in terms of local and global signiﬁcance remains a quest for self-deﬁnition, and an obsessive one at that. It is notably a quest which extends to literary criticism. ‘Irish classics’ are still admissible,4 and the term itself supposes a 3 The development of neumatic notation for the transmission of Old Roman and Gregorian Chant, no later than the eighth century, testiﬁes to this intimacy, as between the Roman liturgy and the melodic formulas by which it was memorized and publicly celebrated. Although this is a vastly complex topic, the pre-eminence of music devoted to the transmission of liturgical rites in European culture is not in doubt. It was not until the seventeenth century, when the Church’s monopoly on the cultivation of art music was loosened, that vocal and instrumental models independent of the Church modes began to be developed. For at least ﬁve centuries in Europe, ‘art music’ meant vocal liturgical music. The primary function of music was thereby to support and adorn the language of the liturgy. 4 As in the title (Irish Classics) of Declan Kiberd’s magisterial assessment of Irish literature (from both languages) published in 2001.

Introduction

3

continuity and development of canonic status which attaches to so much Irish literature written in English, that we could make a perfectly valid comparison between the fertility and inﬂuence of German music in the nineteenth century and the rich harvest of Irish writing in the twentieth. On one side of this comparison there is the ‘imaginary museum of [German] musical works’, and on the other, ‘the imaginary museum’ of Irish literary works.5 Neither of these canonic inventions is invulnerable to deconstruction, but there is a striking similarity between the formation of a musical canon in Germany through the 1800s (with the First World War as a terminus), and the perception of literary masterworks in Ireland from the Literary Revival to the present day. In either case, a proliﬁc critical apparatus (and to be fair, a phenomenal endorsement in terms of performance, audition, and readership) support the works themselves. In either case, too, the appraisal of art gains immense signiﬁcance from the context of cultural and political history. Yeats speaks to an Ireland in quest of its own nationhood as surely as Wagner speaks (however differently and disastrously) to the ambitions of a recently uniﬁed Germany. Canonic episodes matter because they are historical episodes. In Ireland, these episodes are largely a matter of language. Ireland is entirely absent from the ‘imaginary museum of musical works’, however painful it may be to say so. Whether it induces pain or indifference (Irish traditional music and Ireland’s rock music enjoy a compensating lustre in the aftermath of the European classical music canon), this observation begs not only the general question of music in Irish cultural history, but also the extent to which literature has taken the place of music in the emancipation of an art form answerable to Ireland’s sense of itself.6 This book is an attempt to examine the validity of that second question. It proposes, moreover, that the quest for the Irish Omphalos entails a consideration of music not simply as a striking absence but as a vital presence in the Literary Revival and in contemporary Irish literature. It rests on the premise that music is the ‘sovereign ghost’ of the Irish literary imagination. Wallace Stevens’s tantalizing formula for the imagination itself seems particularly expressive of that ambiguous but enduring relationship between music and literature which has been formative in 5 The ﬁrst of these phrases is borrowed from Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford, 1992), and it denotes the growth of a musical canon in the nineteenth century which is essentially deﬁned by the ascendancy of German music throughout Europe during the romantic period. 6 I have tried to address this general question in The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork, 1998). The suggestion that Irish literature ﬁlls the void left by the absence of art music is ﬁrst made in the epilogue to that book.

4

Introduction

Irish writing at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which strongly inheres in the poetry and drama of Irish writers for two centuries afterwards. To identify the presence of music in the Irish literary imagination entails the risk of special pleading, and it is a risk which I want strenuously to avoid. It is true that this imaginative presence has enjoyed only occasional attention in a critical commentary otherwise notable for its protean address, as in Declan Kiberd’s reading of Irish literature as a species of world literature which is postcolonial at every turn and which supervenes any claim it might enjoy as an expression of European modernism. Kiberd has suggested that his older contemporaries and teachers were inclined to integrate Joyce and Yeats not wisely but too well as exemplars of this modernism, at the expense of understanding the modernism or proto-modernism of nineteenth-century Ireland from which they emerged.7 Such an inclination, however, by which writers like Richard Ellmann presented Joyce to the world as an international modernist at one fell stroke, bypassed the snobbery and scepticism of an earlier generation of critics (notably English ones) and restored Joyce’s ﬁction to the European avant garde, where it belonged. ‘At last, Joyce has his monument’, one reviewer said of Ellmann’s biography when it ﬁrst appeared in 1959. The canonic tone of that acclamation should be obvious. To read Joyce as an ‘Irish classic’, as Kiberd did forty years later, may be a very different critical exercise than the raising of a biographical monument that commemorates his achievement as a European artist. In either case, however, as in the behemoth of critical commentary which follows his work, Joyce is secure as a canonic writer. So too is the sovereignty of language over every other consideration in the apprehension of Irish identity, including Joyce’s identity. One might add (although here Kiberd would almost certainly disagree) that the sovereignty of the English language over the Irish language is likewise secure, at least insofar as the plural reception of Irish literature in the world goes. This linguistic sovereignty is not the invention of criticism. With the supreme exception of Synge, the principal architects of the Literary Revival, like Joyce, knew little or no Irish, and depended instead on massive acts of translation from that Gaelic culture which they were to re-house with such imaginative brilliance in English. When Yeats announces his exem7 See the introduction to Kiberd’s The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge, 2005), 9–19 and the essay ‘Joyce’s Ellmann, Ellmann’s Joyce’, from the same collection, 235–49.

Introduction

5

plars in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, they are all English-speaking and English-writing avatars of national consciousness. But if ever there were a sovereign ghost in the machine of literary revival, it is the Irish language and its inherent presence (and formative intimacy) in Yeats’s poetry and drama. The same is true of Synge, who writes in English, even if it is an English that (through his own command and expertise) more narrowly neighbours Irish than any act of translation could manage. My argument that there are two ghosts in the machine, and not one, stems from another kind of intimacy, as between music and language in the recovery and perception of Irish culture in the nineteenth century. From the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, through to the formation of the Gaelic League almost exactly a century later (1893), the preservation of traditional Irish music as a powerful (and passionately argued) emblem of Irish dispossession and repossession, second only to the Irish language itself, became instrumental in the transmission of ideas about Ireland. At every turn throughout the nineteenth century, Irish music, or more precisely an image of Irish music, presented itself as a deﬁnitive expression of Irish identity. This mode of expression was various, as in the collections of Edward Bunting and George Petrie, the remarkable synthesis of Irish music and English verse in the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore, and, ﬁnally, in the decisive alliance between poetry and music fomented by Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan, and Samuel Ferguson. In each phase of this expression, the presence of traditional Irish music as a metalanguage was emphasized again and again by the synonymous projection of poetry and music as the song of Ireland.8 The currency of this metalanguage was all the more transparent in a country which disdained the development of art music, except as an uneasy expression of the colonial presence. ‘The more we foster modern music the more we help to silence our own’, was the musical byword of Irish cultural regeneration in the nineteenth century.9 Even the collection 8 For a more detailed assessment of this projection of traditional Irish music, see The Keeper’s Recital, 1–12, 36–73. The alignment of poetry with popular ballads and music is incisively addressed by Seamus Deane, ‘Poetry and Song 1800–1890’, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry, 1991), ii. 4–5. 9 Richard Henebry, Irish Music (Dublin, c.1903), 14, cited in Joseph Ryan, ‘Nationalism and Music in Ireland’, Ph.D dissertation, NUI Maynooth (1991), 132. Henebry is characterized by Ryan as being ‘to music what D. P. Moran was to politics and literature: an Irish Irelander, disputatious, original and idiosyncratic’. It is only fair to add that Henebry’s rejection of European music belongs to a history of ideas that originates no later than the advent of Young Ireland and which would survive in the writings of Seán Ó Riada.

6

Introduction

of traditional Irish music, so sharply and poignantly motivated in postfamine Ireland by the ‘awful, unwonted silence’ which ensued,10 became a matter of preservation in the protective sense of preserving the music from any cultural contamination, lest its purity as an icon of Irishness be diminished.11 By contrast, the new Irish literature in English of the 1890s drew ever more closely to the template of music, to such an extent that a verbal understanding of music (and of Irish music in particular) as the unheard melody of the literary imagination attained far more signiﬁcance than music itself. It also attained far more creative energy. Yeats’s indifference to music stands in striking contrast to his habitual recourse to the idea of music, even in his early poetry. We do not need to read ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ to recognize that in Yeats the ‘sensual music’ of nature is characteristically set against those monuments of unageing intellect in which poetry and music are in such a degree of apposition that the latter is subsumed by the former. But, as with so many myths of the Revival, Yeats’s myth of music stood far from the thing itself. ‘As for the peasant, he has his songs and his folk-music’, he casually remarked, and in that observation distinguished between the apprehension of an aesthetic idea and his own disregard for traditional music. So well he might, because by the 1890s ‘perfection of the work’ meant writing poetry in English, not singing (or collecting) Irish folk songs. Nor did it mean writing Irish art music. Such an enterprise remained at best a puzzling irrelevance to Yeats, as when he persuaded Synge to return from Germany and to abandon music for verse and drama. Which Synge duly did. In this strange admixture of intimacy and disregard, of reliance upon music as an image of the creative imagination and a corresponding neglect of the thing itself (echoed, it must be said, by the cultural environment in which he found himself ), Yeats was drawing upon a literary tradition which he was only partly inclined to acknowledge. Nor has it ever been wholly acknowledged since. He would be accounted in the company of Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson, those who sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong. He would situate his own poetic in the lyric traditions of this ‘singing school’ (‘Byzantium’), but he would remain icily aloof from the only begetter of that tradition, Tom Moore. Until very recently, Irish literary history has been more or less content to take him at his word. 10 The phrase is from George Petrie’s introduction to The Ancient Music of Ireland (1835). 11 See Harry White, ‘The Preservation of Music and Irish Cultural History’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 27: 2 (1996), 123–38.

Introduction

7

Yeats was evidently circumspect about his debt to Moore (to say the least of it) because two generations of Irish writers had in the meantime repudiated Moore’s engagement with music as the product of a servile imagination enthralled with England.12 Although this representation of the Melodies survives to the present day, there is no longer any reason to suppress Moore’s inﬂuence on those writers who followed him in the enterprise of creating a poetry in English about Ireland. The nature of Moore’s auditory imagination meant little or nothing to the poets of Young Ireland or the scholar-translators of the mid-nineteenth century, precisely because it was an imagination which relied directly on the structure and morphology of the music itself in its evolution of verse in English. Moore had betrayed the original airs by plundering them for his parlour songs (thus the reading of nationalist ideologues and liberal unionists like Mangan and Ferguson), and the sheer popularity of the Melodies undermined their claim to serious attention. In many quarters it still does. But Moore was the ﬁrst writer to engage seriously with the prospect of translating Gaelic culture (in his case, crucially, Gaelic music) into modern English verse, and in that respect he mapped the essential terrain of the Literary Revival. He was also the ﬁrst writer in English to nominate music as the supreme intelligencer of Irish history. This act of nomination provides a clue to the interior history of music in the Literary Revival itself. The passage of music from Moore to Yeats is a transformation into metaphor. In the Irish Melodies music is an active conduit of verse in English: Moore’s poetry explicitly and technically depends upon it. But long before Yeats had written a line, a ‘reconciliation between the English language’ and ‘the essential spirit’ of Irish music became the primary objective of Irish poetry.13 In this objective, the lyric impulse of Moore’s actual engagement with music was overtaken by the powerful attraction of Irish music (already present in Moore) as an image of Gaelic culture to be re-created in the metaphors and sounding forms of a new verbal music. A poem like Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’ is imbued with this new music, even if it seems clear that Mangan’s imagination is unmistakably dependent on the precedent of Moore (which is one reason why Mangan was so keen to disavow 12 Seamus Heaney has remarked of Moore that, ﬁfty years after his death, ‘it was inevitable that he should have become an emblem of nineteenth-century Ireland’s cultural and political debilitation’. See Heaney, ‘William Butler Yeats’, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ii. 783. 13 Deane, ‘Poetry and Song’, 5. Deane identiﬁes ‘poetry and popular song’ as ‘an important weapon in the long war against colonialism’.

8

Introduction

him). But it is also clear that the lyric imperatives of Mangan’s verse have nothing directly to do with Irish music. Instead, they seek to recreate the lyricism of Gaelic poetry. Mangan’s imagination is responsive to the idea of music as it was represented in the work of the scholartranslators, and principally in the publication of James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy (1831). No later than 1834, the year of Samuel Ferguson’s magisterial review of Hardiman, Irish poetry in English became preoccupied with this idea, and found therein its principal reception of Gaelic culture as the culture of song. In this reception, the verbal music of Irish verse in English was constantly underwritten by the hope of recovering the energies of Gaelic poetry, albeit through the agency of translation. The essential metaphor which recurs in Ferguson’s meditations on Irish culture (as it does in the work of his fellow contributors to the Dublin University Magazine) is song.14 The song as an expression of Gaelic civilization, as the source of cultural regeneration in Ireland, attained to such symbolic strength that the music itself was taken as a donnée, to be adapted or pragmatically re-created at will. Music lived in the shadow of its own symbolic incandescence. There it would long remain. But the fundamental properties of music, its connotations of order, language, form, and meaning, were to enjoy a long and brilliant afterlife in the Irish literary imagination. However variously that afterlife expressed itself, two constants would recur: one was that language could aspire to the condition of music itself, and the other was that generic models of Irish literary discourse could perform the function of musical genres. In a phrase, words for music perhaps. It would be implausible to suggest that the function of music as a symbol of the creative imagination is somehow unique to the Literary Revival. In many respects, this projection of music is an arch-romantic convention, as essential to Wordsworth as it is to Yeats. What distinguishes the Irish literary imagination in this regard is that its musical aspirations are expressive of the integrity and imaginative purity of Gaelic culture in the ﬁrst instance (here Yeats is exemplary), and then 14 For a discussion of Ferguson’s review of Hardiman, see White, The Keeper’s Recital, 61–3; in the present context it is useful to note that Ferguson insisted upon the close relationship between the music and the original Gaelic texts, in which ‘the stamen and essence of each is interwoven and transfused through the whole texture and complexion of the other’ (Dublin University Magazine, vol. 4, p. 153). Ferguson harshly criticized the ‘reﬁnement’ of Moore’s verse in relation to the original airs, but his knowledge of these airs (to say nothing of the Irish texts translated by Hardiman) must be in doubt. Ferguson regarded Gaelic music and poetry as a synthesis, as his reading of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy makes abundantly clear.

Introduction

9

of language as a substitute for music itself. Bernard Shaw’s remark that ‘my method, my system, my tradition is founded upon music’ is not an assent to the Celtic Twilight of imaginative remembrance, but a (characteristically) forthright alliance between Shavian drama and European opera.15 When Declan Kiberd observes that ‘Joyce and Synge would have preferred musical careers’, and that they regarded literature as ‘a second best’,16 he touches upon a substitution of literature for music that (as I hope to show here) can be regarded as formative. The presence of ‘words for music’ has a much longer and more vibrant history in Irish literature than we usually care to acknowledge. The quest for the Irish Omphalos is, in signiﬁcant measure, a musical one. It is a striking feature of music in the Irish literary imagination that it ﬁnds expression so frequently in poetry and drama, and that these generic models tend to take precedence over ﬁction in this respect (as in others). The simple explanation for this preference is that these genres more intimately neighbour musical genres than does ﬁction, and it is certainly not too difﬁcult to consider poetry in relation to song, and drama in relation to operatic and symphonic genres, if only because this consideration has been so (variously) evident in the minds of the writers themselves. When Irish ﬁction explicitly aspires to the condition of music, as it does in Joyce, the musical correlatives are so extreme and so (proverbially) Wagnerian, that Joyce subverts the narrative conventions of prose in direct proportion to his synthetic and contrapuntal address on music. In citing the example of Joyce, as in every other writer considered in this book, my primary objective is to determine how words can become ‘words for music’ in the Irish literary imagination. The phrase itself, ‘Irish literary imagination’ is under some duress. Does it really satisfactorily embrace Congreve and Roddy Doyle, the bluster of Sheridan’s Lucius O’Trigger and the reﬁned lyricism of a poem like Eavan Boland’s ‘Night Feed’? As the Irish canon expands in both directions, with Yeats in the grave centre of it all, the highstepping ebullience of eighteenth-century satire and the considered poetics of womanhood which Eavan Boland announces as ‘the long fall from grace’ (in ‘Night Feed’) can seem increasingly difﬁcult to reconcile, as the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and the 15 Cited in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. 1. 1856–1898: The Search for Love (London, 1988), 57. 16 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 11.

10

Introduction

subsequent volumes, The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing (2002), make clear.17 No one can mistake how plural Irish writing is, however broadly or narrowly we deﬁne the canon, but even as canonic considerations fall away under the pressure of giving voice to imaginations traditionally excluded from it, the case for identifying a history of musical ideas in Irish writing seems to me very strong, if only on that account. ‘It is right . . . that we descant and yet again descant, upon the supreme theme of Art and Song’, Yeats maintained in ‘Speech After Long Silence’, and the expressly musical verbs and nouns in which he voices this insistence suggest that not only the theme but also its mode of expression can be proﬁtably explored. To explore how words become ‘words for music’ is, then, to trace the history of an idea about music in Irish literature. I have already suggested that this idea (and the ideas associated with it, particularly in connection with Gaelic culture) originate with Thomas Moore. In Moore, certainly, the image of art responding to Irish history is a musical one, and the harp, for all its tedious and stale projection in the afterlife of popular song, retained its integrity for Moore as the deﬁnitive icon of a ruined (if once brilliant) civilization. Moore believed that icon to have been restored and burnished by his own verse, even as he acknowledged that this achievement depended on the traditional airs which he had roused from silence and represented to the world in the Irish Melodies. In Yeats the harp disappeared, but the symbolic importance of music did not. Even as it became the prevailing image of national consciousness and ultimately of the Irish nation itself, the harp could not function in Yeats’s originality of voice and poetic diction. By the 1890s it was shop-soiled and outworn as an image of the imagination, and far removed in any case from the entirely new register and vocabulary of Yeats’s Celticism.18 17 The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing represents perhaps the most striking act of canonic rehabilitation in Irish literature to date, short of the anguished debate over the inclusion of Irish-language texts (which reaches back at latest to Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland). 18 In the chapter which follows this introduction I discuss Moore’s afterlife in European art music by contrast with his eclipse in Irish literary history: both of these factors help to clarify the nature of Moore’s auditory imagination particularly with respect to the inﬂuence of Irish music on his poetic technique. The presence of Moore in Joyce and Friel is also in contrast to his disappearance from serious consideration in the generation between his death and Yeats’s ﬁrst maturity as a writer. This neglect is all the more striking, given that Yeats’s exemplars (Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson among them) were primarily responsible for the synthetic projection of ‘Irish music’ and poetry which prepared the ground for Yeats’s axiomatic conﬂation of ‘song’ and ‘verse’ in his work.

Introduction

11

If we assent to the idea (as I do) that ‘Yeats’s essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear’,19 then it is not only permissible but perhaps likewise ‘essential’ to acknowledge the pitch and tonality of Yeats’s auditory imagination as a fundamental address upon music, if only because Yeats draws attention to the apposite condition of ‘art and song’ in his poetic response to Ireland. The maturing condition of that response entails in Yeats a verbal music which is correspondingly complex, but it also entails a lifelong engagement with formal order (‘a vaulted space in language’, to borrow Seamus Heaney’s formulation) in which poetry becomes an objective correlative of music. This notion of poetry occupying the imaginative space where music might otherwise prevail has its roots in the Gaelic traditions which inspired Yeats (in which poetry and music remained essentially synonymous), but it also derives from the verbally dominated cultural matrix in which Yeats himself was preeminent. In Yeats, the musical imagination is invariably and culturally destined to ﬁnd a poetic mode of expression. Unlike Yeats, Synge was interested in music not as an imaginative exemplar, but as a medium of expression. Synge was ‘bewitched with music’ and intent on becoming a composer, but his aspirations failed in Germany.20 He decided to give up music and ‘take to literature instead’. His discovery that, in Shaw’s phrase, ‘there is a music of words as well as tones’ was one which decisively came through the agency of the Irish language. Although this redemptive encounter was to be the source of Synge’s dramatic invention, his structural reliance on musical form lends strong support to the suggestion that his plays are shaped by the typology of opera.21 If music is a metalanguage in the Irish literary imagination, Synge’s transposition of Irish idiom and sentence structure into English is one which formalizes the poetic diction and verbal music in which his plays are cast, almost to the point of parody. His recovery of Irish through English resulted in a verbal music which is sharply distinguished at every turn from Yeats’s poetry (and poetic drama), despite the recourse to Gaelic mythology and folklore which he and Yeats share. Ann Saddlemyer has argued that Synge’s understanding of dramatic form derived from his passionate belief that music and dramatic poetry were close kindred, and that the plays accordingly can be best inter19

Heaney, ‘William Butler Yeats’, 790. For an account of Synge’s early commitment to music, see Ann Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, in Irish University Review, 22: 1 (1992), 55–68. 21 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, remarks that we could read The Playboy of the Western World as ‘a kind of verbal opera’ (11). 20

12

Introduction

preted as a species of literature controlled by the technical processes of music.22 Katharine Worth, in The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, has likewise argued that in plays such as Riders to the Sea the operatic precedent is so close that it governs Synge’s deployment of speech as aria.23 If this is a primary case of words for music, it is one which differs from Yeats’s poetry not only in its explicit dependence on the Irish language, but also in its ceremonious and ritualistic allusions to musical drama. If his plays depend on the typology of opera, they make no address on Irish music. Irish music meant comparatively little to Synge (he movingly heard inside its performance ‘the death-rattle of a nation’),24 but the verbal music of the Irish language was another matter. It is not too much to add that Synge’s orchestration of this verbal music in his plays is an exemplary instance of how skilfully language usurps music in the Literary Revival. Synge’s plays are also exemplary in another respect, namely, that they exploit the synonymous condition of music and poetry in Gaelic literature, so that the Irish imperative to ‘say a song’ carries over into the English speech-song of his dramatic imagination. It is the community of language which arises from this speech-song that gives to Synge his enduring presence in twentiethcentury Irish drama. O’Casey’s Dublin tenements and Friel’s Ballybeg both reﬂect that presence. In this respect Synge’s patrimony is theatrical (just as Yeats’s is poetic). Musical paradigms in Synge guarantee his work a mode of authenticity which it would otherwise lack. The Playboy of the Western World is the most successful (and thereby inﬂuential) expression of these paradigms, in which the integrity of operatic typologies protects the play from the inadvertence and intrusion of the Stage Irishman. The precedent of opera, as I have already suggested, also looms large with respect to Shaw. Although he stands beyond the pale of the Literary Revival (as one of the ‘London Exiles’, to borrow the Field Day designation), Shaw’s formative experiences throw the whole question of music in Irish writing into particularly sharp relief. This is because Shaw not only tested his own aesthetic impulses through his experiences as a music critic (above all, in his seminal encounter with Wagner), but drew directly upon opera in his maturity as a dramatist. He did so very differ22

Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, 63–5. Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London, 1978), 125 ff. 24 From a report by Synge on the ﬁrst performance of Yeats’s and George Moore’s Diarmuid and Grainne, published in 1902 and cited by Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals (London, 1985), 62. 23

Introduction

13

ently from Synge. Synge deﬁnes music as ‘form with ideas’ and drama as ‘ideas with form’: his plays express that second deﬁnition insofar as they are controlled by the formal typology of opera which I have nominated here. But Synge’s re-creation of musical forms in language entailed an immersion in Irish which gave to his speech-song its integrity of voice, whereas Shaw immersed himself in European art music, and especially in opera. He ached for the maturity of voice he heard inside Wagner, even as he lambasted the mediocrity of English musical life. His attraction to Wagner, however deeply felt, is normally taken in apposition with his interest in Ibsen, so that it becomes part of Shaw’s fantastic programme of self-education, which his long years in the reading-room of the British Museum so memorably produced. But this attraction also represents something else, namely, a kinship with Wagner’s music dramas in which Shaw’s monumental self-regard discovered a precedent for the vast project of turning ‘G.B.S.’ into a universal ‘man of genius’. As with Wagner’s preposterous egotism, this self-regard would not be of much moment were it not for the dramatic works which it so evidently produced. Although Shaw’s rigorous socialism led him to reject the merciless philosophy of self-interest and racial supremacy which animates Wagner at (almost) every turn, his admiration for Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk led him to produce ‘total artworks’ of his own. In this endeavour, Shaw’s characteristically ebullient contemplation of European art music was paramount. So too was Shaw’s meditation on the state of music in England. In his capacity as a music critic he lashed the English musical establishment for its ‘ﬂagrant pedantry, imposture, corruption, boredom and waste of musical funds’, and promoted instead the dramatic vivacity and originality of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner.25 The irony was that England in the second half of the nineteenth century was itself in servitude to German models of ‘musical respectability’, with the result that Shaw (as with many other commentators) could ﬁnd no trace of originality in British music until Elgar emerged from the provincial obscurity of Worcester. In almost twenty years of music criticism, Shaw found much to censure and little to praise. By the time he came to champion Elgar, his career in music journalism had long since been overtaken by his success as a dramatist. Shaw’s quest for music ended in words. In the present context of identifying a history of ‘words for music’ in Irish writing, there are three aspects to Shaw’s experience of music 25

Quoted in Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 241.

14

Introduction

which I want to explore. The ﬁrst is Shaw’s intimacy with European music in the peculiar circumstances of his family upbringing; the second is his sustained critique of Charles Villiers Stanford during his years as a London critic; and the third is the alliance between drama and opera which his own works promote. Shaw kept his distance from the Literary Revival (or Yeats kept it for him), but his one submission to the ‘Irish Literary Theatre’, John Bull’s Other Island (which Yeats refused), is, as Declan Kiberd has argued, ‘a radical socialist critique of the Anglo-Irish antithesis so beloved of the Victorians and, it must be stressed, of that last Victorian, W. B. Yeats’.26 If the play vigorously inverts the commonplaces of Victorian Irish identity (the dreaming Celt in opposition to the pragmatism of his Anglo-Saxon masters), it also dramatizes that ‘fearful conﬂict between the Celt and the Professor’ which Shaw had discerned in Charles Villiers Stanford’s recourse to Irish folk music in his orchestral compositions.27 Shaw’s rage against Stanford (who was his contemporary, his fellow Dubliner, a Protestant like Shaw, and a musician), is in part a rage against the impoverishment of the English musical imagination, but it is also a rage against the identity of Irish music, which, as Michael Holroyd has intimated, was a rage against himself.28 Immersed in music from infancy, Shaw found what he was looking for in the European theatre and opera house, and not in the British concert hall. He rejected the bad faith of Stanford’s Irish art music and turned instead to Ibsen and Wagner. If his experience of reading Ibsen made him a dramatist (Widowers’ Houses nevertheless originally bore the explicitly Wagnerian title Rhinegold ), it was the experience of opera that made him, in his own modest estimation, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite’. These transformations of identity ﬁnd such plurality of expression in the plays (with the question of identity itself as the fundamental dramatic preoccupation) that it would be implausible to suggest that they can be resolved simply by emphasizing Shaw’s position as an impecunious AngloIrishman making the best of himself in a country hostile to Ireland and 26 Declan Kiberd, ‘George Bernard Shaw’, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ii. 422. 27 Shaw used this phrase to characterize his reading of Stanford’s Irish Symphony in an essay published in The World on 10 May 1893. The essay is reproduced in Dan H. Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Music (London, 1981), iii. 876–83. 28 Holroyd suggests that the breach which Shaw mercilessly pilloried in Stanford, as between the composer’s Irish background and his European aspirations, was ‘an indication of his reaction against innate qualities’, and that the ‘healing’ of this division was to become his theme in John Bull’s Other Island (Bernard Shaw, 241–2).

Introduction

15

sceptical of the music he most revered. But two plays in the Shaw canon which are side by side, John Bull’s Other Island (1904) and Man and Superman (1903), represent Shaw’s reading of Ireland and music respectively as being essential to his own identity. If John Bull’s Other Island resolves the conﬂict between Ireland and England in Shaw’s writing, Man and Superman likewise afﬁrms the contract between his dramatic imagination and German opera. In this respect, the Shavian alliance between Man and Superman and Don Giovanni is obvious, although this alliance is underwritten by Wagner’s dramaturgy (rather than Mozart’s) and by Shaw’s role as a pioneer in the advocacy of Wagner in England. Given the importance of music in Shaw’s intellectual formation with regard to Irish identity (his critique of Stanford), and to dramatic structure (‘my method, my tradition, my system is founded upon music’), it is necessary to afﬁrm literature not as a ‘second best’ (Kiberd) for Shaw, but as a fundamental recognition of music in and through language. This is a recognition which links Shaw to James Joyce. The argument that literature ﬁlls the void left by the absence of art music in Ireland is nowhere more strongly adduced than in Joyce. As with Synge and Shaw, Joyce gave serious consideration to music as a profession, and throughout his career, as Denis Donoghue has remarked, ‘opera meant more to him than any other art’.29 It would not be too much to say that Joyce, more than any other writer, is at once receptive to a notably wide gamut of Irish musical experience and that his prose is imbued with that lyric intelligence which makes music the great code of memory, and of emotional, sexual, and political memory in particular. Joyce’s exile entailed a repossession of musical life in Dublin which acted upon his imagination with the same stimulus as language itself. On 15 June 1904—the day before ‘The Day’, as it were—Michele Esposito, perhaps the most inﬂuential musician, conductor, and teacher in Dublin, came to call on Joyce with two of his daughters. Joyce sang for him, and Esposito, deeply impressed, urged a singing career as the way forward. That evening, however, Joyce wrote his famous note to Nora, and thus initiated the partnership that would begin in earnest the next day. Thus equipped for exile, Europe, and the enterprise of ﬁction, Joyce left Ireland. But he took his experience of music with him. Three years later he would complete what Ellmann describes as ‘his ﬁrst song of exile’: ‘The Dead.’ 29 Denis Donoghue, ‘The European Joyce’, in We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (Berkeley, 1986), 98.

16

Introduction

As a recovery of music in the Irish literary imagination, ‘The Dead’ is exemplary. It is not only Joyce’s structural deployment of musical allusion that makes it so, but the concentrated ingathering of musical motifs by which Joyce summons the prevailing concern of his ﬁction, which in this instance is the impact of the dead upon the living. Music is represented in this ﬁction as the principal conduit of memory, and the shards and fragments of Dublin’s operatic life, so carefully and strategically accumulated by Joyce, prepare the ground for that devastating performance of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ which is the crucial episode of remembrance in an evening crowded with the felt life of music. The melodies in Joyce are not so much ‘unheard’ as described: they advance the plot and reveal its signiﬁcance. In this process, the rival claims of European music and traditional Irish music are most brilliantly integrated, even if the remembrances of opera gradually give way before the prepotent impact of the traditional air. As a code of memory in the Irish literary imagination, music selfevidently attains its greatest presence in Ulysses. In this (crucial) respect, music recovers its centrality in Joyce’s ﬁction after the cold refusals of Irish culture, and of Tom Moore in particular, which characterize the general repudiations of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Ulysses, where music is perhaps the most powerful and various intelligencer of feeling in a book already crowded with public and private forms of allusion, it is difﬁcult to resist the impression of Joyce’s magpie lyricism as the preeminent resource in his epic range of expressive technique. Music, ‘from all the ends of Europe’, to borrow a phrase from Molly Bloom, ‘from Kingsbridge to Lake Como’ (Molly again), dominates the fabric of Joyce’s prose to such an extent that it becomes indispensable to those representations of sensibility, place, and circumstance which justify the fable in the ﬁrst place. It is the great conduit of public and private reminiscence. One by-product of this musical plenitude is that Joyce affords the reader a strong sense of music in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. The heady admixture of Italian opera, liturgical music, and Irish melodies in Ulysses (to say nothing of the dozens of singers, composers, opera companies, ballads, and musico-poetic fragments which throng the text) comprises musical history of a kind. It is, however, Joyce’s reliance on this massive act of musical remembrance in the service of narrative that calls attention to Ulysses as a monumental instance of words for music. Ulysses is a supreme ﬁction with music at its heart. Joyce had no doubts as to its inherent claims on music, as when he asked a friend dur-

Introduction

17

ing a performance of Die Walküre whether he didn’t think the musical effect of Ulysses superior to Wagner’s music drama. (When the friend demurred, Joyce turned away).30 If Ulysses aspires brilliantly to the condition of music, Finnegans Wake represents this aspiration not wisely but too well. The supreme irony of Finnegans Wake, at least from the perspective of music and its presence in Irish writing, is that the moment Joyce lets go of any special form of contractual understanding between reader and writer, between a word and its routine task of stable signiﬁcation, music begins to take the place of literature, rather than the other way around. If ordinary contracts of comprehension between reader and writer are so rigorously subordinated to the will of Joyce’s imagination, so that the sound-ﬂow of words rather than any space between them is what matters, then literature can be said to have so closely approximated the condition of music that it scarcely matters any more which is which. The ‘thought-tormented music’ of ‘The Dead’ is formally controlled by Joyce’s grammar of narrative purpose. The great acts of mimesis in Ulysses are likewise not musical but verbal, however much they draw upon music in their achievement. In Finnegans Wake the siren-spell of music overcomes Joyce, and (to judge by a reception history in which ‘most of us have left it well alone’) it also overcomes the reader.31 It may be that Finnegans Wake enjoys more attention as an episode in the history of European modernism than for its own substantive sake. In that respect it comes close to the condition of certain musical works (almost the entirety of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal compositions, for example) which enjoy iconic status and silent neglect in almost equal measure. But just as Schoenberg vitally inheres in the music of the Second Viennese School (which is to say, the music of his pupils), Joyce’s late ﬁction has a decisive bearing on that ‘disconsolate drama of incompetence’ which preoccupies Samuel Beckett.32 The appearance of Ulysses in 1922, and of Schoenberg’s ﬁrst serial compositions (including the Piano Pieces, op. 23 and the Piano Suite, op. 25) in the following year, mark crucial developments in modernist ﬁction and music respectively. Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness (for want of a better term) and Schoenberg’s serialism are not only seminal techniques, but plainly decisive resolutions of a more general crisis of 30

Cited in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1959; repr. 1977), 473. Donoghue, ‘The European Joyce’, 117. 32 J. C. C. Mays, ‘Samuel Beckett’, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, iii. 237. 31

18

Introduction

expression in art. That these techniques profoundly determined the outgrowth of a radical aesthetic in literature and music is a commonplace, but the precise contours of this inﬂuence are perhaps less readily understood. The relationship between Joyce and Beckett, for example, can be glossed in terms of this inﬂuence in ways which are notably suggestive of the relationship between Schoenberg and his student Anton Webern. In previous work I have posited these relationships as a vivid contrast between Joyce’s verbally heroic largesse and Beckett’s concentrated parsimony of discourse on one side, and the messianic compulsion of Schoenberg’s reanimation of large musical forms by comparison with Webern’s scrupulous reductionism on the other. In deﬁning these relationships as between a master builder (Joyce, Schoenberg) and a ‘master of undermining’ (Beckett, Webern), I have tried to show how Beckett’s plays, from Endgame onwards, systematically incline to a technique of posture, lighting, appearance, movement, time, space, sound, and language that closely neighbours the techniques of serialism as these are found in Webern.33 Even if the speciﬁcs of this argument are vulnerable to dispute, what cannot be doubted is the sea-change in Beckett’s theatrical language after Waiting for Godot. To read Beckett’s later plays against the compelling background of European musical modernism, particularly with regard to the organization of a strictly limited series of linguistic and non-linguistic elements which these plays systematically disclose, is to read ‘the Irish drama of Europe’ in the context of a musical serialism which provides an instructive precedent for Beckett’s technique. Writing of Beckett’s last works, J. C. C. Mays comments that they are ‘the nearest Beckett came to realizing a word that is autonomous in its creation and existence, that has no other cause but itself ’.34 This observation gains from a reading of Beckett’s work which is attentive to the structural redeﬁnition of music which serialism entails. When signiﬁer and signiﬁed attain this level of synonymity, the intimacy of music and language is absolute. This intimacy can be sharply distinguished from the seamless ﬂow of word-play in Finnegans Wake. In Beckett’s case, ‘words for music’ is a formula which (to say the least of it) is built upon a species of musical modernism that Joyce could not have imagined. Here too, the parallel 33 See Harry White, The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2005), ch. 7 (‘ “Something is taking its course”: Dramatic Exactitude and the Paradigm of Serialism in Samuel Beckett’), 98–110, previously published in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998). 34 Mays, ‘Samuel Beckett’, 237.

Introduction

19

between master builders and ‘masters of undermining’ can clarify the difference between Joyce’s epic promiscuity of language and the footfalls of Beckett’s last works. In either case, the music to which literature aspires is very different. This is because Beckett’s work is not simply a repudiation of Joyce’s heroic modernism, but the expression of an aesthetic which, in language no less than in music, depends on a stringent and formally reductionist reordering of experience. These musical paradigms do not apply to Beckett’s work prior to Endgame, however frequently Beckett refers to music in preference to language as an articulation of ‘the long sonata of the dead’ (Molloy). Waiting for Godot, which Beckett came to loathe, remains the classic moment of transition in twentieth-century European drama, from the conventions of a locally deﬁned realism to the formalism of a theatrical space. In that transition Beckett may, in Kiberd’s audacious reading, be regarded as the ‘ﬁrst truly Irish playwright’, because his work is ‘utterly free of the factitious elements of Irishness’.35 However much we might debate this reading, the inﬂuence of Godot on dramatists as otherwise diverse as Tom Murphy and Harold Pinter can scarcely be mistaken, even when they reclaim that identity of place and locution with which Godot dispenses. Pinter’s The Birthday Party (which owes as much to Kafka as it does to Beckett) and The Caretaker rehouse the verbal ballets of Godot in the English theatre, just as Murphy’s The Morning after Optimism revisits Beckett in the new guise of a European fairy tale. Such writers, at least in my view, do not afﬁrm the currency of Beckett’s emancipation from ‘factitious elements of Irishness’, but rather the versatility of his liberation from factitious elements of dramatic exposition and narrative. If Godot introduces into the theatre new models of tonality and formal structure, these models continue to exert considerable inﬂuence long after Beckett discards them. Beckett’s subversion of the soliloquy does not obtain in the Irish theatre. Not I drives the speaking subject to the edge of reason. Contemporary Irish drama leads elsewhere. It leads north. The Northern Irish crisis has produced an immediate address in drama and poetry of such magnitude and imaginative brilliance that we can hardly avoid its deﬁnitive impact on the condition of words for music in the Irish literary imagination. By contrast, there could scarcely be a more telling indictment of imaginative failure with respect to Irish music. If art music remains marginal to any consideration of Irish identity whatsoever, its peripheral status in cultural discourse is 35

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London, 1997), 531.

20

Introduction

partly a matter of its remote presence in relation to contemporary Irish history. The principal interface between music and politics is opera, and the reception of opera in Ireland is a sorry business.36 If Brian Friel could write The Freedom of the City (1973) less than a year after the events on which it is based took place, an opera on the same subject and at the same time would have seemed preposterous, if not ludicrously offensive. The apparatus, the rhetoric, and the colonial after-taste of the genre itself would have rendered such a thing absurd. Beckett’s hideous image of a ‘bow tie around a throat cancer’ comes to mind: Ireland would require a different cultural history to make opera seem like a plausible (or ‘healthy’) response to Derry or Belfast. The presence of music in Brian Friel’s response to history is among the best evidence we have that it is a prevailing consideration in the Irish literary imagination. The entire Friel canon is suffused with music as a symbol of imaginative escape (normally from the failure and impoverishment of Irish history), as a metaphor of the creative imagination, as a metalanguage in apposition with the Irish language, and as the source of certain generic models which are structurally adapted in Friel’s own plays.37 Far from being crowded out by the claims of Irish history and the language problem, music in Friel is the supreme intelligencer of feeling, aspiration, and possibility. It functions both actually and metaphorically as a dramatic agent, so that Chopin, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Janácˇek, and Jerome Kern (to mention some but not all protagonists) rival, in their auditory presence, the verbal discourse of the plays themselves. The great solo concertos of the Irish literary imagination are Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Faith Healer. Only the ﬁrst of these plays expressly meditates on music as subject-matter (even if a whole sequence of other Friel plays, including Aristocrats, Wonderful Tennessee, Give Me Your Answer, Do!, and Performances addresses music as a rival to language). Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa are ensemble pieces which engage so prominently with language and identity that one could miss their paradigmatic relationship to and dependence upon generic prototypes in music. In short, if Philadelphia is a concerto, Translations is an opera. However narrowly Friel juxtaposes words and music 36 On the reception of opera and art music in general in contemporary Irish culture, see White, The Progress of Music in Ireland, chs. 2 and 3 (‘The Divided Imagination: Music in Ireland after Ó Riada’ and ‘The Progress of Music in Ireland: Irish Art Music in a Postcolonial World’), 11–50. 37 I draw here on chapter 6 of The Progress of Music in Ireland (‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’), 87–97.

Introduction

21

in some of his plays (extreme examples can be found in The Loves of Cass McGuire and Performances), his habitual interest in and recourse to music as a dramatic resource is less germane to the present discussion than is the holistic presence of musical forms in masterpieces such as Faith Healer and Translations. In this respect, it is legitimate to read Translations as a verbal opera not only in the context which I am trying to establish here (a context which relates The Playboy of the Western World, for example, to Dancing at Lughnasa), but in the wider context of Irish cultural history where opera itself is either a colonial misprision (as in Stanford) or a generic absence. Given that the principal concern of this book is to examine how words become ‘words for music’ in the Irish literary imagination, the extent to which literature takes the place of music in the emancipation of an art form answerable to Irish history seems especially pertinent to Friel. The interior history of musical ideas which his work constantly proposes is, unmistakably in my view, an Irish history of ideas. The condition of music and of ‘music for the spoken voice’ is no less germane to the theatre of Tom Murphy, whose plays present themselves in this reading of the literary imagination as unﬁnished operas of the Irish mind. ‘As the old gifts of recital and storytelling pass out of everyday life, they make a compelling reappearance on Stage’,38 but the narrative composure which characterizes this reappearance in Friel can usefully be contrasted with the explicit romanticism of Murphy’s dramatic imagination. The formal poise which musical prototypes (notably the concerto) bring to Friel’s work is largely absent from the Murphy canon, which draws on the precedent of music not formally but expressively. Although Murphy himself characterizes his plays as ‘symphonies’ and ‘chamber music’,39 it is not the classical availability of form which these genres suggest in his work, but rather their romantic intensity of expression. The Gigli Concert is a play haunted by the expressive possibilities of opera, and of nineteenth-century Italian opera in particular. There is no other work in the Irish theatre which so painfully explores music as the true domain of emotional intelligence, or which so poignantly verses this conviction as a Faustian pact between the author’s imagination and the medium in which he is working. Unlike Synge and Friel, Murphy confronts the possibility of being undone by the expressive power of 38

Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 4–5. See http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/otherresources/interviews/TomMurphy.htm, a recent (2005) interview between Tom Murphy and Philip Fisher, in which Murphy typically refers to his work in such terms. 39

22

Introduction

music as an end in itself. Although this confrontation allows his dramatic imagination to soar, it also draws attention to that recurring quest for the condition of music which Irish writing constantly discloses. When the soloists step forward in a Murphy play, they rarely yield thereafter to the claims of the ensemble as a whole. They sing their hearts out. In Friel, by contrast, even the most intense or isolated moment of sustained, lyric address (as in the four monologues which comprise Faith Healer) remains subordinate to the aesthetics of formal closure. Friel’s operas and verbal concertos are tempered by classicism; Murphy’s plays dispense with that restraint and draw all the more dangerously close to music itself. In this proximity, Irish theatre in the twentieth century revisits the expressive power of nineteenth-century opera. This recovery of music seems to me very closely related to the loss of language in the Irish literary imagination. The particular alignment of linguistic and musical dispossession which can be discerned in plays like Translations, The Gigli Concert, and Bailegangaire is suggestive of a more general preoccupation which supervenes those narratives of tribal cruelty and personal disintegration to the point where the incantatory magic of Irish and the ineffable promise of music consort together as primary points of imaginative reference. They become emblematic not only of loss, but of something to be regained. These paired absences point towards the Irish Omphalos, that synonymous condition of music and poetry with which I began. If Yeats ‘yearned for a glimpse of the Gaelic world hidden in a language [he] could never hope to learn’, this did not deter his efforts to re-create that world and all its hidden music in poetry.40 The quest for the Irish Omphalos has been largely conducted in English. The ‘guttural muse’ has done well by the language of the occupier, and Irish poets have become more English than the English themselves in sheer prodigality and virtuoso prowess of invention. This is an attainment celebrated, ironized, and historicized by Brian Friel’s Translations, in which an idea of Gaelic culture, and a representation of the Irish language itself, controversially depend on Friel’s own virtuoso English. The quest for this idea throughout Friel’s work brings the Irish language and European music into close apposition. Derek Mahon, ‘the most underrated Irish poet of the [twentieth] century’, repudiates the collective ebullience of this quest.41 If the principal 40 Declan Kiberd, ‘Contemporary Irish Poetry’, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, iii. 1314. 41 Ibid. 1380 (editorial note on Derek Mahon).

Introduction

23

anxiety of inﬂuence which dominated the counter-revival of Irish poetry in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century was Celticism and those ‘literary myths of the revival’ identiﬁed by Seamus Deane,42 it may be fair comment likewise to suggest that the principal anxiety of inﬂuence in contemporary Irish poetry stems from the Northern crisis. The Irish question has become the Northern question. As the Northern crisis itself passes into history, it is hard not to conﬁrm the predominance of Ulster in Irish poetry and drama since c.1970, and it is equally hard to silence the claim of Ulster politics in the formation of a poetic identity to which all other identities are more or less subordinate. Irish nationalism remains a live issue as long as it is called into question: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green.’43 This is, if anything, a mild assertion, especially in the face of nationalist upheaval in continental Europe, where the collapse of communism produced a far bloodier conﬂict than anything Irish poets might dream of. The subdued poetic armies of the south, which include so many distinguished practitioners that to mention them at all is to blur the line of argument, have meanwhile ‘disappeared into their own handiwork’, to adapt a phrase which Declan Kiberd applies to Mahon.44 Kiberd appears to suggest that Mahon has ﬂown past the net of Northern Irish history and created a poetry in which the shards and fragments of a much wider engagement with the world produce a lyric voice at once intensely personal, emancipated from the constraining preoccupations of contemporary history, and universalist in rhetoric and deportment. There is certainly a lapidary detachment about much (not all) of Mahon’s verse, for all its recovery of technique, which speaks to the anonymous condition of poetry freed from the ﬁrst-person singular. In this respect he is akin to Beckett: the submerged consciousness of being Irish suddenly surfaces (often in the oddest and most ironizing contexts) and then is submerged again. The sounds of Ireland come and go ‘like the squeal of a lone bagpipe’ in seventeenth-century Rome (‘Roman Script’), in the University of East Anglia in the late twentieth century (‘I am Raftery’), near the closed Quinnsworth in Kinsale at Christmas (‘Christmas in Kinsale’). In touching upon these auditory moments of identiﬁcation here, my principal concern is to identify the lonely visitations of Mahon’s poetry, 42

See esp. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 28–37 (‘The Literary Myths of the Revival’). Seamus Heaney’s famous rejoinder to his inclusion as a ‘British’ poet in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited in 1983 by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion. 44 Kiberd, ‘Contemporary Irish Poetry’, 1380. 43

24

Introduction

supremely intelligent in their vestigial address, as an unmistakable repudiation of that ‘bright imperious music’ (‘I am Raftery’) which he himself can hear in Irish poetry from Yeats to Heaney. Mahon’s poetry is music of a different kind. It is written for the ‘weak souls among the asphodels’, it is mimetic of ﬂeeting consciousness and sudden illumination, ‘a ﬂutter of wild ﬂowers in the lift-shaft’ (‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’). In writing words for ‘the wordless’, in giving voice to the forgotten anthropologies of existence, Mahon slips away from the moorings of Irish poetry. In this departure, he takes music with him. ‘The chaste precision of the thing and the thing made’ (‘Courtyards in Delft’) are vital afﬁrmations in Mahon, all the more so because his quests are so various, transient, allusive, and atemporal. His lyric imaginings are nevertheless underwritten by a notably stringent technique. He knows the ruin that art brings, the foul deception in a harpsichord. He knows that the music and science of Europe will ‘punish nature in the name of God’ (‘Courtyards in Delft’). But if no other Irish poet more tenaciously insists on the traducements of art and the perpetual thrall in which art is held by power, no other Irish poet more widely enlists European art in the service of his own poetic. European art, from the satires of Juvenal to Metastasio and Baudelaire, thrives in Mahon’s verse, even as the ‘offshore Islanders, year by year, decline’ (‘Brighton Beach’). He situates himself in a painting by Pieter de Hooch, where his childhood is hidden from view, but present nevertheless. He ascribes his participation in the soft betrayals of Irish poetry to the inﬂuence of European art. The Irish persona can be assumed and discarded at will: Mahon is a citizen of the world. The vital assumption—a deﬁnitively Gaelic one—which underwrites this freedom is that poetry and music are fundamentally synonymous. This assumption relates Mahon to the tradition from which he departs. It is an assumption explicitly voiced in ‘I am Raftery’. In that poem, only the patronage has changed. The Gaelic poet-musician, the reciting bard of a lost tradition, remains intact. He writes in English, and drinks scotch and water, but he is still the displaced person he always was, singing at the margins of an indulgent modernity, playing to a ‘bright imperious music’. It is very hard to disavow the function of poetry as ‘words for music’ in Mahon, if only because he routinely tests the expressive validity of verse against the ‘post-literate, audio-visual realm’ of global (American) popular culture. The ‘structures and devices’, the ‘fancy ﬂourishes and funny voices’ of his poetic diction (‘St Patrick’s Day’) are often resigned to pure contemplation: ‘I fold away my wind-harp and my dejection

Introduction

25

odes’ (‘Smoke’). In the lyric precisions of his verse, written across the world at large and across time, the intimacy of alignment between word and tone, between image and sound, is all the more striking in the absence of music itself. Mahon’s constant preoccupation with the function of poetry, and his perpetual habit of revisiting the work of other writers and artists, both afﬁrm the apposite condition of words and music in the Irish literary imagination. His words intimate the silence of music and ﬁll the void which it leaves. So much of his lyric poetry is a commentary on other modes of perception (in painting, in rhetoric, in literature), that it entails a secondary gloss which invites the reader to reorder his or her experience of art in the light of Mahon’s commentary upon it. ‘Courtyards in Delft’ is an exemplary instance of this pervasive habit. In the present context, I would argue that this secondary condition, this habitual recourse to poetry as a critique of perception, gains from a comparison with the European art song, in which musical settings revisit and interpret poetry. The Goethe settings of Schubert and Wolf, separated by half a century of German music, are primary examples of this tradition. In such cases, music is a vital but secondary mode of response to the experience of poetry. It comes after the fact of Goethe’s verse, and redeﬁnes its existence in the world. By analogy, the lyric modalities of Mahon’s poetry re-contextualize the idea of order and perception in other peoples’ work. His verse is a lyrical rhetoric of subversion that constantly depends on the currency of established perception. Mahon revisits the perception of art and resets it. No less than in Schubert or Wolf, albeit differently, Mahon’s primary motivation as a poet is to revisit and reorder in verse the prior perceptions of art and experience. This is one reason why so many of his poems are new versions of art. They provide fresh considerations and novel contexts for the established perceptions of art. Mahon’s poetry, in brief, explicitly depends on the convention of setting or rearranging existent work. If this isn’t words for music, it is hard to know what is. The argument that literature in English ﬁlls the void left by the absence of art music in Irish cultural history cannot simply be attested by the rich harvest of Irish poetry, in which writers like Mahon are preeminent, by comparison with the muted achievement of Irish composers (although that, I suppose, is argument in itself ): this argument is more persuasively advanced by remembering the trope of loss that inheres in the Irish literary imagination, and also by drawing attention to the way in which writers like Mahon and Heaney enjoy an international currency which Irish composers have never attained. The loss is conventionally

26

Introduction

and rightly understood as a linguistic one (the death of Irish), but the currency of Irish writing in English seems anything but dispossessed. It is a modest proposal to suggest that Irish writing in the twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries enjoys the same kind of pre-eminence that continues to attach to German music in the nineteenth century. As soon as Yeats discovered how to convert the energies of a nearly defunct civilization into English, Irish writing began to work in the world at large. The more nearly Joyce recovered the mental topography of Dublin in his ﬁction, the more European he seemed (and seems) to be. And so on. In this brilliant progress, a shadow is cast over what remains behind. The chronicle of failure is sometimes explicit with regard to literature written in Irish,45 but the very concept of an indigenous art music is regarded with much greater circumspection. The lustre and prestige of traditional music sufﬁce. It is in this sufﬁciency that literature thrives as a substitute for art music, but it is also notable that when Irish poetry takes (rare) cognizance of music in Ireland other than traditional music, the art music of Europe is almost invariably construed as an expression of the colonial presence. ‘The ﬁrst thing to note about Irish music’, Seán Ó Riada famously insisted, ‘is that it is not European.’46 The corollary, that European music cannot be Irish, is also valid, to judge by a poem like Michael Hartnett’s ‘A Visit to Castletown House’. The experience of Georgian architecture becomes an occasion of remembered cruelty in that poem, and the ‘deep, luxurious, sensual sound’ of the classical recital the poet has come to hear is juxtaposed with images of brutal exploitation summoned from the manicured lawns outside. Viewed in such terms, art music is something we might be grateful to forget. More generally, Hartnett’s poignant ‘farewell to English’ (notwithstanding his subsequent return) seems less an aesthetic renunciation and more an act of conscience: to exchange Irish for English is at best a necessary betrayal of history. This betrayal is compounded by the experience of ‘classical music’ other than as a reminder of colonial usurpation and cruelty. Michael O’Loughlin’s ‘On Hearing Michael Hartnett Read his Poetry in Irish’ is deﬁnitive of this point of view. ‘The music of what has happened’ in Irish history is explicitly voiced as the experience of an Irish poet writing in the ‘shambles of imperial iambs, | like rows of shattered 45 As in the bilingual anthology edited by Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella in 1981 entitled An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Mountrath, Portlaoise). 46 Seán Ó Riada, Our Musical Heritage, ed. Thomas Kinsella (Portlaoise, 1982), 20.

Introduction

27

Georgian houses’. It is not only that the artful technique of O’Loughlin’s English verse undermines the veracity of this complaint, but that the poet insists on the colonial repression of Ireland by likening it to the pursuit of music at the expense of the dispossessed: ‘The kips that cursed under Christchurch Cathedral | Rising like a madrigal into the Dublin sky.’ The proud architecture of Protestant dominion, in other words, ﬂourishes amidst the poverty of Dublin slums, and the madrigalian serenity of its graceful form is thereby condemned. O’Loughlin means to indict art music only by association with the language and architecture of the colonizer, but that in fact is the point which concerns me here. These disavowals are all the more sharply felt because O’Loughlin experiences, ‘for the ﬁrst time’, in Hartnett’s Irish a music otherwise inaccessible to him. It is the voice of nature, the sound of snow falling through midnight, ‘Onto the empty ﬁelds’. I draw attention to this repudiation of art music because O’Loughlin’s poem associates the sound of Irish with a hidden music he cannot otherwise hear. In this association, he revives a powerful trope long attached to traditional Irish music itself, in which the ‘voice of nature’ is contrasted with the artiﬁce and privilege of the European musical imagination. We do not, as a rule, ﬁnd this contrast (as between two kinds of music) expressly addressed in Anglo-Irish poetry, but it has been fundamental in two centuries of cultural commentary on Irish music.47 When, however, this contrast makes a ﬂeeting appearance in poetry, as it does here, it is hard to mistake the function of poetry in English as a recovery of that repressed intelligence which the loss of Gaelic culture entailed. In this retrieval, the sound of Irish and the sound of Irish music appear to be synonymous. Both sounds connote a vanquished (if not vanished) culture. But these connotations are verbal and metaphorical: they have nothing to do with the actual condition of spoken Irish or the practice of traditional music. Friel’s Translations brilliantly resolves this difference as between language and metalanguage, so that Irish is not only spoken through the medium of Friel’s English, but in the process becomes metaphorically deﬁnitive of cultural dispossession. Translations is admittedly a spectacular tour de force in this regard, but it is also mnemonic of that pervasive convention, established by Yeats and Synge, in which English becomes a metalanguage for Irish. This sense of one language conveying the experience of another is all the more acute when Irish poetry becomes explicitly preoccupied with 47

White, The Keeper’s Recital, documents and discusses this contrast in detail.

28

Introduction

what Seamus Heaney describes as ‘the makings of a music’.48 In Heaney’s poetry the engagement with language as verbal music is so absolute, and so persistently dedicated to the expression of an otherwise inaccessible experience, that the general condition of his auditory imagination means that the literary artwork borders the musical one. The ﬁnished poem will attest not only his own integrity of voice, but the currency and legitimacy of pre-existent forms. His poetic diction is primarily and explicitly underwritten by a concept of verbal music (in which his own poetry follows not only Yeats but also Wordsworth), that is formal as well as sonorous. The immanence of order, the continuity between poetic tradition and the individual talent, are perpetual assents. These constants, through which Heaney attains perhaps unrivalled readership as an Irish poet in the international domain of literature in English, are all the more striking because they apply with much less frequency (to put it mildly) in the international domain of contemporary art music. Here, too, the comparison which I have tendered as between Irish writers in the twentieth century and German composers in the nineteenth seems instructive. In either case, the sense of belonging to an established tradition is very strong. So too is the sense of enjoying an international reputation through the medium of an art which is at every turn intensely expressive of a particular time and place. The universal currency of a speciﬁcally German musical tradition from Beethoven through Wagner is, if anything, an oppressive condition of musical reception history, at least insofar as post-war composition is concerned. ‘The imaginary museum of musical works’ casts a long shadow. Condemned and rehabilitated in equal measure, the German musical tradition continues to exert the same anxiety of inﬂuence which it exercised during its formation. The very genres which it made its own (symphony, concerto, opera) still preoccupy composers—including German composers—in the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries. This is true even when things fall apart and the (musical) centre cannot hold. The fragmented condition of post-war musical composition in Europe, the collapse of tonality under the pressure of Wagner’s inﬂuence, and the crisis of a repudiated canon which yet ﬁlls the opera houses and concert halls, all speak to the reduced aftermath of ‘new music’ in the lustrous wake of nineteenthcentury German musical hegemony. Artistic sovereignty lies elsewhere, and certainly not with music. (Cinema seems to be the obvious domain 48 See Seamus Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reﬂections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, in Preoccupations, 61–78.

Introduction

29

of inventive pre-eminence now, as opera once was.) But whatever signiﬁcance attaches to European art music in the second half of the twentieth century, and notwithstanding the sovereignty of masters who prove an exception to the general rule (Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Bartók), the currency of ‘art music’, and more vitally still its regenerative capacities, have been signiﬁcantly reduced.49 In this climate, and bearing in mind the repudiation of art music for so long in Ireland as a colonial habit of mind, it is scarcely surprising that the Irish composer is such a secondary ﬁgure of interest, if at all. Denis Donoghue’s mandarin pronouncement more than ﬁfty years ago, that ‘there is in Ireland today no composer whose works an intelligent European musician must know’, remains fair comment, especially given the international pre-eminence of Irish writers during the same period, let alone during the twentieth century as a whole.50 The fame game doesn’t matter, but the canonic reception which attaches to Irish writing is still in striking contrast to the marginal presence of Irish composition in the world, notwithstanding the progress of art music in Ireland during the past ﬁfty years. Rather, it is traditional music which carries forward, domestically and internationally, an Irish musical identity which is essential, formative, and canonic. In that enterprise, the achievement of Seán Ó Riada proved to be decisive. It is not my intention here to examine in any detail the nature of this achievement, other than to remark that Ó Riada’s inﬂuence was such that he silenced the claim of original Irish art music, even as he brilliantly promoted a novel and immensely far-reaching representation of the ethnic repertory.51 Seamus Heaney’s rendition of him as the failed pretender, caparisoned in high art but unable to achieve the promised deliverance, speaks to this bifurcation in Ó Riada’s musical imagination, as between a composer who repudiated the technique and artistry of European 49 The literature on the current crisis in the reception of classical music is extensive. For conﬂicting points of view on this crisis, see Joseph Horovitz, The Post-Classical Predicament (Boston, 1995); Pieter Van den Toorn, Music, Politics and the Academy (California, 1996); Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? (Oxford, 2002). Perhaps the most damning indictment of ‘the literate tradition’, and certainly the most extensive one, can be found in Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York, 2005), in which the central claims of German historicism in relation to nineteenthand twentieth-century music are radically interrogated. In this enterprise, Taruskin’s repudiation of Adorno, Carl Dahlhaus, and the new musicology controversially underwrites a reading of western art music in terminal decline. 50 See Denis Donoghue, ‘The Future of Irish Music’, Studies, 44 (1955), 113 ff. 51 I have examined this matter at length in The Keeper’s Recital, 125–50. See also The Progress of Music in Ireland, ch. 2 (‘The Divided Imagination: Music in Ireland after Ó Riada’), 17–35.

30

Introduction

classicism with which he began, and the increasingly solitary ﬁgure, preoccupied with his own conception of traditional music, who retreated into silence and death. ‘In Memoriam Sean O’Riada’ remembers the stooped and prematurely aged musician as ‘our jacobite | . . . our young pretender | who marched along the deep | plumed in slow airs and grace notes’. The poem offers a glimpse of promise, of what might have been, and it couches this possibility in those allusions to Mangan and ‘My dark Rosaleen’ which conﬁrm a political reading of music in Irish cultural history. It is a poem about the prospect and failure of emancipation, and it also countenances the unfulﬁlled promise of reconciliation between the ‘slow airs’ of Irish music and the ‘grace notes’ of an alien tradition. The currency of that tradition was already in question when Ó Riada abandoned formal composition in favour of traditional music, but however much the relations between European art music and Irish traditional music may be disputed, no serious doubt can attach to Ó Riada’s unique position as the only contemporary composer to have been received into the verbally dominated matrix of modern Irish culture. Heaney’s remembrance is canonic: it commemorates an essential musical presence in the fabric of Irish identity. It is not simply that contemporary composers are otherwise notable by their absence in Irish cultural discourse (poetic or otherwise), but that the virtuosi of rock music and traditional music are, by contrast, increasingly acknowledged: no general account of contemporary Irish culture could afford to omit the Chieftains, Rory Gallagher, or U2, among many others. But the discovery and reception of any musical correlative to Heaney’s poetry is of no account whatever, other than to remark that, in Ireland, such correlatives are untenable to begin with.52 A school syllabus which gives eager assent to this state of affairs and which strenuously promotes commercial music at the expense of the European repertory, so that ‘classical music’ remains a token of bourgeois liberalism, means that the subjunctive ﬂourish of Yeats’s ‘Words for music perhaps’ has in the meantime become a strident imperative. The composition of art music remains largely irrelevant to the Irish mind.53 52 Irish cultural historians tend not to countenance art music in any way whatever. By way of recent example, Diarmuid Ferriter’s The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2005) is generous in its references to traditional and commercial music as expressions of Irish identity, but wholly silent with regard to art music. 53 In chapter 9 of The Progress of Music in Ireland (‘ “A book of manners in the wilderness”: University Education and Music Education in Ireland’), 121–40, I have argued that the historical indifference and hostility towards art music in Ireland has recently been fortiﬁed by an emphatic programme of music education in which a fundamentally American approach to music as a source of self-discovery and creative exploration has been promoted at the expense of privileging the European repertory in any signiﬁcant way.

Introduction

31

The verbal music of poetry, and, as I would argue here, the presence of music in the literary imagination, by contrast, enjoy not only a formative but a central presence in Irish cultural history. This presence is nowhere more eloquently attested than in Heaney. If there is, in Douglas Dunn’s phrase, a central engagement with ‘that frustrated relationship between lyricism and history’ in Heaney’s poetry,54 it seems reasonable to suggest that this encounter between lyricism and idea, between ‘the music of what happens’ and a sense of language which is at perfect pitch, conﬁrms a long tradition of verse which passes from Irish into English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, via Moore, Ferguson, Mangan, and the poets of the Revival. Writers establish their own forebears. In Heaney’s case, the precedent of bardic impulse to be found in the traditions of high Gaelic culture and more immediately in Yeats is unmistakable. To trace in Heaney a line of descent from the music and verse of Moore through the reanimated lyric conventions of the Revival is to discover not only that long tradition of music as a vital intelligencer of the text, but crucially, a sustained emancipation from the dislocated condition of music in Irish art. In Heaney’s poetry, that quest for the Irish Omphalos entails a quest for music in language that not only conﬁrms the general condition of the Irish literary imagination in this respect, but also the invention of a discourse in which poetry functions as music. More narrowly (if audaciously), it can be argued that in Heaney, the poetic work of art—a designation justiﬁed by his habitual integration of ﬁxed forms with an entirely original register of voice in constant communion with the past—so far eclipses our shaky (and vigorously undermined) conception of the contemporary musical work of art that it satisﬁes the ear as well as the eye. Heaney’s poetry answers the need for music. This capacity may well account for his poetry’s immense currency (and not only in Ireland), but of greater relevance to this argument is the recession of art music from the frontiers of public consciousness and reception throughout Europe and the west. This recession is itself eclipsed by the vigour of the ‘classical music’ industry, in which the dissemination of the standard repertory (and the frequently imaginative retrieval of early music) have largely usurped the prominence of new music. In this development, the performer is ascendant. The reinterpretation of old music, rather than the wide circulation of new music, predominates. However complex the underlying explanation for this state of affairs, it would be perverse to deny the general crisis in which 54 See Douglas Dunn, ‘Real Presences’, in The Irish Times (Weekend Supplement), 1 June 1991.

32

Introduction

the composition of art music has been engulfed, at least since the Second World War. Thus, the silence which greets new music in Ireland ﬁnds some measure of comparison with the fragmented reception of new music in Europe, where the lustre of interpretation stands in ironic opposition to the neglect of newly composed works. The musical canon is getting older and older.55 The literary canon, by comparison, self-evidently embraces what is new (if not always what is novel). If plays and collections of poetry like Faith Healer and Field Work (to look no further than the writers nominated in this study) have instantly attained canonic status, it may be because such works espouse a contractual engagement of intelligibility that is no longer of interest to contemporary art music. ‘I have nothing to say, and I am still saying it’, the American composer John Cage remarked shortly before his death in 1992.56 A more expressive formula of disengagement could scarcely be imagined, but the ﬂight of new music from the neighbourhood of language throws into sharp relief the kind of drama and poetry which not only has something to say, but which depends on the currency of formal organization and literary tradition in order to say it. The ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ are not condemned as pastiche because they reanimate the technical conventions of Elizabethan verse: the sensibility they convey and the language in which they are cast belong unmistakably to an Irish poet writing in the last decades of the twentieth century. The availability of forms in Heaney is an availability of European literary discourse which reaches back to Dante.57 This continuity between European tradition and the individual Irish talent afﬁrms (and partly explains) the wide reception of Heaney in the world at large, but it also gains from his exceptionally concentrated response to the music inside language. To liken his technique to that of a 55 The global dominion of the recording industry, in which ‘classical music’ is a matter of representing in multiple degrees of ﬁnesse a repertoire drawn largely from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stands in ironic contrast to the sequestered condition of ‘new music’, in which the rubric of ‘world premiere’ more often than not signiﬁes a solitary performance of strictly local signiﬁcance. At worst, this means that ‘classical music’ itself has for many people become a mode of ‘easy listening’ (as in the ‘Classic FM’ model), as against the status it enjoyed as a central intelligencer of European cultural history before 1945. 56 This reiterates a point of view Cage had held since the 1950s: compare Richard Taruskin’s historical understanding of the aesthetics underlying this comment, when he observes that ‘Cage now proposed to complete the job [of Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of the dissonance’] and emancipate noise’. See Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, v. 56. 57 Condemnations of Heaney subsist on other grounds, as I indicate in the closing chapter of this book.

Introduction

33

sculptor who can sense the frozen music within marble before the mallet has fallen seems to me a reasonable comparison, because ‘The invisible, untoppled Omphalos’ (‘Toome Road’) which his poetry intimates is a constant presence. Heaney himself has characteristically acknowledged this technical pre-eminence with a more modest but closely related metaphor, as the prelude to ‘Clearances’ from The Haw Lantern makes clear: his mother taught him how to split coal, ‘Taught me between the hammer and the block | To face the music’. The pulse and cadence of the verse transmit this fundamental synonymity of experience and expression, so that the ﬁnished poem becomes emblematic of its own subject-matter. The ‘blunt and falling music’ of the reiterated word Omphalos (and by extension, the whole register of Heaney’s lyric technique) is the music which Heaney can hear inside language and through which he orders his experience. Once again, it could be argued that verbal music is in this sense a commonplace of poetry, and one that extends far beyond the purview of Irish writing in English. But Heaney’s conception of poetic technique (‘the makings of a music’) is expressly intent upon the possibility that this music—the tang and texture of English—can order experience as music itself does. I shall argue in this book that the poems realize this possibility. The music inside language which Heaney so skilfully discloses as the principal conduit of experience, memory, and observation, attests an auditory imagination in which sound and sense are exactly attuned. In this synthesis, music itself is redundant. One can easily understand why Heaney’s poetry eclipses the function of a musical setting. The composition of the verse, the very tone and resonance of its verbal music, its technique of representation, would be diminished by such a superﬂuity. I mean to suggest that, in Heaney, the extent to which literature ﬁlls the void left by art music in Ireland is essentially complete. His poetry comes as close to the Irish Omphalos as we could wish. In that proximity, the canonic presence of Irish writing in the world seems less important than the Irish history of ideas about music to which this poetry bears witness. It is a history which speaks at every turn to the absence of art music from the Irish mind. But this history also carries forward an aspiration towards the condition of music, as when Moore writes English poetry that is modelled on his own arrangement of Irish airs, or when Yeats repossesses the bardic synthesis of music and verse in his own poetry, and nominates ‘song’ as the fundamental image of the Irish literary imagination. To a greater or lesser degree, these substitutions of literature for music become explicitly self-conscious in the work of Synge, Shaw, and Joyce, in whom the plural achievements of the

34

Introduction

European musical imagination induce similarly plural correlatives in drama and ﬁction. If literature is a ‘second best’ for these writers, they nevertheless conﬁrm that generally creative engagement with European music (as symbol, as formal paradigm, and as generic model) which continues to preoccupy Irish writers long after the Revival has passed. Beckett’s subversion of narrative intelligibility, and his stringent formalism (with respect to language as one system of signs among many), gain from those paradigms of European musical modernism which likewise subvert the stability of tonal discourse and inspect the void of silence, as the works of Anton Webern most certainly do. The trace of nineteenth-century musical models is unmistakable in Friel and Murphy, whose dramatic structures so closely neighbour the concerto and opera in particular that we can identify the seminal presence of music as an imaginative resource in their work, without calling attention to music as an explicit subject of dramatic engagement in plays like Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Faith Healer, and The Gigli Concert. In Mahon, the primary function of poetry is to reorder the experience and perception of art, so that the Irish poet-musician (‘I am Raftery’) provides new settings for other people’s work. As I have already proposed, this habitual rhetoric of a new (poetic) context for received ideas (in painting, in statuary, in a disused shed in County Wexford) enjoys a compelling precedent in German art song. There, too, the poet is a musician. In Heaney’s auditory imagination, the process by which literature answers the need for art music is absolute. If Moore heard inside Irish music the pulse and morphology of his poetry, Heaney hears inside language the music which lies ‘behind the linear black’. The disclosure of that music, and its purposeful synonymity of experience and expression, are Heaney’s most compelling achievement as a poet. Seeing things is a matter of hearing things. In the patient elaboration of that auditory technique, the preoccupation with music is unmistakable. When Yeats proposed that we should descant upon the supreme theme of art and song ‘after long silence’, he nevertheless remained wholly indifferent to music, except as a vital symbol of the creative imagination itself. The temple which he raised in the ear is made of words. The vaulted space in language is not music. But the persistent search for music in language which we ﬁnd in Irish poetry, together with the persistent reliance on musical paradigms which Irish drama constantly discloses, should perhaps alert us to the condition of ‘words for music’ as a permanent mode of address in the Irish literary imagination. That address begins in earnest with the poetry of Tom Moore.

1 The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish ﬁnger. They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. There is not in this wide world a vallee. Great song of Julia Morkan’s. Kept her voice up to the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe’s wasn’t she? (James Joyce, Ulysses)1

1 One cannot always be sure how strategic Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness in Ulysses is meant to be. When Bloom passes the statue of Moore in College Green, however, there can be little doubt that his taking the piss out of Moore, when added to Bloom’s incipient feminism (and perhaps femininity, to judge by what happens to him later in the novel), apostrophizes the kind of reception history which has plagued Thomas Moore since the second half of the nineteenth century. The association made by Bloom between Moore and Balfe does not seem fortuitous in this regard; nor does the unmistakable reference to ‘The Dead’ (‘Great song of Julia Morkan’s’), a narrative in which Irish music, 1 (1922; Oxford, 1993), 155. Bloom is thinking of Moore’s ‘The Meeting of the Waters’, and of Julia Morkan, who features so prominently (as Aunt Julia, one of the ‘Three Dublin Graces’) in ‘The Dead’.

36

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

if not Moore himself, is so structurally and emotionally decisive.2 In the passage cited here, Joyce is appealing to the commonplace understanding of Moore as a matter of fond remembrance at best, and at worst as something of an embarrassment. ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ is quite literally a joke. To think about the statue itself, as against Joyce’s description of it in Ulysses, is to contemplate how very little has changed in the past eightyﬁve years (or more properly, in the past century, given 1904 as the year in which Ulysses is set) with regard to Moore’s accommodation in the canons of Irish cultural history. Roguish ﬁnger or not, the urinal below Moore and the bird-droppings which perpetually whiten his bronze pate ensure that a statue otherwise explicit in its intent of ennobling the Bard of Erin is thereby a symbol of decrepitude and neglect. Unveiled in 1857, some ﬁve years after Moore’s death, the statue is utterly undone by being set over a public lavatory. But there it is: a monument which is so strongly suggestive of the arts as a central engagement in urban life becomes instead a permanent testament to the dislocated condition of music in Ireland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rhetoric of statuary belongs and functions elsewhere: in Vienna, Bonn, or London. But it does not function without irony in dear old Dublin.3 This image of ironic neglect also calls to mind monuments of another kind. In an age suffused with multiple editions of writers and composers, to say nothing of the preservation and scholarly recension of even the furthest reaches of European literature and music, it is all the more striking to discover that as yet no complete works edition of Moore exists. The monumental nature of such an editorial enterprise would undoubtedly commemorate Moore’s extensive writings, but it would also restore to the Irish Melodies that context of which they are so sorely deprived, namely the context of his other works. No one could plausibly deny the largely negative reception history which attaches to Moore, but few people, likewise, could counter the better access to Moore’s worldview (and in particular his view of Ireland) which this context would 2 For an account of music in ‘The Dead’, see Harry White, The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2005), ch. 8 (‘James Joyce, Music and Dublin’), 111–20. See also Chapter 5 of the present study, below. 3 In this connection it is hard not to think of other instances in which Dubliners make fun of public monuments, as in the sobriquet attached to the Anna Livia sculpture in O’Connell Street (‘the ﬂoozie in the jacuzzi’), whereby Joyce falls victim to the kind of joke he makes about Moore in Ulysses. For a remark on Yeats and the Moore statue, see n. 8 below.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

37

provide. The Melodies would thereby take their place alongside Moore’s satirical and political verse, his novels, his historical writings, his other poetry and speciﬁcally Lalla Rookh, itself a key text in the history of European romanticism, particularly with regard to the relations between music and literature in the nineteenth century.4 The Melodies would also gain from a more comprehensive address than is currently available on Moore as the biographer of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Byron. It is surely signiﬁcant that such publications, along with Moore’s voluminous correspondence and his political interventions (as in ‘A letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin’, 1810) appeared over the same period in which the Melodies came into being (they were published between 1808 and 1834, in ten volumes). The signiﬁcance lies in the fact that Moore can be read not as a sentimental purveyor of Irish romanticism, but as a lyric poet whose musical, biographical, and political achievements were not incidental but formative to that image of Ireland which the Melodies collectively and individually represent to the world. A collected edition, in short, would provide a much more reliable perspective on Moore than the one which reception history affords. Two new scholarly initiatives in Galway and Belfast bode well for the future of such a massive scholarly undertaking.5 Reception history, in the meantime, has not been kind to Moore. By now, one feels, he has become something of an embarrassment in the canon of Irish literature (insofar as he ﬁgures at all), or at best a superannuated ﬁgure lost to the ebullient modernism of the Literary Revival and the magisterial conﬁdence of Irish writing in the twentieth century. ‘Tummy Moore’s maladies’ (Joyce again) provoke a degree of uneasy 4 An hour-long assessment of Moore broadcast on RTE (the Irish State Broadcasting service) in January 2006, which surveyed his work and which included extensive contributions from Seamus Heaney, Fintan O’Toole, Nicholas Carolan, and Ronan Kelly (a biographer of Moore), omitted even a passing reference to Lalla Rookh and was wholly silent on the reception of Moore in Europe. (One Faithful Harp, produced and directed by Nuala O’Connor and transmitted on 29 January 2006.) 5 A detailed description of the Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive, under the direction of Sean Ryder (NUI Galway), is given in the American Conference for Irish Studies website (http://www.acisweb.com/news) as retrieved on 28 Dec. 2005. The aims of the project are indeed ambitious with regard to making available online a complete edition of Moore’s writings and music. The task of representing the Irish Melodies alone in a scholarly edition is formidable, given the complex provenance of their ﬁrst publication in Dublin and London. A related project, entitled ‘Thomas Moore at Queen’s University Belfast’, is based on the Gibson-Massie Moore collection, which is described as ‘the world’s largest collection of Thomas Moore’s published literary and musical works’. A user’s guide to the collection is available at http://www.qu-prism.qub.ac.uk/TalisPrism, as retrieved on 28 Dec. 2005.

38

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

affection, but they rarely command respect. Irish cultural history, emancipated as it most certainly is from the narrow claims of nationalism, consigns Moore to the oblivion of sentimentality, or at best deconstructs his work as a species of Victoriana invariably surpassed by those ‘Irish classics’ which follow. It is not simply that Moore is largely absent from the imaginary museum of Irish writing (an absence which is mirrored in the critical canon, if not in the more prosaic domain of literary history),6 but also that Moore’s claim to attention has been undermined by those decisive engagements with modernism which guarantee to Yeats, Joyce, and Synge an international reception that bypasses Moore or makes him irrelevant. Almost from the outset, the difﬁculty of accommodating Moore into any kind of continuum or (Irish) reception history has been characterized by the perception that he stole from the dull antiquarians (Edward Bunting in particular) a priceless trove of melody which was then burnished by his own poetic bravura and skill. Moore himself acknowledged that his interest in Irish music was stimulated by reading Bunting’s ﬁrst collection of Irish airs (published in 1797), but he was also alive to the political transformation of these airs which he himself effected. That Moore would be overtaken by a more strident nationalism which subtracted the aesthetics of art music in favour of the militant immediacy of ballad poetry partly accounts for his disappearance from the canon, but this progression, together with his own projection as a hated darling of the Victorian parlour, cannot completely eclipse the fact that, between 1807 and the advent of the Famine, Moore voiced an idea of Ireland which originated not only in Bunting and the modish appetite for Celticism, but in the United Irishmen, the failure of rebellion, and the newly symbolic appeal of Irish music itself. Moore’s writings came to embody a romanticized political sentiment. 6 A striking, but by no means untypical, instance of this critical omission is Moore’s absence from Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (London, 1995) and Irish Classics (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Kiberd’s approach to Irish literature is otherwise so comprehensive that one begins to think of Moore’s disappearance from view as a strategic exclusion. Although Moore is (modestly) represented in anthologies and literary histories such as Seamus Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry, 1991) and A. Norman Jeffares and Peter Van Der Kamp (eds.), Irish Literature in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Anthology (Dublin, 2005), it is difﬁcult to avoid the impression that his popular reputation largely eclipses a more serious consideration, so that his work seems like a false start rather than a true source for the Literary Revival. For a consideration of Moore which situates his work in the context of mid-nineteenthcentury Irish poetics, see David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, 1987).

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

39

The clichéd condition of this sentiment can easily be identiﬁed as a primary cause of Moore’s fall from grace. It might seem an exaggeration to suggest that the sheer ubiquity of the Melodies in particular, to say nothing of their iconic status in popular Irish culture, became something of an embarrassment to the avatars (Gaelic as well as Anglo-Irish) of the Celtic Revival, but there can be no doubt that by the end of the nineteenth century Moore’s achievement was substantially reduced to a handful of songs which frequently became intermixed with the balladry of Thomas Davis and the more general projection of Irish music both as an emblem of resurgent nationalism, and as a symbol of cultural integrity and renewal.7 In this general projection, Moore’s own position was substantially weakened. Yeats’s most recent biographer, Roy Foster, speaking presumably for the poet himself, calls Moore ‘an impatient hack’, and echoes thereby the severity of Yeats’s own brief dismissal and that of most writers preoccupied with the genesis of literary revival in Ireland.8 The object of Tory disdain and nationalist contempt in his own day, Moore was all but written out of the history of the Celtic Revival (he barely registers a mention in Ernest Boyd’s classic account). With one or two sovereign exceptions, contemporary critical discourse bears out the tendency to ignore Moore altogether, or else to concede a grudging (and often 7 For an account of Moore’s reception history in terms of Irish music, see Harry White, The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork, 1998), chs. 3 and 4 (‘History and Romanticism: Bunting, Moore and the Concept of Irish Music in the Nineteenth Century’ and ‘Antiquarianism and Politics: Davis, Petrie, Hyde and the Growth of Music in a Sectarian Culture’), 36–73. Mary Helen Thuente, in The Harp Re-strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (New York, 1994), offers an extensive assessment of the Irish Melodies (171–92), in which she argues compellingly that they are best understood as ‘political songs to Irish airs’ which ‘echo themes in earlier United Irish songs’ (179). This reading restores to Moore a degree of political signiﬁcance of which his reputation as a drawing-room sentimentalist deprives him, and its tolerant and inclusive regard for Moore’s relationship with the United Irishmen, in contrast to ‘the narrow and sectarian literary nationalism that succeeded him’ (192), conﬁrms Moore’s role as a precursor of the ballad poetry of Young Ireland rather than as a decisive ﬁgure in the development of Irish literature in English. 8 See R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1997), 147: ‘Propagandists like Davis and impatient hacks like Moore had lost their bearings . . .’ Foster is paraphrasing Yeats’s articles in the Bookman (1895) and the point of view represented in his introduction to the Book of Irish Verse (1895). Foster reports Lionel Johnson, having seen a draft of Yeats’s introduction, as writing to Katharine Tynan that Yeats ‘will certainly be massacred by a certain kind of Irish poet if he ever sets foot in Ireland again. And Moore’s statue will certainly fall and crush him—or itself, which is vastly preferable!’ (ibid. 146). I return to Yeats’s attitude to Moore in the chapter following this one.

40

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

puzzled) acknowledgement of his fundamental importance with regard to modern Irish writing in English. Three characteristic examples must stand here for many: To all intents and purposes, Moore single-handedly founded a recognizably Irish poetic tradition in Ireland . . . a poetry that tries to capture the atmosphere of the melody is doomed to failure. (Robert Welch) But though the praise lavished on his writing by Goethe, Byron, Stendhal and Victor Hugo now strikes us as bizarre, it remains true that, however mawkishly, he [Moore] placed Ireland almost single-handedly on the cultural agenda of his day . . . (Terry Eagleton) . . . We may say that Moore’s elegance was frequently reduced to enervation; we may say that his words do not live without their accompanying music, or that the music is violated by the artiﬁciality of the words; we may laud or regret his inﬂuence on Irish nationalism. Yet, ultimately, the kind of issue raised by Moore’s poetry, or more particularly, by the Irish Melodies and some of the National Airs, lies at the heart of Irish writing for more than a century afterwards. (Seamus Deane)9

The considerate nature of this last point of view, and its considerations in respect of music in particular, provide a valuable corrective to the vertiginous descent that otherwise characterizes Moore’s reception history to the present day. If Moore’s European reputation now seems ‘bizarre’, this may stem at least in part from a widespread critical failure to engage with the intimacy between music and literature, not only in Moore’s poetic but in the wider context of European romanticism.10 This is a failure notably redeemed by Robert Welch, whose stringent critique of the Irish Melodies in particular gains from his willingness to countenance this intimacy between music and poetry. It is a willingness which is rare but which, as I shall argue here, is essential to offering any kind of useful distinction between Moore’s auditory imagination and those 9 See Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish, 1797–1897 (Gerrards Cross, 1988), 56, and Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (Gerrards Cross, 1980), cited in Matthew Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song: The 1821 Irish Melodies’, Bullán, 4: 2 (Winter 1999/Spring 2000), 83–103; Terry Eagleton, ‘The Masochism of Thomas Moore’, in his Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork, 1998), 140–57, at 157; Seamus Deane; ‘Thomas Moore (1779–1852)’, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, i. 1056. 10 For an assessment of Moore which is sympathetic to his importance in European romanticism, see Tom Dunne, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing, 1800–1850’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge, 1988), 68–91.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

41

conventions of musical symbolism which prevail in that tradition which Moore ‘single-handedly’ established. The expressly musical dimension of Moore’s poetic technique (as against the musical symbolism of his verse) is one which has, until recently, been little explored.11 A second dimension, likewise all but overlooked, concerns Moore’s impact on European romanticism and the impact of Europe on Moore. Lalla Rookh is the obvious source in this regard, if only because it inspired at least one major work in the European repertory—Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri, op. 50. Likewise, we require some awareness of Berlioz’s debt to Moore, in which the most extreme (and self-reliant) romantic musical imagination in Europe took its cue from Moore’s apparently modest settings of Irish music. ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ is at the heart of Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, to say nothing of those Irish composers who directly engaged with the Melodies as editors or arrangers: these include Balfe, Stanford, and William Vincent Wallace. With regard to the Melodies as a self-standing body of work, the precedent of European (especially German) interest is strikingly important. The connections between Beethoven and the Scottish publisher George Thomson establish an instructive point of comparison between the Irish publishers William and James Power, Moore, and the composer John Stevenson. Likewise, Moore’s inﬂuence—expressly through the medium of the Melodies—on the development of a nationalist aesthetic in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz and the piano music of Chopin signiﬁcantly enlarges our awareness of him as a primary agent of European romanticism in his own right.12 In an especially severe reading (both of the man and his work), Tom Paulin remarked that Moore had ‘transformed his country’s political aspirations into lilting anapaests’.13 Such a reductionist, not to say hostile, gloss only seems possible when Moore’s musical intelligence and the extent of his imaginative inﬂuence are both discounted. These perspectives on Moore’s own work and on his inﬂuence in the history of European romanticism are intended here to contribute decisively to a fresh appraisal of his auditory imagination and its formative (if suppressed) inﬂuence on the musical discourse of the Irish Literary Revival in the late nineteenth century. 11 Welch’s indictment of Moore’s attempt to render a sense of music in verse, in Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats, has at least the merit of challenging the poet on his own (musical) terms. 12 See Eoin MacWhite, ‘Thomas Moore and Poland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 72, sec. C, 49–62. 13 Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1984), 40.

42

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

It may seem pedantic in this connection to underline a distinction between the formative history of ideas which inﬂuenced the shape and direction of Moore’s writings and the reception history which subsequently covered most of them in neglect or exposed them to the charge of sentimental pandering. But it is only fair to acknowledge that, just as the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 and Moore’s encounter with the United Irishmen during his years in Trinity were decisive in his formation as an artist, the reaction which his work drew from Young Ireland and from individual partisans on either side of the political divide in the 1830s and 1840s (Samuel Ferguson and James Clarence Mangan are good examples) was expressive of a history of Irish ideas in which music often took the place of language itself. It is not only that music became a primary marker of Irish identity (and ever more so as the language all but disappeared from public utterance), but that Moore’s representation of that music established a powerful precedent for the ways in which ‘Irish music’ would attain meaning in the Revival, above all in Yeats, Synge, and even Joyce. Moore’s explicit understanding of Irish music as the language of loss and dispossession can be construed as a prototypical romanticism, but it can also be legitimately read as the source of that stable association between music and the Irish literary imagination which is so strikingly reinvented by Yeats. Music itself, its material condition of being, lay remote from Yeats, however completely attached he became to its symbolic properties as an image of the poetic imagination. By his own admission (in Autobiographies), he took his cue from John O’Leary and disdained Moore in favour of Mangan and Young Ireland. In that vital preference, Moore’s claim on the auditory imagination is thrown into sharp relief. This is because it is an imagination which responds directly to Irish music rather than to any symbolic connotations it might possess. If Ireland in the nineteenth century was ‘a confused and devastated place, suspended between two languages’, its imaginative regeneration lay in ‘the national longing for form’, and form entailed a radical address upon language.14 The verbal music of that address, its distinctive tonalities of Irishness, comprised an entirely new crudescence of Gaelic, Hiberno-English, and modern English invention. In this synthesis, Tom Moore’s strategic dependence on Irish folk music was decisively eclipsed. But if, as Deane and Eagleton suggest, Moore remains nevertheless central to concerns of the Literary Revival, why was he repudiated or ignored with such striking consistency? Why 14

Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 48.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

43

is he at best a muted presence in the Revival, as he is a notable absence in contemporary critical commentary? Why does he excite such vehemence on those occasions when he is somewhat difﬁdently admitted to the debate? In Ireland’s Literary Renaissance, Boyd reluctantly conceded that in Moore ‘the ﬁrst ﬂutterings of the Irish spirit in literature’ could be discerned, and then prudently left him to one side. Why is Moore memorial and peripheral at one and the same time? To answer these questions, and to propose that Moore’s enduring legacy was the transmission of Irish music as a vital intelligencer of verbal meaning, one needs to examine the climate of opinion in which Moore’s Irish Melodies appeared, and to distinguish between the immediacy of their reception and their posthumous reputation in the full ferment of the Literary Revival. One also needs a European perspective on Moore, not only in terms of his poetic diction in the wider context of literary romanticism, but also with reference to his inﬂuence on music in France and Germany. Only then, I think, can one begin to understand that Moore’s auditory imagination was shaped in signiﬁcant measure by music, in contrast to the deep structures of verbal music, the music inside language, which is what T. S. Eliot meant when he used the term ‘auditory imagination’ to deﬁne the music of poetry.15 It is this distinction between actual music and the music of language that helps to account for Moore’s strangely dislocated presence in the reception history of Irish writing.

2 Moore’s alignment of the ethnic repertory of Irish music with his own poetic was the decisive episode by which antiquarianism (the recovery of the Gaelic past) was overtaken by romanticism (the ideology of the present in relation to that past) in the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century. He formulated this alignment nowhere more expressly than in the ‘suppressed preface’ to the third volume of the Irish Melodies, which originally appeared anonymously as an appendix to the poem Intolerance: But the sceptic is scarcely to be envied who would pause for stronger proofs than we already possess of the early glories of Ireland; and were even the veracity of all these proofs surrendered, yet who would not ﬂy to such ﬂattering ﬁctions 15

As in his essays ‘The Auditory Imagination’ (1933) and ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942).

44

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

from the sad degrading truths which the history of later times presents to us? The language of sorrow, however, is in general best suited to our Music, and with themes of this nature the poet may be amply supplied. There is scarcely a page of our annals that will not furnish him with a subject, and while the national Muse of other countries adorns her temple proudly with trophies of the past, in Ireland her melancholy altar, like the shrine of Pity at Athens, is to be known only by the tears that are shed upon it.16

The admixture here of romance and history, of a grim realism in the face of Ireland’s present condition by comparison with the consolations of myth and glorious reputation, is, of course, a classic trope of romanticism that is anything but unique to Moore, except for its explicit reading of Irish music as a conduit of historical and emotional meaning. To write thus in the aftermath of ‘that time of torture and terror’ (which is how Moore was to characterize his years in Trinity because of the interrogation and summary execution of United Irishmen within the circle of his friends) was not the pliant posture of the drawing-room romancer, but the passionate avocation of music as an intelligencer of political sensibility. In a letter to his collaborator on the early volumes of the Melodies, Sir John Stevenson, published as part of the Advertisement to the ﬁrst number, he palliates this insistence with a more general, but no less committed, observation: Our National Music has never been properly collected, and while the composers of the Continent have enriched their operas and sonatas with melodies borrowed from Ireland . . . we have left these treasures to a great degree unclaimed and fugitive. But we are come, I hope, to a better period both of politics and music; and how much they are connected, in Ireland at least, appears too plainly in the tone of sorrow and depression which characterises most of our early songs.17

This immediate identiﬁcation of music with politics was to prove emblematic for Moore’s collection as a whole. It is not simply that Moore’s encounter with Irish folk music was so intimately bound up with insurgency and the mortal danger in which this placed his friends: it is also that Moore’s romantic projection of sources (which were themselves entirely innocent of political meaning) was a deliberate and strategic invention that rapidly acquired symbolic and conventional status. Not only do we ﬁnd that the ﬁgures of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and 16

Cited in Deane, ‘Thomas Moore (1779–1852)’, 1057. See Wilfred S. Dowden (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Moore (Oxford, 1964), i. 116–17. The letter cited here is dated in this edition as February 1807. 17

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

45

Robert Emmett haunt the early numbers of the Melodies (so that an epigraph from ‘Oh blame not the Bard’ appeared on an anonymously circulated print of Emmett’s ‘Speech from the Dock’ in 1811); we can also recognize that the Irish Melodies (speciﬁcally Moore’s conjunction of new verse with pre-existing tunes) comport themselves so as to sustain this connection of music and politics, however softened the join may have appeared to be. It is idle to complain that Moore’s drawingroom decorum sentimentalized his reading of history, when the Melodies themselves demanded not the rhetoric of sedition but the currency of a well-wrought song. Sedition, albeit of a muted kind, would come later, in the shape of Thomas Davis’s ballads published in The Spirit of the Nation. So, too, would a rejection not only of Moore, but of any reliance upon what Davis called ‘paltry, scented things from Italy’.18 Beyond the drawing-room, and beyond the conﬁnes of the romantic song, Moore could express more radically his detestation of that synthesis of colonial policy and religious imposition which deﬁned for him the eponymous ‘Intolerance’ of the penal laws. He published Intolerance anonymously in 1808, when the ﬁrst two numbers of the Melodies were already in circulation. Its rhetoric of ‘stately Juvenalian’ satire19 was too much for English taste, and in any case contradicted the Anacreontic charm of Moore’s romanticism, to say nothing of the aesthetics of art music. But the vigorous diction of Intolerance (and its companion piece, Corruption) not only afﬁrms Moore’s direct sense of (outraged) engagement with Irish history, but also that vital space between righteous indignation and the claims of music: . . . to think that such a blooming part Of the world’s garden, rich in nature’s charms And ﬁll’d with social souls and vigorous arms, 18 See ‘Irish Music and Poetry’, in D. J. O’Donoghue (ed.), Essays Literary and Historical by Thomas Davis (Dundalk, 1914), 160–3. Davis here means the artiﬁces of European music, and in this condemnation he prepares the ground for Douglas Hyde and the repudiation of art music on the grounds of ‘de-anglicisation’ of Ireland. The relationship between Davis’s rejection of European art music and Hyde’s programme of cultural regeneration in the 1890s is further examined in Harry White, ‘ “Paltry, scented things from Italy”: Ireland and the Discourse of Nationalism in 19th-Century European Musical Culture’, Musica e Storia, 12: 3 (Venice, 2005), 649–62. 19 For details concerning the publication of Intolerance and Corruption, see Hoover H. Jordan, Bolt Upright: The Life of Thomas Moore (Salzburg, 1975), i. 166–70. Jordan cites a review from the Anti-Jacobin Review, 31 (1808), 308–9, in which the writer fails to comprehend ‘how any one possessing such implacable hatred to Britain, and every thing British, could degrade or pollute his immaculate Irish mind with the use of the English language’.

46

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore Should be the victim of that canting crew, So smooth, so godly—yet so devilish too; Who, arm’d at once with prayer-books and with whips, Blood on their hands, and Scripture on their lips, Tyrants by creed, and torturers by text, Make this life hell, in honour of the next! 20

I don’t see anything of the drawing-room toady there. In any case, it is useful to draw a distinction between the ebullience of Moore’s occasional verse (as here) and his approach to music in setting words to traditional airs. It is not my intention to trace that approach in detail, but the genesis of Moore’s collection deserves some comment nevertheless.21 We know that it was William and James Power who approached Moore early in 1807, with a view to his writing words (along with other poets) for a collection of Irish airs to be set with ‘symphonies and accompaniments’ by John Stevenson. We know, too, that Moore had earlier been invited by George Thomson similarly to contribute to a volume which Thomson was planning, in succession to his earlier collections of Scottish and Irish airs. We know, ﬁnally, that two of Thomson’s principal musical collaborators were Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1805 Moore had written as follows to Thomson: ‘Sir, I feel very much ﬂattered by the application with which you have honoured me, and the idea of being associated in any manner with Haydn is too tempting to my vanity to be easily resisted. At present, however, I am [so] strictly pledged not to divert one moment from the poems I am engaged in.’22 As it transpired, Moore did not fulﬁl this commission for Thomson, but we may suppose that the prospect of doing so would have inﬂuenced his approach to the verses which he wrote for William and James Power. His ready appreciation of Haydn is especially signiﬁcant in this respect. Barry Cooper has remarkably informed us that ‘Beethoven composed more folksong settings than any other genre, and . . . more of them are 20 From Intolerance, a Satire, published in A. D. Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London, 1910), 137–8. On pp. 139–40 of the same edition Godley publishes the ‘Appendix’ on the history of Irish music, and cites Moore’s observation that it was ‘originally intended to form part of a Preface to the Irish Melodies’. 21 For an account of the sources and publication history of the Irish Melodies, see Veronica Ní Chinnéide, ‘The Sources of Moore’s Melodies’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland, 89: 2 (1959), 109–34, and Thérèse Tessier, La Poésie lyrique de Thomas Moore (1779–1852) (Paris, 1976), passim. 22 Dowden (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Moore, i. 108–9.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

47

Irish than any other nationality’.23 Responding to an invitation from Thomson to contribute settings in succession to Haydn, Beethoven ﬁrst contributed arrangements of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish melodies to Thomson in 1809 and 1810. In 1814 and 1816 respectively, Thomson published two volumes of Irish airs with arrangements by Beethoven. In all, the composer provided seventy-one settings to the Scottish publisher. Cooper makes it plain, however, that Beethoven was not setting texts, which Thomson instead added on receipt of the arrangements. This detail is a crucial one, because Moore’s contemporary settings represented a collaboration in which the creation of new texts was the primary consideration, and in which the musical settings were correspondingly a secondary, if vitally important, undertaking. Moore selected the airs, determined their pitch, and modiﬁed their rhythmic contours to suit both his newly composed verses and his own capacities as a performer. Only then was Stevenson invited to arrange the airs and preface them with modest ‘symphonies’ (introductions) and postludes for piano. In musical terms, as I have argued elsewhere, it is the hapless Stevenson who appears gauche and naive in terms of this extraneous material, just as it is Stevenson’s contribution that motivated so many subsequent editions which sought to improve on his arrangements throughout the nineteenth century.24 What I should wish to emphasize here, however, is the fundamental difference between Moore’s Irish Melodies and every other ‘Hibernian’ collection of airs, including those provided by Beethoven for George Thomson. In this connection, it is useful to turn back to Barry Cooper: Being from a non-Irish background, Beethoven was actually in a better position to appreciate local idiosyncrasies than someone brought up amongst them. Moreover, his instrumental introductions and postludes are closely based on material from the melodies themselves; unlike other harmonisers, including Bunting, he does not normally introduce extraneous, classical-style passages into the preludes but builds them up almost entirely from prominent motifs in the melodies. . . . Indeed, it is only in Beethoven’s settings that the rich musical potential of these Irish melodies is properly revealed, with material from them being deployed in the ritornellos in extraordinarily imaginative ways. It takes a Beethoven to demonstrate what ﬁne melodies they are . . . (my emphasis)25 23 Barry Cooper, ‘Beethoven’s Folksong Settings as Sources of Irish Music’, in Patrick F. Devine and Harry White (eds.), The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995, Selected Proceedings: Part Two (Dublin, 1996), 65–81, at 65. 24 See White, The Keeper’s Recital, 48–9, for further remarks on Stevenson, and Jordan, Bolt Upright, i. 139–65, for a detailed account of the compositional process of the Melodies. 25 Cooper, ‘Beethoven’s Folksong Settings’, 80.

48

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

Without wishing to seem chauvinistic, or still more to criticize unduly a major Beethoven scholar, I ﬁnd nevertheless that this passage betrays a fundamental difﬁculty in understanding the signiﬁcance of Beethoven’s folk-song arrangements in terms of Irish music at large, and Moore’s settings in particular. The proposition that ‘the rich potential of the melodies’ is reserved to Beethoven’s businesslike settings seems especially astonishing, but I dwell on Cooper’s observations because they illustrate the gulf between the essence of Beethoven’s general achievement (in which folk-song arrangements were a peripheral activity) and the signiﬁcance of Moore’s address upon this repertory. It is not simply that the Thomson commissions are at best a footnote to the composer’s fundamental contribution to the genres of European art music (so that the mere number of seventy-one folk-song settings, which exceeds any other genre in Beethoven’s output, becomes in turn a much less meaningful statistic), but also that Moore’s arrangements went to the heart of Irish music as an intelligencer of history and verbal feeling. And not just verbal feeling in general, but verbal feeling in the English language, speciﬁcally in relation to those tropes of dispossession and loss which Moore drew from the melodies themselves. Beethoven was arranging tunes. Moore was attempting to translate their meaning into language. The traditional point of comparison between Moore’s predecessors and near contemporaries has largely been limited to Edward Bunting. Some years ago I tried to deﬁne the difference between Moore and Bunting by suggesting that Moore’s success as ‘the Bard of Erin’ transformed Bunting’s Ancient Irish Music (1797) from antiquarian collection to romantic source.26 It was not a permanent transformation, and in antiquarian terms it remained an indefensible one. But we cannot disclaim the fact that Moore’s poetic was advanced and developed by his fantastically successful recourse to the melodies which Bunting had so painstakingly (if intermittently) tried to preserve. At the last, the difference between them was that Moore became interested in the past as an image of the present (and sometimes as a retreat from it), whereas Bunting was committed to the past for its own sake. What remains clear is that the continuity of this relationship between Moore and his predecessors—musically, culturally, aesthetically, and politically—could not be usurped by the routine commissions which a Scottish publisher sought from a German composer living in Vienna and utterly removed from the orbit of Irish sensibilities and considerations. Moreover, in 26

See White, The Keeper’s Recital, 37–52.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

49

ways that neither Thomson nor his composers could have conceived, the response to early numbers of the Irish Melodies replicated the divide that separated the Protestant Interest in Ireland from its unruly, Papist counterpart. The Anti-Jacobin Review was predictably severe in this regard: ‘Several of them [the Melodies] were composed with a view to their being becoming popular in a very disordered state of society . . . They are the melancholy ravings of the disappointed rebel, or his illeducated offspring.’27 Once again, we are far from the later reception of Moore as a poetaster of the English country house. Much in this vein was to follow: if the Melodies would never quite shake off the aura of the drawing-room, neither would they lose their symbolic force as a cumulative petition for self-regulation. Through the course of their publication this association gathered force. Moore’s biographer, Hoover Jordan, reports that as early as October 1809 a writer in the Leinster Journal referred to Moore as ‘that poet of the heart, who has done more by his poetic effusions than all the political writers whom Ireland has seen for a century’.28 By 1841 the Dublin Review was prepared to rationalize Moore’s adventures in the drawing-room with the political impact of his settings in surprisingly candid terms: ‘We have somewhere seen it asserted that the inﬂuence (which all must admit) of the Irish Melodies in advancing the great cause of Catholic emancipation was exerted in the highest circles of English society, where the language of them and the sweet music in which it was wedded, excited a sympathy never before felt for the suffering country’.29 This notion of Moore as an advocate of Catholic emancipation through the Melodies would in turn be eclipsed by their very popularity, and by the overwhelming memory of Daniel O’Connell’s immensely more efﬁcacious agitations: nevertheless, this trope of emancipation directly nourished that projection of Moore as an apologist for nationalist self-determination which Young Ireland would in turn come to adopt. Although the currency of this idea in the 1840s stimulated opposition (from Bunting no less than from Samuel Ferguson and James Clarence Mangan), we ﬁnd that Gavan Duffy, a principal architect of Young Ireland, was prepared in 1842 to acknowledge (in deﬁance of his mentor Davis) precisely that reading of the Melodies which Moore himself appeared to sanction in his prefatory remarks to the very ﬁrst number. Duffy’s apologia is worth quoting at some length: 27 28

Anti-Jacobin Review, 58 (1820), 314, cited in Jordan, Bolt Upright, i. 158. 29 Cited in ibid. 144. Cited in ibid.

50

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

‘And can this’, thought we, taking up the ‘Melodies’—‘can this be forgotten?’ No: these songs are no longer as they were, popular only in the drawing-rooms of Europe and America; they are gradually becoming known to the middle classes in Ireland, and the Irish translation bids fair to reach the mind of our peasantry. It may be fault or excellence in them; but Moore’s songs bear translation. They not only have appeared in every European language, but they supplied the Poles with their most popular revolutionary songs during the last war—the highest honour ever shown to a lyrist.30

Duffy refers here to the Irish translation by John MacHale, archbishop of Tuam, of the texts of the Melodies in 1842, and also to the wider dissemination of Moore’s verse not only across class divisions in Ireland but throughout Europe. More explicitly still, his acknowledgement of Moore’s inﬂuence on the formation of Polish nationalism in the revolution of 1838 signals a vital relationship between verbal feeling and Irish music. There can be little doubt that this condition of feeling, whereby not only Moore’s Melodies but Irish music in general became both expressive and symbolic of dispossession and loss, survived the Great Famine. This endurance, however, did not prevent the Melodies, now largely divested of Moore’s wider reputation as a writer, from falling headlong into the cloying divide that lay between the integrity of Gaelic revivalism and the aspirations to develop an art music at once expressive of Ireland and worthy of Europe. Between these extremes were the balladry of popular agitation, the unfulﬁlled promise of art music, and the representation of Moore himself as a pro-British sentimentalist and wailer after a lost cause. Small wonder, perhaps, that Yeats, half a century after Duffy, should consciously align himself with Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (1893) and overlook Moore almost completely. This new alignment, in which a verbal reading of music survives, would prove to be crucially formative in the Literary Revival. The appearance of innumerable popular editions of the Melodies (with and without music) throughout the nineteenth century hastened Moore’s swift declension from national poet to the embodiment of a popular culture which both the Gaelic League and the Literary Revival quickly disdained. Moore’s posthumous relationship with the Celtic Revival and modern Irish writing in general entailed a repudiation which was as widespread as his earlier acclaim had been. When he resurfaces 30 See Charles Gavan Duffy, ‘Thomas Moore’ (1842), in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, i. 1250–4, at 1251. Duffy’s essay originally appeared in The Nation newspaper as part of the ‘National Gallery’ series.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

51

amidst the ﬂotsam and jetsam of consciousness in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (to say nothing of his dismissal in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), he is consigned to the detritus of Irish cultural discourse, as irrelevant to the modernism and myth-making of Joyce’s fabulations as he is to the brilliant recovery of Gaelic mythology in Yeats. Located perilously between the claims of music, which could only be countenanced by the Revival as a symbol of the literary imagination itself, and those of modernist poetry and drama, Moore’s Melodies lapsed into disrepute. But if writers establish their own forebears (even if they don’t always acknowledge as much), it seems only fair to add—as Seamus Deane has done—that it is Moore’s alignment of Irish music and his own verse that restores to the Melodies their seminal role in the transformation of Irish literature written in English. Divested of their sentimental reputation (to say nothing of Moore’s own projection as an eager socialite in love with the upper reaches of English society), the songs might well have been regarded, not as a cul-de-sac, but as a vital precedent for the Revival itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the polarized condition of music in Ireland—either as a symbol of the integrity of Gaelic culture or as a shibboleth of colonial imposition—meant that the Melodies instead entailed a reception history of striking contempt, or, as in the case of scholars like Declan Kiberd, a tactful silence. The afterlife of the Melodies in the attempt to establish a body of Irish art music was, however, somewhat different. Entirely fresh editions appeared in 1859 (with new ‘symphonies and accompaniments’ by Balfe), and in 1894, by Stanford. Stanford’s encounter with Moore was decisive. Hugely proliﬁc as a composer, from the 1870s until shortly before his death in 1924, Stanford’s complex relationship with Ireland, which was in signiﬁcant measure determined by his politics and his understanding of traditional music, can scarcely be addressed here, except to note that his absorption of Irish music was more thoroughgoing than any composer before or after him, with the sovereign exception of Seán Ó Riada.31 At ﬁrst glance this may seem a strange assertion, but it happens to be true. Stanford’s monumental edition of the Petrie collection of Irish music (1902–5), his 1887 publication Songs of Old Ireland, and his edition and arrangement of the Melodies in 1894 (signiﬁcantly entitled The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore, the Original Airs Restored ) can collectively be regarded, as his recent biographer Jeremy 31 Stanford’s conception of Irish music in relation to his own ambitions as a composer is addressed in Chapter 4 below, in the context of Bernard Shaw’s development as an Irish writer through the agency of European music.

52

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

Dibble puts it, as ‘an immensely important and formative event in the development of Stanford’s musical personality’.32 In this respect, the ‘metaphor of the translation of catholic into protestant, of native and antique authenticity into modern and equally native civility’,33 which Seamus Deane applies to Moore himself can equally well be applied to Stanford’s efforts to get to grips with the ethnic repertory by means of Moore’s own musical translations. In Stanford’s case, these efforts caused a recurring problem. This problem was that the quotation of these melodies (often in full) across the entire range of Stanford’s compositions represented a failure on two counts. First, this compositional habit repeatedly betrayed an inability to integrate the intonations of Irish music with the organic structures of symphonic discourse (with the result that Irish melodies from Moore and elsewhere tend to stand out with a kind of exotic selfconsciousness from the surrounding Germanic context of Stanford’s instrumental music). Secondly, Stanford, so utterly unlike Moore, was an Anglo-Irish unionist whose enchantment with the European aesthetic in music fortiﬁed the association which many commentators (including Bernard Shaw) would draw between art music and the colonial presence. Nor could Stanford overcome the (by then) depleted condition of Moore’s reputation, insofar as any kind of art music, and notably the drawing-room ﬁnesse of Moore’s arrangements, spoke to an Ireland which had long since ceased to be of interest to Stanford’s contemporaries in literature and the visual arts. Although his incorporation of Irish folk song would exert considerable inﬂuence on the perception of art music in Ireland, Stanford’s ‘translation’ of Irish melodies from one (musical) culture into another was not a successful one.34 Many composers were to follow Stanford’s powerful lead in quoting Moore’s Melodies as the vital hallmark of authenticity in Irish music, and all of them encountered the same dissatisfying results. The dutiful presence of the Irish air proved to be an obstacle which Irish art music would not overcome for decades after Stanford’s death, with the notable exception of Arnold Bax, whose music bypassed the legacy of Moore and uniquely depended instead on the Literary Revival and on Yeats himself.35 32 33 34 35

Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford, 2002), 129. Deane, ‘Thomas Moore (1779–1852)’, 1056. See Chapter 4, below. Bax’s creative dependence on Yeats is considered at the close of Chapter 2, below.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

53

Thus, Moore’s Irish musical posterity is akin to his faint presence in the Literary Revival: just as he had been consigned to the limbo of sentimental popularity by the cultural milieu of the Revival, so too his afterlife in Irish art music proved to be a hindrance rather than a help. By the time Seán Ó Riada had rejected European music as ‘not Irish’, Moore’s address upon the ethnic repertory was completely marginalized and—it must be added—most brilliantly usurped by the virtuosity and inventiveness not only of Ó Riada, but of Ceoltóirí Cualann, the Chieftains, and the polished exponents of Irish traditional music in the late twentieth century.

3 It is tempting to speculate as to what might have happened to the reception of Moore had Ireland been more engaged with art music and less polarized by the music question (to say nothing of the language question) in the nineteenth century. But Moore’s reception in Europe is another matter. To consider Moore under the rubric of ‘music and the Irish literary imagination’ is also to consider the impact of the Irish literary imagination on music. In the present context, it is useful to contrast Moore’s considerable inﬂuence as an agent of romanticism in France and Germany with his fall from grace in Ireland. This contrast helps us to explain not only the context in which his auditory imagination can be more comprehensively understood, but also the difference between a verbally dominated cultural matrix (of the kind represented by the Literary Revival in Ireland) and a musical one (as in nineteenthcentury Europe). Despite Moore’s unhappy afterlife as a silent partner in the Revival (beyond the purview of fond remembrance and open contempt), his alignment of music and poetry would survive in Yeats’s habitual insistence on music as a symbol of the poetic imagination, and more expressly still in the deeply rooted association between language and music which Yeats, Synge, and Joyce so strikingly (if variously) maintained. ‘L’Irlande, toujours L’Irlande!’, Hector Berlioz wrote in a letter in March 1829, and although he was thinking inevitably of Harriet Smithson, he was also thinking of Tom Moore. A month later Berlioz published his opus 1, Huit scènes de Faust, with an epigraph from the Irish Melodies. In the following year he published Neuf melodies imitées de

54

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

l’Anglais (Irish Melodies), which he dedicated to Moore and subsequently retitled Irlande. All nine songs were settings of verses by Moore, eight of them translations (by Berlioz and Thomas Gounet) from the Irish Melodies. Berlioz later attributed the genre of his Mélologue, Le retour à la vie (a work which grew out of the Symphonie fantastique) to Moore’s Melologue upon National Music.36 In Irlande, as Julian Rushton has shown, Berlioz not only set French translations of Moore’s verse: he also composed melodies in express imitation of Moore’s poetic style, if not in emulation of the Irish originals on which Moore based his songs. By the late 1820s Moore’s reputation in Paris was such that the term mélodie itself was adapted as an equivalent to the German Lied to designate the genre of French art song. Moore’s musical inﬂuence, therefore, stands at the head of a distinctive tradition which extends from Berlioz to Duparc.37 If Moore, in Rushton’s view, can be counted as ‘a literary and musical inﬂuence on the level of Goethe and Shakespeare’ in the development of Berlioz’s compositional technique, this is self-evidently no small matter, but Berlioz himself was certainly not alone in the conviction that Moore’s songs (and hence the Irish melodies themselves) bore the stamp of melancholy and relayed in some measure a ‘complete picture of the customs, history and suffering of the Irish people’.38 That the translations of Moore (by Gounet) should carry forward a romantic impression of Ireland into France is perhaps unsurprising, but that Berlioz should establish a tradition of French art song expressly by means of Moore’s verse is certainly a matter for comment. If the Irish Melodies ‘drew tears’ from Berlioz, it was Moore’s poetry, rather than the original melodies, which principally inﬂuenced this primary architect of French music in the nineteenth century.39 36 See Julian Rushton, ‘Berlioz and Irlande: From Romance to Mélodie’, in Devine and White (eds.), The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995, 224–40. 37 See Rita Benton, Frits Noske, and David Cox, ‘Mélodie’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xii. 111: ‘The earliest use of the word mélodie for a type of song probably occurred in the 1820s; its eventual adoption was related to the popularity in France of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and the subsequent setting of their texts by various French composers.’ 38 Rushton, ‘Berlioz and Irlande’, 226, quotes from Allen B. Thomas’s Moore en France (1911), which in turn cites an article published in the Revue Encyclopédique in 1823. 39 I have been unable to determine the extent to which Moore’s representation of Irish melody exerted an inﬂuence on Berlioz, notwithstanding that Rushton (‘Berlioz and Irlande’) and other authorities concede that ‘folk-like’ elements in French art song in the nineteenth century derive from the circulation of the Irish Melodies in Europe. What remains indisputably clear is that Moore’s romantic projection of Irish music in the texts of his songs decisively inﬂuenced the cultivation of a distinctive tradition of French art song in the nineteenth century.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

55

The impact of Moore’s literary imagination on European music is even more tellingly disclosed in Germany following the publication and translation of his ‘oriental romance’, Lalla Rookh. As an instance of Moore’s disappearance from reception history, Lalla Rookh is exemplary. There could scarcely be a more compelling contrast between the animated reception which this sequence of poems and prose enjoyed on its ﬁrst publication in 1817, and the general silence in which it has been enveloped since the end of the nineteenth century. Lalla Rookh has passed into the archive almost wholly unremarked, other than for the fantastic sums which Moore was paid as an advance by his publishers and the ‘cream of the copyrights’ which followed. It is almost painful to inspect its soaring reputation across Europe and the United States (where it revived Moore’s standing) in the aftermath of its subsequent neglect. Published on 22 May 1817 by Longmans, the twenty-six songs it contains were also printed separately by Power with their musical settings. By the end of that year six editions had been printed. It was widely reviewed in Britain and Ireland, and Moore found himself acclaimed as ‘the most ingenious, brilliant and fanciful poet of the present age’. Comparisons with Byron were commonplace, and Lalla Rookh caught the public appetite for orientalism on a scale rivalled by few other literary works. It was translated into German, French, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Persian. Nevertheless, as Moore’s biographer Helen Jordan remarks, ‘critics observed of his Melodies and Lalla Rookh that they would not produce a school of Moore, as the school of Wordsworth or Byron had arisen, for no other poet could work in the two media of music and poetry’.40 The critics were right: the lustre of Moore’s reputation in the years following the publication of Lalla Rookh no more secured his position as an English romantic than it contributed to his ambiguous standing as an Irish (proto-) nationalist. To ‘work in the two media of music and poetry’ was to fall between two stools. By 1817, moreover, Wordsworth had already heard inside English poetry ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ and emancipated romanticism from its preoccupation with the enchantments of the east. Orientalism would abide in English writing for decades, but the native pastoral of Wordsworth’s auditory imagination would prove a more enduring mode of poetic discourse than the fantastications of Shelley or the Coleridge of Kubla Khan. Moore’s adventures in the east, deﬁnitive of the rage for the exotic, were decisively eclipsed. 40

This account of Lalla Rookh is drawn from Jordan, Bolt Upright, i. 259–80.

56

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

The terminus of obscurity in Moore’s case is all the more ironic given the essentially lyric cast of his poetic imagination. This irony lies in a comparison with Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) eponymously proclaim the presence of music as an essential consideration in English poetry. But Wordsworth’s music is the music of language, and his subject is the growth of the self—two vital discoveries that lay beyond the sphere of Moore’s literary conception. The lyric mode in Wordsworth is symbolic: in Moore, it is a literal presence which can only achieve its complete realization in music itself. The growth of the self now appears to be so preponderant in our reception of European romanticism (in Goethe as in Wordsworth), that it is easy to overlook other preoccupations, equally prominent, which once dominated the romantic imagination. If the self is the enduring hallmark (and the overriding subject) of European poetry after the French Revolution, the ‘other’, expressed in radical relation to the self or explored for the sake of its own compelling power, was no less signiﬁcant. Expressed as a sequence of contrasts, implicit or explicit, the relationship between the self and the other easily maps the favourite terrain of the romantic imagination: present and past, natural and supernatural, west and east, good and evil, civilization and nature, England and Ireland, to identify a few germane instances.41 In the case of Lalla Rookh, Moore’s appeal to the other, so melliﬂuously rehearsed in the Irish Melodies as a contrast between the felicities of verse in English and the ‘sad degraded truths’ of Irish history, found new and fertile expression in his representation of India. The tale of the Indian princess Lalla Rookh would represent Moore’s principal claim to literary prominence in Europe. ‘Where in Germany even today would you ﬁnd three such literary heroes to set beside Lord Byron, Moore and Walter Scott?’, Goethe enquired in 1824.42 Goethe had been reading Moore since 1821 (at latest), and knew Lalla Rookh 41 Although the literature on romanticism is self-evidently vast, it is interesting to note in passing how Moore’s disappearance from the general canon of nineteenth-century English literature—as in his total absence from Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (eds.), The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Romantic Poetry and Prose (London, New York, and Toronto, 1973)—mirrors his exclusion from the canon of Anglo-Irish literature. Bloom and Trilling privilege the growth of the self (as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude) as the distinctive hallmark of English romantic poetic sensibility, but a more European approach to romanticism (especially in relation to Goethe) would restore the dialectical pairings identiﬁed here to the English and Scottish romantic imagination. 42 ‘Und noch heutzutage, wo wollen Sie denn in Deutschland drei literarische Helden ﬁnden, die dem Lord Byron, Moore und Walter Scott an die Seite zu setzen wären?’ Cited in James Boyd, Goethe’s Knowledge of English Literature (Oxford, 1932), 265. Boyd remarks that, ‘though Goethe’s references to Moore are comparatively few, they are sufﬁciently deﬁnite to show that he considered him a great writer’.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

57

certainly no later than 1823. He would afterwards esteem Moore above all for his biography of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831), but it is not difﬁcult to understand the German poet’s esteem for Lalla Rookh, given the vital seam of orientalism which pervaded Goethe’s own imagination. The general context of Goethe’s prodigious engagement with British writing makes his enthusiasm for Moore all the more remarkable, but the particular afﬁnities between Goethe and Moore (not only in respect of orientalism, but also with regard to their shared structural habit of enclosing stories and songs within the folds of a continuous narrative) account at least in part for Moore’s brilliant reception in Germany.43 In the nineteenth century the mutually intensive relationship between German poetry and music, in which the art song became a principal conduit for the interpretation and reception of Goethe’s poetry (among much else), apostrophized the equal standing of music and literature in ways that did not (and could not) apply in Britain or Ireland.44 From Franz Schubert to Hugo Wolf, the German Lied countenances a response to Goethe’s verse which self-evidently represents a monumental expression of the musical imagination in relation to poetry. This is true to such an extent that Schubert and Wolf have perforce become the most enduring and widely known interpreters of Goethe, especially now when few people experience Goethe at ﬁrst hand, even in Germany.45 As with Faust, 43 Hazlitt’s infamous attack on Moore in The Spirit of the Age (1825) adverts brieﬂy to the afﬁnities between Moore and Goethe (‘with his unpretending origins and mignon ﬁgure’), but these afﬁnities have been little explored. Schumann’s choral settings of Goethe, including the Szenen aus Goethes Faust (composed between 1844 and 1853) and his Requiem f ür Mignon (composed 1849), neighbour his composition of Das Paradies und die Peri (1843). The enclosure of songs in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and in Lalla Rookh (1817) seems to me strikingly similar, to say nothing of Goethe’s abiding preoccupation with orientalism in his novels and poetry. Jordan, Bolt Upright, i. 272–3, brieﬂy recounts an astonishing testament to the popularity of Lalla Rookh in Germany: the representation of ‘living tableaux’ modelled on the poem which the king of Prussia mounted on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter to the brother of the Tsar and the state visit of the couple to Berlin in 1821. ‘The Grand Duchess of Russia (daughter of the King of Prussia) took the part of Lalla Rookh, and the rest of the cast was composed of suitably eminent royalty’ (p. 272). Jordan adds that engravings of these tableaux were sent to Moore and Goethe. 44 We do not look to English music for settings of Wordsworth or Keats in the nineteenth century; likewise, one cannot ﬁnd in Irish music a tradition of art song emanating from the precedent of Moore. Moore’s inﬂuence on the development of French art song, for example, has no useful parallel in the history of art music in Ireland. 45 In the course of a keynote address given on 26 March 2004 at a conference on Goethe as ‘musical poet and musical catalyst’ at Maynooth University, Nicholas Boyle remarked that ‘hardly anyone in Germany reads Goethe anymore’. Although it must be difﬁcult to determine the empirical status of that observation, it is somewhat easier to show that the reception of Goethe’s poetry through the agency of the German art song is the principal means by which this poetry remains in circulation.

58

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

which powerfully inheres in nineteenth-century French opera, twentieth-century German ﬁction, and late twentieth-century Irish drama (to name three obvious instances),46 the afterlife of Goethe’s poetry seems more evident in Schubert and Wolf than in any direct encounter with Goethe himself. One only has to think of the currency of nineteenthcentury German composers (including Schubert) in the present day to understand the difference between the faint reception which now exists for Goethe’s own writings (beyond the purview of specialist commentary) and the powerful inﬂuence which these writings continue to exert through other works and media. Whether such media only partially represent Goethe (or even misrepresent him) is another question, but Goethe’s presence in German music in particular is emblematic of the seminal role which literature enjoys in the German musical imagination from Beethoven to Wagner. And not only is German literature formative in this regard, but—as the history of nineteenth-century opera makes plain—so are Italian, French, and English literatures.47 Viewed in such terms, Lalla Rookh is an unfamiliar case in point.48 ‘It may surprise some modern-day devotees of Schumann’s works’, John Daverio wrote in 1997, ‘to learn that the composition which secured his international reputation was not a symphony, a song cycle, a chamber work, or a poetic cycle of keyboard miniatures, but rather an oratorio.’49 Daverio’s identiﬁcation of Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri. Dichtung aus Lalla Rookh vom Th. Moore (1843) as the work which made his name is indeed a surprise. As with Lalla Rookh, Peri (to use its affectionate contraction) now languishes in an obscurity which is the obverse of the popularity it once enjoyed. Schumann, like Moore before him, was attempting something new: a secular oratorio which would partly realize his ambition to write what Daverio calls ‘literary opera’, in which language and music might coexist as equal partners. When he began to think seriously of adapting Moore’s poem (in a translation by

46 As in Gounod’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, and Tom Murphy’s The Gigli Concert. 47 Familiar examples are Verdi’s settings and adaptations of Victor Hugo and Shakespeare (as in Rigoletto, Otello, and Falstaff ), and Donizetti’s setting of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (Lucia di Lammermoor). 48 In this connection, Stanford’s ﬁrst opera, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan (1877), also based on Lalla Rookh, is a less familiar instance of English opera based on Irish literature. 49 John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (New York, 1997), 274. Daverio remarks (276) that ‘history has not been kind to Moore’s poetry’.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

59

Emil Flechsig) in 1842, Schumann discarded the idea of opera per se in favour of the dramatic oratorio, but he intended from the outset to devise a musical syntax answerable to the epic, lyric, and dramatic registers of Moore’s poetry, albeit in (sometimes very close) translation. The result was to be a work which broke new ground in its radical departure from the closed forms and discrete sequences of ‘number’ opera and oratorio, and which instead explored a continuity of musical discourse underpinned by tonal and formal structures, the logic and symmetry of which Daverio compares to Wagner’s Parsifal.50 Even if we leave this comparison (which many would regard as excessively in Schumann’s favour) to one side, it is useful to advert to Daverio’s understanding of Schumann as ‘a composer who was perhaps the ﬁrst in western musical history to view the art of composition as a kind of literary activity’.51 This is surely a characterization which brings Schumann close to Moore. It might not be too much to add that Moore correspondingly regarded poetry as a kind of musical activity. Moore’s own description of his poetry, as an ‘effort to translate into words the different feelings and passions which melody seemed to me to express’, is one which testiﬁes to the idea of literary composition as an expressly musical enterprise.52 Although he was explicit on this point in regard to the Melodies, it is reasonable to extend this argument to Lalla Rookh also. The four great poems in Lalla Rookh are described in the text as having been recited to musical accompaniment, even if the songs alone were actually intended for musical settings.53 In this suggestion, we begin to approach the nature of Moore’s auditory imagination. ‘I love the whole Schumann,’ Daverio remarks at the 50 See ibid. 277: ‘Of the nineteenth century’s larger creations for vocal and orchestral forces, only Wagner’s Parsifal equals the Peri in dispositional logic and symmetry.’ Daverio’s account of the latter work (pp. 267–84) is much the most detailed assessment published in English to date. I owe to Daverio (p. 546) the disclosure that Wagner ‘also toyed with the idea of setting Moore’s poem to music’. Daverio reports that Wagner abandoned the idea because he ‘couldn’t ﬁnd the proper form in which to render it’, and congratulated Schumann ‘on having done so’. 51 Ibid., p. vii. 52 Quoted in Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song’, 92. In a letter to Elizabeth Piggott dated 12 April 1828, Moore remarked that he hated that ‘any one should read poetry of mine which was only made to be sung and is only passable through that medium’. See Dowden, The Letters of Thomas Moore, ii. 604. 53 See Lalla Rookh, in Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 394 (the introduction to ‘Paradise and the Peri’): ‘ “It is,” said he [Feramorz] . . . “in a lighter and humbler strain than the other”: then, striking a few careless but melancholy chords on his kitar, he thus began . . .’ This description supports the general understanding throughout Lalla Rookh that the poems are recited to musical accompaniment.

60

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

outset of his monumental study, ‘not [only] the one known to most everyone, the dreamy composer of quirky piano pieces and gorgeous songs.’54 But as with Moore, it is the miniatures and ‘gorgeous songs’ which have fared best. It would be untrue to suggest that Schumann’s large-scale works (one thinks of the symphonies and the chamber music) have suffered the same neglect as has so much of Moore, but in either case the judgement of posterity has been notably severe in respect of once-acclaimed masterpieces. Schumann’s failures in opera may be heroic, but they are failures nevertheless.55 His notebooks are ﬁlled with dozens of unrealized operatic projects (including works based on Shakespeare and Byron), but of these, only the Szenen aus Goethes Faust (not strictly an opera in any case) and Genoveva actually came to fruition. It is hard therefore not to conclude that Schumann’s imagination suffered under the duress of trying to reconcile his literary impulses with the claims of music. It would be facile to ascribe precisely the same difﬁculty to Moore, but a degree of comparison between Moore and Schumann helps to identify more narrowly the impact of music on Moore’s imagination. The mixed blessings of that preoccupation are perhaps thrown into sharper relief when we observe that scholars have long since conceded the perplexing impact of literature on Schumann. Unlike his contemporary Mendelssohn, Schumann did not call his shorter piano compositions ‘songs without words’, but their extramusical address on the literary imagination has never been in doubt. He called them ‘character pieces’ instead, and imbued many of them with an expressly extra-musical signiﬁcance.56 They variously describe scenes from nature, narrate stories, personify friends, and dramatize Schumann’s own personality by way of explicit reference to two opposing images of himself, characterized by the self-invented personae of ‘Florestan’ and ‘Eusebius’. Indeed, it was Schumann’s express conviction that (against the grain of post-Beethovenian aesthetics) music was invariably expressive of something beyond its own substantive structure, 54

Daverio, Robert Schumann, p. vii. The ﬁrst complete recording of Genoveva was made as recently as 1976. Schumann is perhaps unique among the canonic composers of European classical music in the degree to which so many of his major works are neglected. Certainly, his project of ‘literary opera’ is one which has fallen into almost complete neglect in the annals of reception history, despite the central importance Schumann himself attached to this. 56 Daverio remarks that the set of early character pieces for piano called Papillons (op. 2) ‘shows us a young composer in the process of construing music as literature’ (ibid. 79). 55

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

61

which informed his life’s work as a composer. It is this intimacy of understanding as between music and literature which brings him so close to Moore. Moore shared this perception, and regarded music not simply as a symbolic embodiment of the literary imagination (and the creative act itself ), but as a correlative of literary discourse. If Schumann’s piano pieces are songs without words, then Moore’s poems, by close analogy, are lyrics without music. In either case, the tantalizing word is ‘without’, in the sense that ‘absence’ can yet intimate ‘presence’. It is this quality which drew Schumann to the second part of Lalla Rookh, entitled ‘Paradise and the Peri’: it was, wrote Schumann, ‘as if intended for music from the start’.57 It is hard to imagine what might now redeem Lalla Rookh from its stagnant reputation (insofar as it has one at all) as ‘ideal fare for young persons’, which is how it was regarded in late Victorian England.58 When the exoticism of the east gave way to the gothic terror of Transylvania (one Irishman, as it were, usurping another in the annals of popular British public taste),59 Lalla Rookh slipped its generic moorings as a great dramatic poem and lay becalmed as a harmless adventure story in rhyme. In that capacity, it is in the same region as Scheherazade or the novels of Karl May, even if this ‘eastern romance’ (Moore’s own subtitle) ﬂeetingly seems closer to a fable by Borges, with its apparatus of footnotes and arcane reference, than anything by Byron or Shelley. Just as MacPherson imagined ancient Scotland in his Ossianic forgeries, so Moore imagined the Orient, if to different purpose. Lalla Rookh, despite its ostentatious descriptions and sources, had from the start a mixed reception as a serious rendition of Indian and Persian culture, but as a romantic address on the other in relation to the self it was an immediate (if controversial) success. The four poems of 57 In a letter from Schumann dated June 19 1843, cited in ibid. 277. Although this explicit recognition of the musical nature of Moore’s auditory imagination (beyond the Melodies) is rare, it only seems fair to add that Moore’s intimate dependence on music was at least implicitly recognized by many people, and notably by those other composers who set his work. Lalla Rookh was set as an opera in whole or in part by C. F. Horn (1818), Gaspare Spontini (1822), Eduard Sobolewski (1850), Félicien David (1862), Anton Rubinstein (1863), Arthur Goring Thomas (1879), and Stanford (1881). 58 See Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, pp. ix–x. Although Godley concedes that ‘it is not so surprising that quite serious critics should have admired this kind of literature’, he ﬁnds it even less surprising that ‘Dear Lalla Rookh’ should have ‘delighted generations of schoolgirls’. This characterization of the poem nevertheless contradicts the reputation which it enjoyed in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, when Moore’s standing equalled Byron’s. 59 Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897.

62

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

which it is made, ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, ‘Paradise and the Peri’, ‘The Fire Worshippers’, and ‘The Light of the Haram’, are so proliﬁcally suggestive of allegory (in particular as between appearance and reality, colonizer and colony, England and Ireland, and notably Moore and his critics), that it is hard to recall that it was apparently read at face value. All four poems are recited by the poet Feramorz, the disguised son of the king of Lesser Bucharia. Feramorz accompanies the caravanserai of princess Lalla Rookh as she makes her fabulous way from Delhi to Kashmir in the company of her vast entourage, including her advisor Fadladeen. Feramorz accompanies himself on the lute throughout his recitations, and Fadladeen robustly criticizes his efforts. Lalla Rookh, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the poet, whose true identity is only revealed at the close. One false step and the whole thing could come straight from the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.60 Despite its literal reception as a tale of the east, Moore’s orientalism masks a preoccupation with Ireland which may have been obvious to readers from the start: in the preface to ‘The Fire Worshippers’ the entourage is camped in sight of a ruined tower, ‘which might perhaps be a relic of some of those dark superstitions, which had prevailed in that country before the light of Islam dawned upon it’. Feramorz feels ‘sympathy… with the sufferings of the persecuted Ghebers, which every monument like this before them but tended more powerfully to awaken’. Fadladeen listens to the tale of rebellion and religious tyranny, ‘expecting treason and abomination in every line’.61 Although the tale is allowed to speak for itself, Moore tells us that Fadladeen resolves to have Feramorz silenced on arrival in Kashmir, and to urge the king, on account of ‘the very dangerous sentiments of his minstrel’, that a failure to chastize him would make an end ‘of all legitimate government in Bucharia’.62 ‘The Fire Worshippers’, for all its exotic charm, speaks directly to the cruelty of political oppression and religious tyranny which Moore denounced in England’s dealings with Ireland throughout his literary career. English corruption and intolerance are removed safely not only to the past, but to the east. But they are present nevertheless.63 60 An early overture by Sullivan ‘after Lalla Rookh’ dates from the composer’s student years in Leipzig. His ‘fairy’ opera Iolanthe (libretto by W. S. Gilbert), is subtitled ‘The Peer and the Peri’ (1882). 61 Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 404–5. 62 Ibid. 434–5. 63 For a compelling assessment of Moore’s poem as a critique of colonialism, see Susan B. Taylor, ‘Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh’, retrieved from the internet on 11 Sept. 2005 at http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/containment/ taylor/taylor.html. Taylor’s opening paragraph reads as follows: ‘This is a piece about the power relations embedded in colonial metaphors. The metaphors I examine connect two

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

63

The structure Moore employs to organize this material is correspondingly simple and strongly reminiscent of the prelude–verse–postlude design of the Irish Melodies (or of the German strophic art song, for that matter). Prose passages introduce the poems, and (through the agency of Fadladeen) provide commentary upon them. The prose also conveys the slender plot by which the tales come to be told and by which they are resolved: ‘ “And this” said the Great Chamberlain, is poetry! This ﬂimsy manufacture of the brain, which in comparison with the lofty and durable monuments of genius, is as the gold ﬁligree-work of Zamara beside the eternal architecture of Egypt!” ’64 The lofty denunciations of Fadladeen throughout Lalla Rookh can fairly be regarded both as an attempt on Moore’s part to forestall (or anticipate) the kind of criticism to which he was routinely subjected, and also as an ironic and self-aware commentary on the nature of his poetic imagination. Fadladeen is a sycophantic hypocrite whose judgements on poetry ultimately depend on the social standing of its author: when Feramorz is revealed as heir to the throne of Bucharia, Fadladeen’s criticisms of the young poet are ‘recanted instantly’. Such an about-face, however, does not entirely deprive the censures themselves of implausibility, if only because they draw attention to Moore’s own difﬁculties in writing verse. These difﬁculties can be summarized, perhaps, as a conﬂict between technical mastery and lyric impulse, a conﬂict which pervades Lalla Rookh: ‘Like the faint, exquisite music of a dream’, is one line which Fadladeen fastens upon in order to indicate the ‘syllabic superﬂuities’ which spoil the iambic pentameter of ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’. Moore, I think, wants us to admire the descriptive power of the simile even as he impugns the technical failure of the line.65 Although Fadladeen’s fault-ﬁnding throughout Lalla distinct but related images of British colonization in the early nineteenth century: one of Ireland as woman and one of the East as woman. These metaphors coincide in Irish writer Thomas Moore’s 1817 narrative poem, Lalla Rookh, An Oriental Romance. The Indian setting and orientalist rhetoric that Moore employs in Lalla Rookh form a sort of literary mantle that allows him to articulate concerns about Irish liberation in the guise of an Eastern tale. Yet as the author of this Eastern tale, Moore is in an almost paradoxical position as a citizen of Ireland, a British colony which is geographically Western but culturally viewed as “other”, insofar as prejudicial fantasies and fears about the Irish cast them as shifty, emotional people prone to excesses of all sorts. Ironically enough, Moore in turn presents similar fantasies and anxieties about Arab and Indian cultures as he uses Lalla Rookh’s allegorical Eastern tales to depict Ireland’s subjection to British rule.’ 64 This is Fadladeen’s immediate reaction to the recitation of ‘Paradise and the Peri’. 65 See Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 392–3. The line is faulty as an example of iambic pentameter, and is only redeemed by reckoning the ﬁrst syllable as an anacrusis. Given that Moore published Lalla Rookh in 1817, it is perhaps relevant to contrast the ‘lax and easy’ nature of his versiﬁcation with the prevailing strictness

64

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

Rookh is often predictive of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, his interventions (unlike Beckmesser’s) may also be expressive of Moore’s own anxiety about the nature and status of his romantic lyricism.66 To judge by the variety of metrical schemes which Moore employs in Lalla Rookh (iambic tetrameters and pentameters prevail, but anapaestic hexameters are notably prominent in the fourth poem and in some of the songs), a primary consideration for Moore was to present his exotic subjectmatter within the technical conventions of English poetry. The translator of Anacreon did not countenance blank verse (I have been unable to ﬁnd any blank verse in Moore), but he did allow himself considerable licence in the matter of syllabiﬁcation. Consider the opening of ‘Paradise and the Peri’: One morn a Peri at the gate Of Eden stood, disconsolate, And as she listen’d to the Springs Of Life within, like music ﬂowing And caught the light upon her wings Through the half-open portal glowing, She wept to think her recreant race Should e’er have lost that glorious place! ‘How happy’, exclaimed this child of air, ‘Are the holy Spirits who wander there, Mid ﬂowers that never shall fade or fall, Though mine are the gardens of earth and sea, And the stars themselves have ﬂowers For me One blossom of Heaven outblooms them all!67 of syllabiﬁcation which Wordsworth maintains throughout his longer poems. On Wordsworth’s extensive preoccupation with strict versiﬁcation (against the grain of many of his contemporaries), see Steven Willett’s review of Brendan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio, 1995), as retrieved from the internet, http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/back/odonnell.html, on 24 Jan. 2006. 66 Beckmesser upbraids Walther von der Vogelweide in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at every turn for his technical failures in the composition of song. In a moving letter to Mary Shelley, written in 1838, Moore remarked that ‘the fact is (whatever people who knew no better may have sometimes thought of me) none of the great guns of our modern Parnassus, Shelley, Wordsworth, Southey, and so forth, have ever acknowledged or admitted me as a legitimate brother—and in this I have a strong suspicion they were not much mistaken’. See Dowden (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Moore, ii. 838–9. Dowden publishes an extract from Mary Shelley’s reply, in which she credibly contradicts Moore, speciﬁcally in regard to her brother’s high opinion of his lyric genius, ‘especially in the department of poetry peculiarly your own—songs and short poems instinct with the intense principle of life and love’ (p. 839). 67 Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 394.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

65

‘The lax and easy kind of metre’ (Fadladeen) in which this is written is most apparent in the second stanza, where the substitution of three short syllables for the iambic short–long stress (‘how happy’ | ‘that never’ | ‘the gardens’, etc.) produces a lilt which draws attention not only to Moore’s habitual relaxation of the rules of strict syllabiﬁcation, but also to his reliance upon a pulse which is strongly suggestive of compound time in musical metre, in which duple beats are subdivided into triplet pulses. Although the poem is ostensibly cast in iambic tetrameter throughout, the constant modiﬁcation of the syllabic stresses produces a triple division of the beat which is deﬁnitive of compound measure. The scansion of the second stanza can thus be rendered musically in such a way as to absorb the extra syllables into a continuous 6/8 metre. This rendition underlines the striking difference between the narrative ﬁrst stanza, with its prevailing iambic pulse, and the compound pulse of direct speech in the second stanza. This is a difference which Schumann explicitly recognizes in his musical setting. Das Paradies und die Peri begins with a ‘recitative song’, a formally open but motivically coherent alto narrative in which the vocal line is preﬁgured in the expressive orchestral prelude, and in which the simple time of Moore’s iambic ﬁrst stanza is closely preserved. In the second stanza, however, the direct speech of Moore’s verse is emphasized by the omission of ‘exclaimed this child of air’, and enriched by the closed form of an aria. More signiﬁcantly still, Schumann’s orchestral accompaniment to this soprano aria strongly projects the pulse in triplets, so that the German translation (which at this point follows the Moore original very closely) is organized in hendecasyllabic tetrameters which preserve the triplet pulse of Moore’s verse (as in: ‘though | mine-are-the | gar-dens-of | earth and | sea’ and ‘Sind | mein-auch-die- | Gär-ten-auf | Lan-den-und | Meer’).68 In Schumann’s setting, it is the orchestra which scans the verse. The voice is thereby freed from the obligations of marking the basic pulse. It has other, more interesting, things to do. It is Schumann who resolves the conﬂict between lyric impulse and technical mastery in Moore. ‘Syllabic superﬂuities’ are no longer of any account, except as an intimation of music itself. The ﬂexibility and inventiveness of Schumann’s vocal writing, the richness and suggestive range of his orchestral technique (including its motivic interdependence with the voice), and his imaginative projection 68 All references to Das Paradies und die Peri are taken from Robert Schumann: Werke, ed. Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, et al. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1881–93), series ix/1, vol. 3

66

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

of Moore’s poetry throughout Das Paradies und die Peri are, to be sure, expressive of the difference between a musical imagination and a literary one. But it would be wrong to dismiss Moore’s ballad-like simplicity in this second stanza as a succession of rudimentary triplets which are overtaken by the throbbing pulse of Schumann’s orchestral textures and the winning ﬂexibility of his vocal line. This is simply because Schumann, in these stanzas and throughout ‘Paradise and the Peri’ can hear inside Moore’s verse the sounding-board of his own musical imagination. Prima le parole (‘The words come ﬁrst’) is the operatic formula which acknowledges this creative dependence, and in the ﬁrst instance it is only fair to press home the argument that Schumann’s lyric and orchestral opulence creatively depends—in ways that are explicitly related to Moore’s verbal technique—on the poetry that he sets. Schumann’s response to Moore is no less signiﬁcant an act of interpretation than is his response to Goethe. In either case (Moore or Goethe), the precedent of a literary imagination already imbued with music is unmistakable. The status of music in Moore’s auditory imagination nevertheless remains problematic, however illuminating Schumann’s response to it may be. In Lalla Rookh, where the whole question of Irish music and its inﬂuence on Moore is at one remove, we can see clearly enough that the lyric condition of Moore’s verse is sharply distinguished not only from music itself (as in Schumann), but also from that vital tradition of verbal music in English poetry which originates with Wordsworth. It is not only that the rich seam of orientalism which Moore worked almost to the point of exhaustion was overtaken by Wordsworth’s more enduring projection of the self-as-subject, but also that the techniques of English romantic verse were otherwise engaged. Wordsworth, from Tintern Abbey to The Prelude, from 1798 to 1850, favours blank verse in iambic pentameter. There are sovereign exceptions to this preference, but his enduring habit of retaining strict syllabiﬁcation (as in ten syllables per line of iambic pentameter) is a striking feature to anyone who reads Wordsworth and Moore back to back. There is a practised ease to this technical consistency (to say nothing of its classic bearings in relation to Elizabethan blank verse) which invariably projects Wordsworth’s imagery, rather than his metre, into the foreground. The intimacy and penetration of Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the self thereby gain from the untroubled and stable condition of his versiﬁcation. With Moore, by contrast, the pulse of metre, pointing again and again to something beyond the verse (namely, music), is much more obtrusive. Wordsworth did acknowledge ‘the power of music’ (in a poem from

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

67

1807), but he became strategically far more interested in the verbal music of poetry. In that simple transference lies the difference between his poetry and Moore’s.69 The muted condition of music in the formation of English romanticism meant that Moore’s vital afterlife in the music of Robert Schumann would pass almost unremarked. Gavan Duffy’s sympathetic reappraisal of Moore (1842) does countenance the ‘long, wild, sweet, barbarous and fascinating melody’ of Lalla Rookh, but remains unaware of his extensive inﬂuence on European music.70 If, as W. J. McCormack suggests, literature (and not music) embodied the soul of Ireland for the writers of The Nation, then it is scarcely surprising that Moore’s achievement in this regard should have counted for so little.71 Moore inspired Berlioz in the creation of French art song; he inspired Schumann in the creation of German dramatic music; he inspired Adam Mickiewicz in the creation of Polish literary nationalism, which in turn created a climate for the musical nationalism of Frederic Chopin. Why should he prove so fertile in Europe and so neglected at home? This question returns us to the Irish Melodies.

4 Moore’s avowed project in the Melodies was ‘to interpret in verse the touching language of his country’s music’.72 It is this enterprise, so rarely considered in isolation from the troubled reception history which has attended the Melodies themselves, which brings us close to the nature of Moore’s auditory imagination. If I suggest here that this imagination 69 This preference for the verbal music of poetry over music itself in the development of English romanticism is thrown into sharp relief by the ascendancy of musical romanticism in Germany in the nineteenth century. In Chapter 2, below, I argue that the overwhelmingly verbal expression of English romanticism is also an important precedent for the Irish Literary Revival, particularly with regard to Yeats. 70 Duffy published his essay on Moore in the ‘National Gallery’ series in The Nation (which echoed the ‘Portrait Gallery’ in the Dublin University Magazine). 71 See W. J. McCormack, editorial introduction to Duffy, ‘Thomas Moore’, 1250, in which he remarks that ‘Literature, for The Nation, was not only the embodiment of Ireland’s soul but also a ﬁeld for propagandist colonization’. It is hardly necessary to add that, in Europe, the embodiment of a nation’s soul was far more commonly perceived through the agency of music. 72 Moore, quoted in the preface to the second edition of Moore’s Irish Melodies: With Symphonies and Accompaniments for the Pianoforte by M.W. Balfe (London, 1865), p. v.

68

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

rests on the borders of music, it is because Moore’s verse is self evidently contained by two prevailing considerations: a romantic understanding of Irish music as an expression of loss, and a technical allegiance to the limitations of the airs themselves. Between the actual music of the antiquarian collections and the interpretation of this music in Moore’s Melodies lies an auditory imagination which is intent on translation. But it is a translation from Irish music into English verse, with the rider that this verse should convey the author’s romantic conception of the original music intact. What is more, the Irish Melodies explicitly depend on the original music to justify and animate the linguistic import which they contain. That whole seam of imagery in the Melodies which relies on the commonplace projection of the Irish harp as a metaphor of the dispossessed imagination (with its dim roots in classical antiquity and the ‘aeolian harp’ of Greek poetry) entails a unique address upon music itself, not as a metaphorical presence, but as a sounding form. In this reliance, Moore is not only at odds with his romantic contemporaries, but with the Irish Literary Revival which came after him as well. In this reliance, too, Moore’s achievement is radically distinct from the whole tradition of art song in Europe, which, as I have indicated, he nevertheless inﬂuenced in signiﬁcant measure. Put plainly, Moore’s is a unique achievement. In writing verse which seeks to interpret pre-existing music, he reverses the normative process in Europe by which music seeks to interpret preexisting verse. Moore’s own verse stands behind French and German music in ways which compare to Goethe’s presence in Schubert (to name just one comparable instance), but the Irish Melodies represent an act of imagination for which there is no useful parallel before or after their appearance. For better or worse, it is Moore’s synthetic conjunction of sounding form and language which deﬁnes the scope of his auditory imagination, at least insofar as the Melodies are concerned. To understand this conjunction as a species of translation is necessarily an incomplete comprehension of what happens in the Melodies, because the coexistent claims of music and poetry are not completely resolved in that metaphor. But translation would appear to be the best metaphor we have. In a brilliant reading of the Melodies which directly addresses the strategic intelligence and nature of Moore’s enterprise, Matthew Campbell observes that: ‘ “Translation” in the Melodies, is not from Irish into English, which the lyrics never pretend to do, or even entirely from music into words, but more precisely from the music of one nation

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

69

into the language of another.’73 Read against Robert Welch’s penetrating remark that: ‘A poetry that tries to capture the moods and atmospheres of a melody is doomed to failure,’ it is possible to advance Campbell’s reading of the Melodies as an attempt to render in language the ‘meaning’ of the melodies both generally (as in Moore’s own conventions of loss) and individually (as in the inherent meaning which individual melodies might suggest). Bearing in mind those discriminations between the natural contour of the original melodies and Moore’s verbal connotations which have exercised scholars of the music from Edward Bunting to Janet Harbison,74 we can moreover adduce the primary role of hermeneutics in the Melodies as a verbal construct and not as the empirical discovery of some inherent ‘sadness’, or connotation of ‘desire and loss’ in the tunes themselves. Even so, it remains an almost (if not entirely) intractable difﬁculty in reading the Irish Melodies that Moore’s synthetic constructs of music and verse most certainly express an auditory imagination directly governed by musical structure. The easiest way to comprehend this reliance is to go to the songs themselves. ‘At the Mid Hour of Night’, from the ﬁfth number of the Melodies (1811), is a setting by Moore of a tune listed as ‘Molly, My Dear’, which was originally collected by Edward Bunting. As Matthew Campbell has shown, its verbal rhythm of ‘ethereal changeability’ derives from the structure of the melody itself, which discloses an unorthodox but perfectly regular design: ﬁve phrases, each of ﬁve measures’ length, organized into an AABBA pattern.75 Moore’s verbal prosody and rhyme schemes are strictly attentive to this design. Whether or not we assent to Moore’s auditory perception of inherent sadness in the tune itself, one cannot mistake his adherence to its musical structure in the composition of his verse. A glance at the music (which is often more than it gets) is sufﬁcient to conﬁrm Moore’s habitual and creative dependence on the phrase structure and melodic correspondence (or rhyme) of the original airs in the structure of his poetic metre and rhyme schemes. The ‘triple and duple 73

Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song’, 93. My own view is that the extent of Moore’s musical adjustments to the original airs (which is to say, the representation of these airs in Bunting and other sources) has been exaggerated. Although Moore without question radically altered the original tempo of many of the tunes in order to accommodate his own poetic of dispossession and loss, the settings which I have examined conﬁrm that in purely musical terms (rhythmic duration and pitch) Moore stayed remarkably close to his sources. As the present discussion discloses, moreover, he frequently allowed the melodic structure of the airs to dictate the poetic structure of his verse. 75 See Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song’, 98. 74

70

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

feet in a loose pentameter line’, which Campbell discerns in ‘At the Mid Hour of Night’, are in the ﬁrst instance determined by the alternation of triple and duple pulses in the music. It really is that simple. The musical morphology of ‘Molly, my dear’ governs the corresponding rhyme scheme which Moore devises (AABBA), just as it determines the syllabic setting and metrical design of the verse: Schumann remarked that the titles of his character pieces came to him after he had written the music, and not before. The music suggested a meaning which Schumann subsequently apostrophized in phrases such as ‘Scenes from Childhood’ or ‘From Far and Distant Lands’ or simply ‘Dreaming’. Moore’s auditory imagination likewise proceeds from the suggestive morphology of the music to language, so that ‘At the Mid Hour of Night’ can only be properly understood as a verbalization, a translation into language, of the meaning which the shape of the music dictates. This translation, however, is not a vague aspiration to the (romantic) hermeneutics of music, but a closely wrought verse that depends at every turn on the inherently formal organization of the original melody. Moore’s technical allegiance to the formal shape and pulse of ‘Molly, My Dear’ entails a poetry that thereby stands aloof from the metrical conventions of his own day (as in a strict adherence to iambic pentameter or free verse) and instead reproduces the musical scansion and musical rhyme of the tune itself. To read ‘At the Mid Hour of Night’ without any cognizance of the air by which it is generated, and to which it is permanently attached, is to deprive Moore’s verse of that auditory intelligence which gives it signiﬁcance. In that deprivation lies the origin of Moore’s dismissal as a poetaster and panderer. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that Moore’s verse owed its metrical and formal designs to the music which he was setting. Throughout the Melodies, Moore’s word-setting closely adheres to the phrase structure and rhymed cadences of the original airs, which is one reason why his verses are preponderantly syllabic. It is a short step from this observation to the suggestion, in turn, that his auditory imagination is conditioned by the sounding form of Irish music, at least with regard to the Melodies. What is much more difﬁcult to determine is the extent to which Moore’s verse (compellingly reunited in Campbell’s reading with the music, but otherwise divorced as a matter of convention by commentators) discriminates between its poetic of loss and its auditory reliance on music. This matter is complicated by Moore’s own convictions about the inherent sadness of Irish music and his determination to translate this into verse. Even if recourse to the original airs (or their

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

71

representation in the Moore–Stevenson arrangements) permits us to see more clearly than otherwise the technical extent to which Moore’s prosody follows the musical structure, the ‘wailing after a lost cause’ by which the Literary Revival commonly identiﬁed Moore, and thereby repudiated him, has everything to do with music as a metaphorical expression in his poetry and almost nothing to do with Irish music or music of any kind. If, as Seamus Deane stringently observes, the Literary Revival achieved ‘the remarkable feat of ignoring the Famine and rerouting the claim for cultural exceptionalism through legend rather than through history’,76 it is safe to conclude that this feat entailed a severe dismissal not only of Moore’s engagement with history (both within and beyond the Irish Melodies), but also of his engagement with music. If Moore’s reading of Irish history in the Melodies was construed at best as covert and at worst as opportunistic, it is hardly surprising that the ‘romantic lyric mode’ of his auditory imagination should scarcely have registered on the Revival, still less the dependence of that imagination on music itself. A new kind of music, the verbal music of Yeats’s heroic imaginings, would take its place. For Moore himself, however, the intimacy which he espoused between Irish music and history would remain to the end. In his preface to the collected edition of the Irish Melodies (1841), he nominates individual songs for their express political content (as in his insistence that ‘Oh, breathe not his name’ was inspired by Emmett and not Edward Fitzgerald), and identiﬁes a connection between certain verses and his abiding agitation for Ireland, as the following excerpt makes characteristically plain: The feeble attempt to commemorate the glory of our great Duke—‘When History’s Muse,’ etc.—is in so far remarkable, that it made up amply for its want of poetic spirit, by an outpouring, rarely granted to bards in these days, of the spirit of prophecy. It was in the year 1815 that the following lines ﬁrst made their appearance:— And still the last crown of thy toils is remaining, The grandest, the purest even thou hast yet known; Though proud was thy task, other nations unchaining, Far prouder to heal the deep wounds of thy own. At the foot of that throne, for whose weal thou hast stood Go, plead for the land that ﬁrst cradled thy fame, etc. 76 Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997), 51.

72

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

About fourteen years after these lines were written, the Duke of Wellington recommended to the throne the great measure of Catholic Emancipation.77

Moore is quoting here from ‘While History’s Muse’, a song which originally appeared in the sixth number of the Irish Melodies (1815). Direct forms of address to living personages are rare in the Melodies as a whole, and, if anything, this one maintains a connection between Irish history and music which is too close for comfort. Moore’s exhortation to the duke of Wellington to heal the deep wounds of Ireland is prefaced by two verses of arch ﬂattery which introduce into the Melodies the kind of obsequiousness he otherwise detested. Whether this fawning is sufﬁciently offset by the lines cited above is a question which apostrophizes the whole argument about Moore, but in this context my concern is to identify the still more intimate connection between the ﬁddle tune on which ‘While History’s Muse’ is based (identiﬁed not only by Moore but by scores of collectors as ‘Paddy Whack’) and the structure of Moore’s verse.78 The ABCB design of the jig, its compound metre, and characteristic phrase endings are all carried over into the verse with such rhythmic and metrical exactitude that the grave implorations of the text are undermined by the ebullient formulas of the melodic line. There is a distinction to be drawn between the rudimentary vigour of the dance tune and the lofty appeal of Moore’s verse, which not only provides an interesting rebuttal to Edward Bunting’s general complaint that Moore represented the melodies in a ‘drawling, dead, doleful and die-away manner’,79 but which also permits us to distinguish between the verbal music of the language itself and the lilting counterpoint of the rhythms in which it is cast. This distinction between a jaunty jig and the solemn rhetoric of emancipation would suggest that Moore’s auditory imagination was on occasion governed by musical structure not wisely, but too well. In the case of ‘While History’s Muse’, Moore’s allegiance to the jig entails a clash between the functional merriment of dance music 77

From the preface to the ﬁrst collected edition of the Irish Melodies (1841). ‘Paddy Whack’ appeared as a country dance and ﬁddle tune in several collections published in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. Its most recent documented appearance prior to the sixth number of the Melodies was in S. Holden, A Collection of Old Established Irish Slow and Quick Tunes. Books 1 & 2 (Dublin, c.1805), Book 1, 30. I am grateful to Adrian Scahill for providing this information. Dr Scahill adds that this is also the ﬁrst documented appearance of ‘Paddy Whack’ from an Irish source. The text of ‘While History’s Muse’ is published in Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 207. 79 A phrase used in Bunting’s 1840 collection and cited in Charlotte Milligan Fox, Annals of the Irish Harpers (London, 1911), 107 78

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

73

and the solemn address to Wellington which it is asked to convey. But it is imperative to add that Moore, as a rule, succeeded in aligning his structural dependence on the original airs with the verbal music of his verse, to the extent that his hermeneutics of musical ‘sadness’—which pervade the poetry—often entailed precisely those modiﬁcations (especially in regard to tempo) which so antagonized Bunting. Moore’s principal adjustment to the airs which he took from printed collections was to alter the pace of a lively tune in deference to the sentiments of his poetry. The ﬁnal number of the sixth volume, ‘Dear Harp of My Country!’, is a case in point. Originally intended as a farewell to the whole enterprise of the Irish Melodies, the text is demure, valedictory, and consistent in its identiﬁcation of Moore as the true intelligencer of Irish music: Dear Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee, The cold chain of Silence had hung o’er thee long When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee, And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song. The warm lay of love and the light note of gladness Have waken’d thy fondest, thy liveliest thrill, But, so oft hast thou echoed the deep sigh of sadness, That even in thy mirth it will steal from thee still. Dear Harp of my country! Farewell to thy numbers, This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine! Go, sleep with the sunshine of Fame on thy slumbers, Till touch’d by some hand less unworthy than mine. If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover, Have throbb’d at our lay, ’tis thy glory alone; I was but as the wind, passing heedlessly over, And all the wild sweetness I waked was thy own.80

If Irish music is meant to excite the pulse of the ‘patriot, soldier or lover’, its true import, in which ‘the deep sigh of sadness’ is immanent, has been unbound by Moore, whose words have broken ‘the cold chain of Silence’ in which this music slept. All the tropes which deﬁne Moore’s reading of Irish music are here intact, together with his own redeeming role in bringing this music to life again. Moore’s entitlement to these claims depends in the ﬁrst instance on his perception of the success of the Irish Melodies as a whole, but the text of ‘Dear Harp of My Country!’ also adverts to the complicit nature of the whole enterprise (‘our lay’), 80

Godley (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 210.

74

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

as between the inspiration of the original airs—which, as I have tried to suggest, determine the metre and syllabiﬁcation of the verse—and Moore’s synthesis of music and language in the ﬁnished song. In this synthesis, ‘Dear Harp of My Country!’ is exemplary. Moore takes a country-dance tune, ‘New Langolee’, which was published by Thomson in 1775, and which had already been set as a comic song which celebrates a ribald contrast between Handel’s music and the ‘Irish music’ of phallic prowess: Ye Ladies attend to your juvenile poet, Whose labours are always devoted to ye, Whose ambition it is, and most of you know it, To charm all your hearts, with his Langolee. Langolee! what sweet vowels compose it, It is the delight of each fair maid that knows it And she that does not, may with rapture suppose it, That Irish shillalee, call’d Langolee. The loss of our eminent Handel’s lamented, Yet in this opinion all ladies agree, That his solos, concertos, and all he invented, Could ne’er charm their senses like Langolee. Langolee, oh! Handel resign it, The contest is vain, you had better decline it; For musical ladies thus chose to deﬁne it, The gamut of music is Langolee.81

It would be interesting to discover whether or not these charming obscenities were known to Moore, but the sentiments they convey unmistakably express that endemic hostility to art music which characterizes the ballad tradition in late eighteenth-century Ireland. The emasculations of Handel give way before the ‘gamut of music’ itself, which is the prospect of an erect, Irish penis. In this context, the ﬁddle tune is there to give life to these sentiments, and its own virility nourishes the bullish repudiation of music as anything except a prelude to rough trade. It is not hard to imagine that Tom Moore would have in turn repudiated the titillations of this setting of ‘New Langolee’, but in any case we cannot doubt that his own sense of music had nothing to do with the leering insights of the ‘juvenile poet’ who authored it. Moore’s auditory imagination, it would seem, ran along different lines. 81 The text here is from a setting published in The Festival of Anacreon [!] (London, 7th edn., 1789). ‘Langolee’ is Irish slang for an ‘engorged’ penis.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

75

This is self-evidently the case in respect of language and sensibility (to say nothing of Moore’s sense of history), but it is also true of Moore’s recourse to the tune itself. No longer the occasion of sly debasement, ‘New Langolee’ instead becomes a conduit for Moore’s own conception of Irish music. The words of ‘Dear Harp of My Country!’ themselves retard the pace of the tune (as does Moore’s punctuation), and thus modiﬁed, the tune colludes in that romantic lyricism which is the prevailing tonality of Moore’s poetic diction. In Moore’s arrangement, the close (and characteristic) alignment of syllable and pitch ensures that the music becomes the true intelligencer of the verse, just as Moore regards his own sentiments (here as elsewhere) as the true intelligencer of the music. In that mutuality the deﬁning essence of Moore’s imagination is located. The mental journey from obscene lyric (with its vital contempt for the European musical imagination) to romantic address could scarcely be clearer, but in that progress Moore takes the original tune with him. Moore’s verse self-evidently identiﬁes Irish music in new terms (principally as an intelligencer of Irish history), which are impertinent, if not irrelevant to the jeering hostility of the comic song published in 1789. But the ‘wild sweetness’ he identiﬁes in the original melody would ﬁnd no place in the Irish literary imagination, except as a verbal construct of its own.

5 James Clarence Mangan’s adjudication on the Melodies proved to be decisive in their Irish reception history: Moore’s songs were made for the ballroom, and for gentle maidens, who sit down to a piano, manufactured by some London house—they are, beyond a doubt, matchless in their caste—but before Moore sung, our grandmothers at the spinning-wheel, and our great-grandfathers, whether delving in the ﬁelds, or shouldering a musket in the brigades, sang these time-consecrated verses, to keep alive the memory of Ireland, her lost glories and cherished aspirations. Before Moore was, those bards were, and it is but fair to give their memory the honour which some would bestow exclusively on the author of ‘The Irish Melodies’. How few out of the whole mass of our peasantry ever heard a single song out of the ‘Melodies’?82 82 Cited by Deane, Strange Country, 136–7. Mangan’s remarks were ﬁrst published in John O’Daly (ed.), The Poets and Poetry of Munster: A Selection of Irish Songs by the Poets of the Last Century, with Poetical Translations by the Late James Clarence Mangan, now for the ﬁrst time published, with the Original Music, and biographical sketches of the Authors (Dublin, 1849).

76

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

The stark inaccuracy of these assertions could never intrude (or even register) on a history of ideas indifferent to music except as an aid to political sentiment. Mangan’s idea that the Melodies should lie within reach of ‘our peasantry’ expresses that puzzled contempt for art music which became a recurring motif in Irish cultural discourse, from Davis to the present day. The equation of ‘those bards’ and ‘our great-grandfathers’ allows Mangan to suggest that a hidden culture of high Gaelic civilization was carried forward in the collective memory of the peasantry, and that Moore had somehow usurped that culture in the polite emasculation of his drawing-room ballads. Even if it were possible to set the record straight (particularly with regard to the transmission of Irish music in collections of instrumental tunes which had long since been divorced from any stable association with ‘these time-consecrated verses’ by the time Moore came upon Bunting’s ﬁrst volume (1797) ),83 the ‘unheard melody’ which Mangan discovered in Gaelic poetry was the music of cultural and political emancipation. But it was not music. ‘It was essential to the career of Mangan that he should be seen to replace Moore’, Deane remarks.84 It was likewise essential that language should be seen to replace music. If Moore was to resurface as anything other than the purveyor of false sentiment in an alien tradition, it would be as a silent partner (and not as the ‘outstanding ﬁgure’ of Deane’s assessment) in the long transformation of Gaelic culture into English. His Irish Melodies might become a handbook of cultural separatism (as they did for Douglas Hyde), or a stamping-ground for unionist indignation (as in Ferguson’s review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy), but by the time Ferguson published his Lays of the Western Gael (1865), Moore’s originality had been suppressed.85 If, as I have tried to argue here, Moore’s auditory imagination rested on the borders of music, it might seem reasonable to suggest that the Literary Revival, which rested on borders of its own (notably the borders of Gaelic culture), could not be expected to champion Moore’s inter83 It seems apparent that by ‘time-consecrated verses’ Mangan means those Irishlanguage texts which Bunting had collected but which he nevertheless suppressed. On this matter, see White, The Keeper’s Recital, 41–3, and Colette Moloney, The Irish Music Manuscripts of Edward Bunting (1773–1843): An Introduction and Catalogue (Dublin, 2000). 84 Deane, Strange Country, 136. 85 For some consideration of the contrast between Mangan’s reception of Moore (which follows the Young Ireland tendency to regard him as a panderer) and Ferguson’s indictment of Moore in his 1834 review of Hardiman, see White, The Keeper’s Recital, 61 ff., and Deane, Strange Country, 136–7.

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

77

textual response to Irish music, at the expense of its own complicated intertextuality of language (as between Irish and English). But since Yeats so explicitly identiﬁed himself with Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson expressly in terms of music, the ‘company that sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong’ seems fairly to include Tom Moore. It was, after all, precisely on this account that he was excluded from the paternity of the Revival itself. For Yeats, certainly, Moore sang not wisely but too well. This paradox is deepened by Moore’s presence in the imaginative afterlife of European art music, to say nothing of his formative inﬂuence on nationalist poetry in Poland and the ‘bizarre’ esteem in which Goethe held him. It may be that the history of later nineteenth-century music in Europe can help to explain what happened to Moore in Ireland. Schumann’s ‘literary opera’ was certainly overtaken by Wagner’s ‘total art work’, in which the rival claims of German music and literature were remarkably resolved in favour of music, just as Moore’s creative (and structural) dependence on music was overtaken in Ireland by Yeats’s poetry, in which both the music of language and the symbolic presence of music eclipse the prospect of further engagement with music itself. But it is insufﬁcient to point out that, unlike the case of Schumann and Wagner, Moore was a musician whereas Yeats was a poet. If Moore ‘single-handedly founded a recognizably Irish poetic tradition in English’, one could nevertheless be forgiven for thinking that this achievement belonged to Mangan and Ferguson, to judge not only by Yeats, but by almost the whole body of commentary which follows from the Revival. Moore’s displacement from the canon of Irish literature can fairly be read as a displacement of music itself, in favour of the music of language and the symbolic properties of musical discourse as these apply to poetry. (Moore’s reception in the history of Irish music is, however, another matter.) But the music of language and the symbolic properties of musical discourse can justiﬁably be advanced as terms in which to describe the auditory imagination of Moore’s own poetry, especially given his lifelong preoccupation with the sounding form of music, which the Melodies permanently attest. Moore’s conception of Irish music, as a long-silent witness to degradation and loss awoken by the lyric address which he made upon it (as in ‘Dear Harp of My Country!’), was a romantic moment which could not endure the verbally dominated matrix of Irish cultural regeneration. It was a conception that seemed to lapse into sentimental remembrance, contemptuous dismissal, or silent disdain. But it was also a conception that would not only ‘lie at the heart of Irish writing for more than a century afterwards’ (Deane), but

78

The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

which would ensure the presence of music as a symbol of the literary imagination throughout the Revival. Moore’s own reliance on music, the deﬁning feature of his auditory imagination, would modulate into the persistent search for music in language, even as the idea of music continued to exert a vital role in the symbolism of Irish poetry and drama. In this modulation, as in the symbolic recourse to music, Yeats was pre-eminent.

2 W. B. Yeats and the Music of Poetry

Both you that understand stringed instruments, And how to mingle words and notes together So artfully that all the Art’s but Speech Delighted with its own music; and you that carry The twisted horn, and understand the notes That lacking words escape Time’s chariot. (W. B. Yeats)1

1 Two years before his death, W. B. Yeats broadcast a series of programmes on the BBC in which his poems were recited and sung. In his prefatory remarks to the ﬁrst of these broadcasts, Yeats was careful to distinguish clearly for his audience what he meant by ‘singing’: Both the folk singers and the speaker of verse must keep within the range of the speaking voice and the range of the speaking voice is small. Perhaps the folk singer may go a little beyond it here and there but if he goes far he becomes a bird or a musical instrument, and his proper place is the concert platform. Why not ﬁll up the space between poem and poem with musical notes and so enable the mind to free itself from one group of ideas, while preparing for another group, and yet keep it receptive and dreaming? Furthermore to rest and vary the attention I have suggested that certain parts of poems should be sung. There is, however, one point on which I have been emphatic. There must be no speaking through music, nothing like Mendelssohn’s accompaniment to the Mid-Summer 1

The King’s Threshold (1903).

80

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

Night’s Dream, and there must be no accompaniment to what is sung: the words need all our attention.2

‘There must be no speaking through music’: it’s a suggestive phrase, but all Yeats meant was that the Mendelssohn would get in the way; it does not seem to have occurred to him that Mendelssohn’s music might speak of its own accord. Nevertheless, the whole passage is a decisive repudiation of music as anything other than an aid to verbal communication and the discourse of poetry. In a subsequent broadcast he asked Margot Ruddock ‘to sing to her own music two of my early poems, selected by myself ’. Yeats went on to note that Ruddock was not Irish, but that ‘she sings as we sing in Ireland, without accompaniment’. He then determined how best to appreciate her renditions of ‘Into the Twilight’ and a song from The Countess Cathleen: ‘If you listen, as a trained musician listens, for the notes only, you will miss the pleasure you are accustomed to and ﬁnd no other. Her notes cannot be separated from the words. Because her singing gives me great pleasure, I am sure it will give pleasure to some others.’3 It would be interesting to know the nature of Margot Ruddock’s performance (only Yeats’s typescript survives), but in any case it seems clear that what commended her ‘own music’ to Yeats was that it heightened the recitation of the verse but that it gave no quarter to anything which might be construed as a musical setting.4 Yeats’s approbation was grounded in the certainty that the pleasure of music would not detract from the verbal music of his own poetry. ‘Delighted with its own music’, Yeats’s verse would brook no brother to the throne. However unsettling Yeats’s hostility to music may now appear, it gains in signiﬁcance when we come to consider how his poetry not only aspires to the condition of music, but presents itself to the world as an objective correlative of musical discourse. Yeats was absolutely clear on the self-standing nature of his poems—he meditated on them as objects 2 W. B. Yeats, ‘In the Poet’s Pub’, BBC radio broadcast, 2 Apr. 1937, typescript published in Colton Johnston (ed.), W. B. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews, Uncollected Articles, Reviews and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900 (New York, 2000), 265–75, at 266–7. Emphasis mine. Johnston (404, n. 477) records that Yeats deleted from the typescript: ‘and I have begged them, with all the vehemence of which I am capable, to avoid properly trained singers. Those magniﬁcent people belong to the concert platform, not to us. We are just ordinary people who sing because we are in love or drunk, or because we don’t want to think of anything in particular.’ This deletion conﬁrms Yeats’s lifelong disavowal of art music as something extraneous to Irish society. 3 W. B. Yeats, ‘My Own Poetry Again’, BBC radio broadcast, 29 Oct. 1937, typescript published in Johnston (ed.), W. B. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews, 290–6, at 293. 4 On this point, particularly in relation to the row between Edmund Dulac and Yeats over Ruddock’s participation in the broadcasts and her unsuitability as a musician from Dulac’s point of view, see R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II: The Arch-Poet (Oxford, 2003), 587–9.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

81

external to himself, and observed them at work in the world. The poetic work of art, the unageing monument of intellect, enjoyed in Yeats’s imagination a degree of objective existence which engaged with history no less than did the music dramas of Richard Wagner.5 What licensed this self-recognition was, in Denis Donoghue’s phrase, the ‘equestrian authority’ of Yeats’s poetic diction. ‘Equestrian’ might be a risible adjective in other contexts, but when it qualiﬁes ‘authority’ it connotes the formal control and intonation of Yeats’s voice in contradistinction to the mundane registers of prosaic diction, including the poetry which such diction might allow and produce. Essential to this voice is Yeats’s own bardic conception of poetry, in which ‘all the old writers . . . wrote to be spoken or to be sung’, as against the condition of modern poetic discourse ‘that is effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain moments of strained lyricism’.6 In this respect, too, the comparison with Wagner is germane: an impatience with the status quo of musical or literary discourse, a determination upon the recovery of indigenous mythologies, a magisterial insistence on the reuniﬁcation of word and tone (however differently achieved) produce in Yeats and Wagner a monumentality of voice which does not require admiration but which invariably attains recognition. In either case, it is this voice that counts. Iconic, lapidary, monumental, ceremonious, if also erotic and lyric, it is this elevation of voice that ﬁnally distinguishes the music of one and the poetry of the other. This likening, as between a great musician and a great poet, is modestly strategic on my part, insofar as I would like to draw attention to music in Yeats’s poetry not simply as a deﬁnitive episode in the Irish literary imagination, but as a formative presence which radically altered the landscape of romantic poetry in English, just as Wagner’s synthesis of music and literature likewise challenged the conventions of opera in Europe, notably in Italy and Germany.7 There is not much to be had 5 The famous phrase from Yeats’s late poem, ‘Man and the Echo’: ‘Did that play of mine send out | Certain men the English shot?’, apostrophizes this awareness. More generally, Yeats’s recourse to Gaelic mythology can be compared to Wagner’s retrieval of Germanic myth, especially given the self-conscious espousal of art as a declaration of nationhood in either case. 6 Cited in Seamus Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reﬂections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, in Preoccupations. Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (New York, 1980), 61–78, at 73. 7 It was because of this challenge that Wagner used the term ‘music drama’ rather than opera to describe his later works for the theatre, and to signify the generic upheaval of his conception of musical drama in relation to Italian opera in particular. Wagner’s extensive deliberations on the nature of ‘opera and drama’ likewise compare with Yeats’s meditation on the idea of literary revival in Ireland.

82

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

from poking fun at Yeats for his indifference to actual music (just as in the present context, too narrow or sustained a comparison between Yeats and Wagner would stray from the purpose of this study, even if it might afford to Irish cultural history a more resolutely European context than it often receives).8 There are, nevertheless, several advantages to a perspective on Yeats which, as it were, temporarily emancipates him from the literary history of nineteenth-century Ireland. Such a perspective is provided by nineteenth-century English poetry and the condition of verbal music therein. In this perspective, as Seamus Heaney has shown, Yeats’s achievement gains from a comparison with Wordsworth. In this perspective, too, the striking absence of music as a rival to poetry in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century attains fresh meaning. The essential distinction which Heaney offers between Wordsworth and Yeats is between ‘complaisance’ and ‘control’, between a poetry which assents to the natural stresses of English and a poetry which goes against the grain of blank verse in search of ‘a music that [comes] ringing back off the ear as barely and resonantly as a shout caught back off a pillar in an empty church’.9 From the composition of Tintern Abbey in 1798 to the publication of the revised Prelude in 1850, Wordsworth’s steady, iambic ﬂow, as reassuring and as regular as the river to which he ascribed its inspiration, connects the turbulence of romantic poetry to the sonorous freedom of Elizabethan blank verse. Even if we concede that Yeats’s own beginnings in verse were Pre-Raphaelite, the exemplary pressure of those rolling iambs, the sheer achievement of carrying forward the sensibility of romantic discourse in iambic pentameter, is all the more compelling because there was little else for Yeats to survey outside the domain of the spoken word.10 Roy Foster calls Yeats a poor 8 As the dominant ﬁgure in late nineteenth-century musical nationalism, Wagner’s regeneration of an expressly German musical art provides an interesting precedent, albeit in drastically different political circumstances, for the cultural agenda which Yeats set for himself in the 1890s. In this connection, Yeats’s determination to supervene the ‘ﬁlthy modern tide’ of bourgeois mercantilism echoes Wagner’s repudiation of German complacency in the middle of the nineteenth century. 9 Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music’, 73. 10 Although Shelley and Coleridge made a far greater impact on Yeats, Wordsworth’s dedication to blank verse in iambic pentameter provided a current against which Yeats would direct the metrical ﬂow and technique of his mature poetry. By contrast, Yeats’s use of blank iambic pentameter in plays such as On Baile’s Strand (1904) marks the difference between dramatic verse and the closed forms of his poetry. Rhymed iambic pentameter, moreover, would assert itself in Yeats’s later poetry, as he drew closer to ﬁxed forms which leave the ballad behind.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

83

linguist, and his contemporaries judged him to be tone-deaf: he knew no Irish, and he was indifferent to music except as a rival to poetry.11 Of equal account to Yeats’s development is the isolated condition of English poetry in its magisterial preference for the ‘unheard melody’ of Keats’s ode as against the rival claims of music and letters in nineteenth-century Europe. ‘The Romantic Generation’ is a verbal conceit, but only if we limit our attention to England. In Germany, in France, across continental Europe, romanticism was an expressly musical phenomenon which, if anything, eclipsed the poetry of Goethe and Schiller (it certainly does so now). Models of collusion between music and letters (as in Italian opera) and the stupendous claims to an instrumental discourse of romanticism enlisted by Beethoven (as in the German symphony) would dominate nineteenth-century Europe in a debate between operatic and symphonic modes of discourse from which English music was entirely absent.12 Bernard Shaw’s whole career is testament to that absence. Likewise, I would argue, with Yeats. If Shaw turns instinctively towards the continent and towards European music, Yeats correspondingly turns away, and is thrown back upon the Sligo of his earliest youth. He ﬁnds there a degree of intimacy between melody and verse, but it is one which he will quickly absorb into the mainstream of his own imaginings, speciﬁcally with regard to folklore and the prospect of literary revival. In this enterprise, the bardic understanding of music as an aid to poetic and dramatic recitation will survive. But the invention of a bright, imperious music of his own, in which the ‘growth of a poet’s mind’ becomes no less central to Yeats than it was to Wordsworth, will represent Yeats’s principal claim to attention, to say nothing of the literary movement which it will characterize and embody. ‘To raise a temple in the ear’, which is how Seamus Heaney has deﬁned Yeats’s principal achievement, is a formulation which gives due emphasis to the musical nature of Yeats’s poetic. 11 Yeats’s own declaration that ‘Gaelic is my native language but it is not my mother tongue’ (1937) is borne out by his lifelong incapacity with languages in general. Foster remarks that ‘he found himself constitutionally incapable of learning [French] or any other language’. See R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), 74. 12 It is not necessary to subscribe to the ‘Land without Music’ version of English musical history to assert that English romanticism was late to show itself musically. It is not chauvinistic to point out that the phenomenal outgrowth of musical genres in nineteenth-century Europe excluded Britain. The explanation of why this should have been so remains a challenge to British cultural history, but in the meantime it is germane to this study that Yeats’s inherent conviction that ‘words alone are certain good’ was one shared by the wider environment in which he found himself.

84

Yeats and the Music of Poetry 2

The discrimination which Heaney offers as between le vers donné and le vers calculé in respect of Wordsworth and Yeats can be read, I think, in apposition with Yeats’s reception of ﬁxed forms which originate in English poetry.13 The iambic tetrameter of the English ballad and the ballad itself are obvious sources of this reception, even if we are inclined to think of Yeats’s ballads as lyric inventions of his own making, primarily because in his earliest verse an authenticity of voice transcends any dependence on the precedents of technique and form. The iambic tetrameter and trimeter which Yeats favours in Crossways and The Rose show an obvious relation to the English romantics when they are in lyrical mode, but rather than labour this point, it is more interesting to consider how Wordsworth and Coleridge establish the possibility of retaining the formal suggestiveness of an oral tradition while moving beyond this tradition in style and subject-matter. Although Wordsworth’s contribution to the Lyrical Ballads is perhaps more memorable for its departure from this tradition (so that the full ﬂow of his pentameters is more prominent and more typical than his occasional recovery of tetrameter in poems such as ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and ‘The Solitary Reaper’), Coleridge’s early poetry, within and beyond the Lyrical Ballads, is even more strongly suggestive of this juxtaposition of orality and artiﬁce. The opium-induced fragment ‘Kubla Khan’ provides an instructive instance. The poem is partly cast in the iambic tetrameter which is so characteristic of the sung ballad, but its classical borrowings, fantastic imagery, and arresting acts of volition all take it far beyond the narrative formulas of the folk song. One audacious volition in particular undermines not only the metre but the narrative stability of voice: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me 13 Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music’, 61. In making use of this distinction here, I do not discount the more immediate inﬂuences exerted on Yeats by Arthur Symons and the symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, to say nothing of Yeats’s own preference for William Morris and the formative impact of the Rhymers’ Club, particularly in respect of Yeats’s encounter with the poetry of Blake.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

85

Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware!14

The volition is plain: the poet would recover in music the fabulous images of his vision, inspired by the recollection of the Abyssinian maid and her singing. The conceit, however, is more arcane: the poem attests that this has already been done, but in the verbal music of poetry. Those masterful images of sun and snow (more prosaically, sun and ice) are all the music the poet requires. ‘Could I revive within me | Her symphony and song’ is not posturing for affect, although the change of metre in these lines signals the suddenness of this aside, just as the recovery of iambic tetrameter signiﬁes the conﬁdent recovery of imaginative power as Coleridge seems to celebrate his own technique of verbal music.15 We celebrate it too. I cannot be the ﬁrst person to hear inside these lines an adumbration of Yeats’s early poetry, but in any case Edward Dowden’s remarks on the author of The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) seem especially pertinent to this connection: ‘He has genuine imagination, richness of diction & above all a power of writing easy musical verse quite remarkable in these days of Tennyson Rossetti & Swinburne & their followers. One has to go back to Coleridge & Keats to ﬁnd the same kind of gift.’16 One also goes back to Coleridge and Keats for something else. When the notion takes hold that poetry can summon the power of music, as it does so unmistakably in Keats’s preference for the unheard melody no less than in Wordsworth’s ‘still, sad music of humanity’, when the English romantic imagination gives itself over with such compelling success to the interior history of music recollected in language and to the nomination of music as a signiﬁer of that imagination, the absence of any 14 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment’ (1798), ll. 37–49. I have used the edition published in Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (eds.), The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York, 1973), 254–7. 15 ‘And all who heard should see them there’ reinforces the notion of music as descriptive language, a notion which would be explicitly realized by Beethoven and Schubert and that romantic generation of composers in Germany whose work was contemporary with Coleridge’s poetry. 16 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I, 86 (emphasis mine).

86

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

corresponding moment in the history of English music becomes all the more starkly relevant. The very late arrival of this moment in English music, through the agency of Yeats’s contemporary Elgar (eight years his senior), is sufﬁcient to afﬁrm the unique condition of romanticism in Britain as an emphatically linguistic phenomenon, in which poetry takes the place of music, or goes it alone, as it never does in Europe.17 Yeats’s early apprehension of this remarkable state of affairs was lapidary: ‘words alone are certain good’.18 Even if Yeats had not been indifferent to music, almost any Irish writer in late Victorian England might very well have believed this to be true (Shaw would come, albeit differently, to the same conclusion).19 Between ‘the cracked tune’ of Chronos20 and the ‘cracked looking glass of a servant’, which Joyce could still advance as late as 1922 as a ‘symbol of Irish art’,21 Yeats would situate a claim to poetry which identiﬁed language as the true domain of musical expression. Anything which might rival this order, the ‘melodious guile’ of the ‘echo-harbouring’ shell in ‘The Happy Shepherd’, or the ‘inarticulate moan’ of sea-sounds in ‘The Sad Shepherd’ (also published in Crossways), could be identiﬁed, imitated, and ﬁnally mastered in language. The soft betrayals in Yeats’s early lyrics intimate a lifelong association between music and treachery in his poetry, even if music would also denominate for Yeats the creative act of the imagination itself. 17 When that moment arrives in English music, as it does in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (1899) and his First Symphony (1907), the romantic movement in English literature and in European music has passed. For almost the whole of the nineteenth century English music struggled to attain a durable mode of romantic expression, but did not succeed in this enterprise until the generation of composers which include Stanford and Elgar came to maturity. Even then, as Shaw never tired of pointing out, it was only Elgar who transcended decades of mediocrity and failure, despite the best efforts of his contemporaries to do the same thing. It is difﬁcult to identify a single work by any English composer before him which enjoyed the currency and acclaim of European art music, which is why Elgar is still regarded as the ﬁrst native English musician since Henry Purcell (d. 1695) of equal stature to his great European predecessors (and contemporaries). However vulnerable to revision this regard may be, the overwhelming success of literary romanticism in England by comparison created a singularly favourable climate for the absorption of music into poetry. 18 From ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, ﬁrst published in the Dublin University Review in 1885 and afterwards included in Crossways (1895), itself a selection from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). All quotations from the poems cited here are taken from Richard J. Finneran (ed.), The Yeats Reader, rev. edn. (London, 2002), here 3, l. 10. 19 Shaw’s engagement with English music, in which his championing of Elgar and his corresponding criticisms of Stanford are exemplary of this conclusion, is considered in ch. 4 below. 20 A phrase from ‘The Happy Shepherd’. 21 In Ulysses.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

87

This bardic strain, announced at the earliest moment, endures in Yeats to the end. In the great collections he will pause to survey its urgent attractiveness, despite inertia and something very like loss of nerve, as in the poem ‘All Things Can Tempt Me’, from The Green Helmet and Other Poems: . . . When I was young, I had not given a penny for a song Did not the poet sing it with such airs That one believed he had a sword upstairs . . .22

These lines were written in 1907 and revised and published in 1910. The image of a sword upstairs, however, for all its sudden brilliance, travels outwards from the poem into the future (and far beyond the domain of Yeats’s poetry, for that matter),23 but it also reaches back to that ‘masculine’ contrivance of voice by which Yeats sought to emancipate poetry from its Victorian impasse of ‘strained lyricism’.24 The warrior poet, whose words are an overture to action (sending men to their death in 1916), is an iconic presence almost from the start. So too is the synonymous understanding of music and poetry. Yeats was explicit about the source of this understanding: he took it from John O’Leary and the ballads of Young Ireland. Nothing subsequent to this discovery—the heterogeneous admixture of creeds and legends, of spiritualism and hard-nosed politics by which he would discover his voice—disturbed this canonic absorption of music into verse. It is an absorption which the early collections clearly afﬁrm. Yeats’s awareness of the formal dependencies in verse amounts to a defence of his own poetic technique. His principal strategy in that defence was to declare his allegiance to the ballad, and thereby to a unity of music and letters which could take precedence over any local considerations of language, especially the consideration that he was writing in English. His ﬁrst principles are to be found in this unity, even when it is 22

W. B. Yeats, ‘All Things Can Tempt Me’, The Yeats Reader, 40, ll. 5–8. One thinks of Picasso’s declaration in 1945 that ‘painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.’ Cited in George Steiner, ‘The Cleric of Treason’ (1980), republished in George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondsworth, 1984), 179. 24 In 1937 Yeats recalled that in the evolution of his poetic style he had ‘begun to get rid of everything that is not, whether in lyric or dramatic poetry, in some sense character in action. . . . “Write for the ear”, I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when actor or folk singer stands before an audience. I delight in active men, taking the same delight in soldier and craftsman.’ From the introduction to the unpublished Scribner edition of Yeats’s essays published in The Yeats Reader, 439. 23

88

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

perceived as a ghostly presence: ‘If I repeat the ﬁrst line of Paradise Lost so as to emphasise its ﬁve feet I am among the folk singers, ‘Of mán’s ﬁrst disobédience and the frúit’, but speak it as I should [and] the folk song is still there, but a ghostly voice, an unvariable [sic] possibility, an unconscious norm. What moves me and my hearer is a vivid speech that has no laws except that it must not exorcise the ghostly voice.’25 When this abiding ghost is discerned in Gaelic literature, Yeats is surer still of the imperative condition of Irish poetry, foremost his own: Our mythology, our legends, differ from those of other European countries because down to the end of the seventeenth century they had the attention, perhaps the unquestioned belief, of peasant and noble alike . . . I can put my own thought . . . into the mouth of rambling poets of the seventeenth century, or even of some imagined ballad singer today, and the deeper my thought the more credible, the more peasant-like, are ballad singer and rambling poet. Some modern poets contend that jazz and music hall songs are the folk art of our time; we Irish poets, modern men also, reject every folk art that does not go back to Olympus.26

This bardic insistence on a unity of purpose between music and language, expressed here in a Hellenic conjunction between modern Irish poetry in English and the Homeric ideal of poetry as music, centres upon the ﬁnished line not only in Homer, but in Milton and in Yeats himself. Even if this intimacy entails a reading of Irish history and literature that now seems eccentric and wilful, it is fair to say that Yeats believed history was on his side. The allusions to English modernism (‘jazz and music hall songs’) merely conﬁrm the more general belief—which T. S. Eliot shared—that ‘ancient salt is [the] best packing’.27 The voice of the poet disengages from the oral tradition at his peril. This ancient salt—what Yeats describes as the ‘ballad metre’ of The Green Helmet—preserves the intimacy of music and language through the whole gamut of his astonishing career, but the early collections give evidence of that ‘ghostly voice’ as a vital condition of poetic utterance. Although Yeats himself acknowledged that his ﬁrst ambition was to create a ballad poetry in the spirit of Young Ireland, we can perceive in 25 W. B. Yeats, ‘Style and Attitude’ (1937), from the introduction to the unpublished edition of Yeats’s works by Scribner, published in William H. O’Donnell (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Later Essays (New York, 1994), 204–19, at 214. 26 W. B. Yeats, ‘Subject-matter’ (1937), from the introduction to the unpublished edition of Yeats’s works, ibid. 208–9. 27 Yeats uses this phrase in ‘Style and Attitude’ (n. 25), which also contains the famous declaration that ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt’.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

89

Crossways and The Rose a lyric strain in the language that calls deliberate attention to music and that intimates the kind of completion which only music itself can provide. It is this quality of incompleteness that explains the frequency of musical settings which ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ has (exceptionally) attracted: that poem not only nurtures the space that music and language share; it also leaves a trace behind the line for music alone. Yeats was keen to attribute its origins to a half-remembered song, and the ﬁnished lyric calls out for the completion of music.28 In his later poems he would answer this call himself, and rescind the invitation to music. In the mature Yeats there is nothing that music can add without the danger of seeming superﬂuous.29 The refrains and rhymes of these early lyrics gave them a popularity which Yeats would afterwards disdain when he repudiated their ‘unmanly’ grace. But the twilit celticism of ‘The Stolen Child’ and the strangely ebullient pastiche of ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’ (and later still ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’) attest a lifelong reliance on those techniques of repetition and rhyme which Yeats derived from ‘popular’ poetry, even if the early collections also give evidence of a discrimination between the solitary demeanour of the poet’s voice and the ancient salt of ﬁxed forms. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is about this discrimination, so that the lyric traces and verbal music (‘bee-loud glade’) are subordinated to the slightly ponderous enunciations of the ﬁrst-person singular and the deliberate, ceremonious tempo of the poet’s grave resolutions.30 Less ponderous, but no less resolute, is the poem which frames The Rose, ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. Yeats is on the verge of 28 In a BBC broadcast transmitted from Belfast on 17 March 1934 Yeats attributed the provenance of this poem to ‘an elaboration of two lines in English somebody sang to me in Ballysodare’. Yeats’s contribution to the programme was published as ‘The Growth of a Poet’, in the Listener on 4 April 1934, and is republished in Johnston (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Later Articles and Reviews, 249–253 (here, 249). 29 The well-known settings and arrangements of ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ by Herbert Hughes and Benjamin Britten, in addition to T. F. Dunhill’s setting of ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, are exquisite exceptions to the general rule of silence among Yeats’s contemporaries, who set little of his poetry. Although occasional lines were borrowed (as in Britten’s memorable version of ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, in his setting of Myfanwy Piper’s libretto from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw), most composers left Yeats strictly alone for a generation after his death. The website of the Yeats Society of New York (http://www.yeatssociety.org) documents several recent settings of the poetry by contemporary composers, including John Buckley, Philip Martin, Michael Tippett, and John Aschenberger, together with several arrangements by musicians and groups such as Clannad, Christy Moore, and Van Morrison. 30 In Autobiographies, Yeats calls this poem ‘my ﬁrst lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music’.

90

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

disavowal: the element of ‘faery’ will soon disappear from his work. But this poem, for all its ‘frankly political’ modernity,31 requests of the reader that the Rosicrucian imperatives that now drive his imagination be reconciled with Yeats’s insistence on his bardic provenance: Know, that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song; Nor be I any less of them, Because the red-rose-bordered hem Of her, whose history began Before God made the angelic clan, Trails all about the written page. . . . . . Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Because, to him who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body’s laid asleep.32

The poem is addressed to a future which arrived sooner than Yeats could have guessed when he ﬁrst published it in 1892. But it wears the mask of Young Ireland made anew by those radical interventions of the spirit which crowd the second part of the poem. It is a mask moulded in ballad metre and rhyme, and although it slips in order to accommodate an anticipated future (‘That you, in the dim coming times, | May know how my heart went with them’),33 it is the impersonal contrivance of the form itself that underwrites the continuity between Ireland past and Ireland future which the poem would afﬁrm. Yeats was to insist upon this kind of contrivance to the very end of his career (‘Irish poets, learn your trade, | Sing whatever is well made’),34 just as he would continue to name names, however complex the imagery and symbolism he enlisted in the pursuit of poetry.35 The nominations here which border those 31 Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I, 123, remarks that this poem ‘announced [Yeats’s] arrival as a frankly political poet’. 32 ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, ll. 1–9, 16–21, as published in The Yeats Reader, 20–1. 33 Ibid., p. 21, ll. 46–7. 34 ‘Under Ben Bulben’, from Last Poems (1939), ll. 68–9. 35 Perhaps no other modern poet is so given to the use of proper nouns. From the publication of Responsibilities (1914) onwards, Yeats makes a virtue of explicitly

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

91

‘elemental creatures’ that beckon the poet into the future are indeed striking: Davis, Mangan, Ferguson. It seems to me that their sweetly singing deportment in this poem reveals at a stroke the absence of Moore. Yeats does not shrink from aligning himself with their decisive synthesis of music and poetry—on the contrary, he celebrates it in his own technique, precisely because it is a synthesis, in which the ‘ghostly voice’ of folk song authorizes the enterprise of poetry and relates it to that oral unity of purpose which Yeats regarded as a fundamental to any poetry worth the name. In Moore, by contrast, the melody is not a ghost, but still alive: the poetry exists in order to retrieve and then communicate its waking power. We know that Yeats would ﬁnd such an arrangement intolerable, but in any case, the poets whom he commends had long since transformed the signiﬁcance of Irish music in relation to poetry before Yeats wrote a line. All three poets engaged directly with Moore’s poetry and were deeply (if sometimes aggressively) aware of the anxiety of his inﬂuence. They point silently to him in the decisive alignment which Yeats offers here. The abiding, if ghostly, presence of folk song, which (for Yeats) guarantees even to Milton the ‘vivid speech’ of poetry, is as vital to the manifesto of ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ as any of its other constituent elements. This presence connects Yeats to Moore, if only on account of those musical transformations in the poetry of Young Ireland for which Moore was ultimately responsible. Although the ballad then serves as an Urform in Yeats, so that a refrain can seem plausible even in poems that have otherwise travelled far from the domain of oral poetry,36 it is verbal music which works against the grain of received forms that produces what Heaney calls ‘the music of energy reined down, of the mastered beast stirring’.37 incorporating the names of his contemporaries (as well as of ﬁgures from history) into his verse. The notable exception to this is Maud Gonne (even if her husband, John MacBride, is thus nominated in ‘Easter, 1916’). This habit tends to underline the balladlike dimension of the poetry, as well as its vital connection to the ordinary, a link which Yeats highly esteemed. 36 Consider the presence of refrains in poems as symbolically allusive and complex as ‘September 1913’, ‘Easter, 1916’, ‘What Then?’, and ‘Long-legged Fly’, in addition to Yeats’s pervasive reliance on rhyme and the predetermination of ﬁxed forms throughout his poetry. 37 Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music’, 73. This reading of Yeats’s music seems to follow naturally from Richard Ellmann’s readings of ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantium’, in his Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London, 1949; repr. 1965), 244–6, 255–60, 274–5. Ellmann’s perceptive remark, that in ‘Byzantium’ the poet ‘takes the welter of images and masters them in an act of creation’ (274), seems especially germane to Heaney’s characterization of Yeats’s late style.

92

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

A poet who calls attention again and again to the validity of forms, and to the legitimacy of formal models as these apply in his own poetry, must presumably become conscious of those transgressions of formal order which his poetry achieves. In Yeats’s case, certainly, the long labour of prose drafts and poetic revisions which precede almost all of the major works argue in favour of this point of view.38 Even when these transgressions are apparently modest—as in the (to me) astonishing compression of the sonnet in ‘No Second Troy’—they indicate that tension between formal predictability and originality of discourse which propels the motion forward.39 Yeats’s modernism, whatever else it may represent, does not dispense with the tonality and perspective of established order, if only because the greatest of his poems so often escape (or defy) the anxiety of those formal inﬂuences which they implicitly acknowledge. The rhyming pentameters prepare the ear (and limit the vocabulary), but it is the tension between these rules of engagement and the veering suddenness of the individual line that compels the admiration of poets and critics such as Heaney and Richard Ellmann when they read ‘Leda and the Swan’ or ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. To survey these monuments afresh is a daunting prospect in view of the vast critical commentary that has grown up around them, even if we conﬁne ourselves to a diligent trawl for the discourse of musical elements that pervades Yeats’s poetry as a whole. But one monument in particular calls out for scrutiny in this regard, because it is exemplary of Yeats’s iconic awareness of his own technique. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ afﬁrms the status of great poetry as a correlative of great music. It simultaneously enacts and celebrates the ﬁnished work of art by means of a verbal music in which music itself enjoys an unparalleled intensity of metaphorical expression and power:

38 The variorum edition of the poems (1957) and individual studies of Yeats’s drafts, as in Jon Stallworthy’s Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (1961), are sufﬁcient to afﬁrm this observation. 39 ‘No Second Troy’ (from The Green Helmet and Other Poems) leads the eye and the ear to expect a closing couplet, given its perfectly maintained equilibrium of metre, formal design, and rhyme. Taken together, these twelve lines are three quatrains from an unﬁnished sonnet. Perhaps the interrogatory syntax of the poem (four questions, culminating in ‘Was there another Troy for her to burn?’) eclipses any consideration of a closing couplet, the absence of which throws these rhetorical questions into sharper relief than otherwise. In this instance, it is the verbal music of Yeats’s questions which makes any obligation to the completion of the sonnet redundant.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry I That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, ﬂesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magniﬁcence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. III O sages standing in God’s holy ﬁre As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy ﬁre, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artiﬁce of eternity. IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.40

40

‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in The Yeats Reader, 84–5.

93

94

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

The ﬁrst consideration is, invariably, a formal one. The ottava rima in which the poem is cast we now recognize as a favourite model in the late poetry,41 but its familiar appearance in retrospect may have blurred the tang and taste of this ancient salt: other than Byron and Shelley, few poets writing in English before Yeats regularly employed it, and it more easily summons the high ceremony and epic discourse of the Italian Renaissance. It is a ﬁxed form, and its predeterminations are acknowledged with salutary strictness in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: the iambic pulse and pure endings are both maintained, with one decisive exception, throughout the four octaves. Yeats elsewhere espouses the ambition to write one poem as cold and passionate as the dawn. The chaste formality and exactitude of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ strategically permit this paradox to arise. The cool precision of technique will nevertheless accommodate a notably intense rhetoric of expression. Whatever there is of verbal music in the poem is accountable to the requirements of a model that is consummately deployed, but not invented. At every pulse, Yeats holds himself answerable to the exigencies of a design that afﬁrms the impersonal, self-standing authority of a work of art, and all the more so because this design insists on its own autonomy of expression. In this instance at least, the rules of engagement are pellucid: the masterful images are at once reined down by and emancipated from the form itself. A second consideration also entails upon the form, in respect of syntax. The ﬁrst octave contains three periods; the second octave one, the third octave two, and the ﬁnal octave one. This symmetry between the second and the ﬁnal octaves is striking, and it is a symmetry which would obtain throughout the poem, had not Yeats ﬁnally decided to open it with a complete sentence that not only disturbs the periodic symmetry as a whole but which also halts the music of the poem before it has properly begun: ‘That is no country for old men.’ Yeats later remarked that ‘this was the worst bit of syntax I ever wrote’,42 and adjusted the 41 In The Tower the poems cast in ottava rima also include ‘The Tower’, ‘Ancestral Houses’ and ‘My Descendents’ (from ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’), ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, and ‘Among School Children’. Later poems in ottava rima are ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, ‘Coole Park, 1929’, ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, and ‘The Choice’. Yeats broke the mould in ‘Byzantium’ (in which elements of ottava rima are nevertheless present), and made a magniﬁcent return to the form in ‘After Long Silence’ (see below), ‘The Gyres’, and ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. Although Foster, in W. B.Yeats: A Life. II, 596, describes ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ as having been written in ‘stately ottava rima’, the metrical irregularities and varying length of the lines somewhat contradict this identiﬁcation. 42 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 328. For further commentary on this alteration, see below.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

95

poem on that account. But the tension between this deliberate, indicative mood and the obligation to the verse to which it belongs is just what allows the poet’s distinctive tonality of voice to be heard. So resigned in tone, so disruptive in its arresting contradiction of the otherwise prevailing iambic pulse, the sentence gives not the smallest intimation of what is to follow. Metrical deviations in the poem also draw attention to Yeats’s habitual preoccupation with rhythm which is self-evidently the closest point of contact between music and language. Here, the predetermined pulse is so carefully graced by anapaestic substitutions (it is perhaps clearer and certainly more graceful in turn to borrow a musical term and call these triplets), that these triplets collude in the structural clarity of the poem. They ﬁrst occur in the closing couplet of the ﬁrst octave: ‘Caught in that sensual music all neglect | Monuments of unageing intellect.’ The rhythmic inﬂection of ‘sensual’ already contains a triplet pulse (as does the scansion of ‘Caught in that’), but the second line conﬁrms the threeagainst-two quickening of the pulse. The phrase will be modiﬁed in the second octave, but not the rhythm (‘Monuments of its own magniﬁcence’) and this rhythm will echo for a second time in the third octave: ‘Into the artiﬁce of eternity.’ The last octave affords the faintest of these triplets (‘My bodily form from any natural thing’) only to renew the steady iambic pulse as the poem attains the magniﬁcent clarity of its closing declarations. Rhythmic shifts, and most certainly these triplets, signify shifts in the poetic argument. A modulating representation of music will ﬁnd repose in those declarations, even as the condition of verbal music which animates the surge and ﬂux of imagery in the opening octave dies away in favour of those phatic intonations of past, present, and future with which the poem ends. Music itself makes an early appearance in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in two characteristically Yeatsian guises: the sensual music of experience (‘those dying generations’ ‘at their song’) and the mimetic strain of lyricism by which this experience is enacted. This is because Yeats wants to set off ‘Whatever is begotten, born or dies’ from ‘Monuments of unageing intellect’. The ﬁrst of those two lines also intimates the compelling synthesis of experience and art disclosed in the last line of the poem, ‘Of what is past, or passing or to come’: the cadences and intonations of these lines clearly echo, but these musical alignments focus the ear (and the eye) on the reconciliation which Yeats achieves between life and art through the course of all four octaves.

96

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

The change of key (or perspective) in the second octave (in which the iambic pulse is all the more continuous with the form as a whole) represents the old man redeemed in his mortal decrepitude by the lustrous singing of his soul. The images are sufﬁciently arresting and coherent not to require a gloss (though glosses are instructive),43 but very near the surface of the verse one can sense the gathering storm of excitement and sudden insight, especially in the crescendo of insistence that ‘sing and louder sing’ achieves. The note of jubilant transcendence is unmistakable (even if, unaided by footnotes, I would not be the ﬁrst reader to falter at the prospect of a soul clapping its hands).44 Also unmissable is the compassion vested in the phrase ‘For every tatter in its mortal dress’. The whole octave accrues upon the explanation offered in its closing couplet: the poet (nominated in the ﬁrst-person singular for the ﬁrst time) has sailed to the holy city on account of his own realizations. Chief among these is no longer the neglect of the ﬁrst octave but the serene study and contemplation of the second. What is contemplated is the promise of art and the study of art, apostrophized in the now strategic formulation ‘singing school’. From ‘sensual music’ to ‘singing school’ is a mental journey in itself. Art and song are now in exact apposition. This apposition is celebrated (and sacralized) in the incomparable direct speech of the third octave. As the imagery recovers the descriptive mode of the ﬁrst octave in its quest for fresh symbolism, the verbal music is likewise concentrated at a new pitch, so that the line ‘Come from the holy ﬁre, perne in a gyre’ combines the most radical articulation of iterated sound with the most difﬁcult phrase in the whole poem. The urgent imperatives of this appeal to the sages entail the apotheosis of art as music: ‘And be the singing-masters of my soul.’ In this redemptive enterprise, in the burning ﬁre of music, the heart ﬁnds release from the puzzled piece of ﬂesh it drags after it. How else, given the strategic accumulation of musical metaphors and the apposition between art and music, are we to construe ‘the artiﬁce of eternity’? This question is decisively answered in the resolutions of the ﬁnal octave. Nature is repudiated in favour of art, though it is art mediated by experience. The dazzling imagery illuminates the poet subsumed by his own poem, and the purpose to which his poetry is set. Yeats surely 43 As in Richard Ellmann’s precise disclosure of the sources of Yeats’s imagery in the poem which he provides in Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 257–9. 44 Ellmann (ibid. 258) points out that this image is a remembrance from Yeats’s reading of Blake and of Blake’s image of the soul of his dead brother ‘clapping his hands for joy’.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

97

hints at the servitude of poetry (‘to keep a drowsy Emperor awake’), even as he declares with supreme assurance its panoptic power in the closing couplet. At the close, the golden bird sings. Readings of this masterly poem differ greatly one from the other, particularly with respect to an identiﬁcation of Byzantium with Ireland,45 but it would be difﬁcult to deny that in this most concentrated ingathering of his aesthetic, Yeats equates poetry with music. The words, of course, ‘need all our attention’, but this is not a casual or even a singular equation on Yeats’s part; in the ﬁnished poem, in all its burnished declamations, lies the terminus of music. The ‘ghostly voice’ of the folksinger ﬁnds its true resolution in the poetic work of art. In an assessment by Francis Hackett, which Roy Foster tells us the poet kept among his papers, we ﬁnd a comparison which implicitly favours this reading: [his later work is] like Beethoven’s later sonatas, a mobile medium, in which the warmth and impress of mood are communicable . . . He is still Yeatsian, but the sensitiveness has become virile and inclusive. Had Yeats been educated in a grand tradition, had Coole been a Weimar, he could have been our Goethe. As it is, the world knows him as our national poet, the one Irishman who has given form to our lyric and lyric to our theatre. He has spread his dreams under Ireland’s feet. May she tread softly.46

What stands out in this assessment is not only the Beethoven comparison, but the assertion that Yeats is the ‘one Irishman who has given form to our lyric’. As Yeats becomes ‘our national poet’, that which otherwise might be expressed in song (‘our lyric’) ﬁnds expression not in great musical works of art, but in great poems. In Ireland, the cloths of heaven are wrought in words. Yeats calls himself ‘a singer born’ in the late poem ‘Vacillation’, but not only on account of his verbal music and the lyric prowess of his imaginings. The nomination is still more deeply felt than that, if we are to judge by the constant, Homeric preoccupation that runs like a thread throughout his poetry, early or late. Even if we conﬁne ourselves to the two great ‘Byzantium’ poems, the violent passage of the second poem recasts the sea-imagery of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in a verbal music that celebrates the transﬁgured motion of poetry itself. ‘That dolphin-torn, 45 Thus Ellmann and Foster notably disagree as to the meaning of ‘Byzantium’ in the poem. Foster (W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 326) compellingly suggests that ‘Byzantium’ is an imagined Ireland or an imagined country which is paralleled with Ireland. Ellmann (Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 260) regards it as a symbol which excludes Ireland, to which Yeats will return upon its completion. 46 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 520.

98

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

that gong-tormented sea’ (‘Byzantium’) purges ‘the mackerel-crowded seas’ of all innocent experience. These incantations will yield in turn to the corporeal mockery of Joyce (‘the snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea’), but as emblems of Yeats’s technique, their unbridled virtuosity calls attention to the singer as well as the song. In ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ this vocational quality is paramount: John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong. We three alone in modern times had brought Everything down to that sole test again, Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.47

It may be fair comment to regard this as special pleading for the Ascendancy cause,48 but the proud discrimination of ‘We three alone’ surely depends on a greater sense of artistic regeneration rooted in the continuity between tribal utterance and the beautiful lofty things of high culture. Yeats never deviated from his perception of that continuity, however frequently he despaired of its survival against the ﬁlthy modern tide. His principal means of espousing it lay in the musical discourse of his own poetry. This discourse seeks to recover a synonymous understanding of speech and song from classical antiquity and from Yeats’s own conception of bardic culture in Ireland. It becomes habitual even in contexts ostensibly remote from this consideration. The lyric address of ‘After Long Silence’, from Words for Music Perhaps, exempliﬁes the pervasiveness of this understanding: Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.49 47

‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’, ll. 41–7, in The Yeats Reader, 139. Foster, in W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 596, comments that ‘the poem . . . adroitly integrated the inevitable Ascendancy triumvirate of WBY, Gregory and Synge into the iconography of the Irish revolution and the “people of Ireland” ’. 49 ‘After Long Silence’, in The Yeats Reader, 122. 48

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

99

Yeats is talking again after a long interval to Olivia Shakespear, but he would like to change the subject.50 The poem is a clearance and a declaration. It harbours an echo of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (‘sing and louder sing’/ ‘descant and yet again descant’) and as in that poem, it prefers the supreme wisdom of song to the youthful ignorance of love. Coldness and passion, as always. And as always, the apposition of poetry and music, the Homeric assumption that these are ultimately one and the same, provided their vital interdependence is preserved in verse. As with Hackett’s declaration that ‘the world knows him as our national poet’, this preservation of music (and the idea of music) is a feature of Yeats’s poetry which fairly summons the precedent of Moore. It seems plausible to acknowledge this precedent in terms of a comparison between Moore and Yeats, provided that the comparison isn’t forced in Moore’s favour. Short of such special pleading on Moore’s behalf, it is reasonable to advance certain parallels between Moore and Yeats in the context of music and the Irish literary imagination. They are parallels that deserve explicit identiﬁcation here, if only because they appear not to have been nominated elsewhere: Moore and Yeats both espouse a poetry that claims a special relation to cultural retrieval and regeneration, as in Moore’s recourse to Bunting and Yeats’s enterprise of literary revival. Moore’s speciﬁcally political reading of Irish music in relation to his own verse is likewise strongly suggestive of Yeats’s lyric insistence on the folk song as a vital presence which justiﬁes his reanimation of ballad poetry and his retention of lyric forms and conventions (notably refrains), even in his late work. Moore’s address upon Irish music in his poetry is decisively informed by 1798 and the impact of rebellion, just as Yeats’s poetry is explicitly inﬂuenced by Fenianism, Parnell, and 1916. We might summarize this afﬁnity by remarking that Emmett is no less important to Moore than is Pearse to Yeats. Yeats’s poetry is crowded with the names of his contemporaries, who mingle there with Cuchulain and Emer. Naming names was more dangerous in Moore’s day, but his dedicatory epistles and correspondence afﬁrm a continuity of purpose between his poetry and his politics. Moore and Yeats, however differently, both regard certain forms of poetry as a mode of political commentary and intervention. If Moore is perforce more covert about this regard than Yeats, this does not mean that poems such as ‘Intolerance’ and ‘Corruption’ are less politically motivated than 50 For details of the affair and long relationship between Olivia Shakespear and Yeats, and the occasion of this poem, see Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, esp. 559.

100

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

‘September 1913’, or that ‘Easter, 1916’, for all its greatness as poetry, is less occasional than ‘Oh, breathe not his name’ or ‘She is far from the land’. Moore’s dedication to reform, his disillusion with the Whig cause, and his proliﬁc engagement with political satire, literary biography, and strictly occasional verse, together with his monumental efforts as a historian, collectively provide a context for his Irish Melodies which parallels the wider career of Yeats as a dramatist, theatre manager, and advocate of political and social reform as a context for the thematic unfolding of his poetry. Two other parallels have striking force: Moore seeks out the orient in a characteristically romantic mode of narrative poetry, whereas it is occultism that leads Yeats there, but in both cases the strangeness of setting admits a familiar preoccupation with Irish themes. Finally, Moore’s reputation as ‘the bard of Erin’ and Yeats’s acclaim as ‘Our national poet’ depend, as a rule, on a notably restricted celebration of popular, lyric forms. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ have at least that much in common. None of these parallels would be worth a moment’s further consideration if they were intended to advance the case for Moore as a poet of equal stature to Yeats. But they are intended to press home the argument that Yeats’s aesthetic reliance on the apposition of music and verse has a history in the Irish literary imagination which is more locally deﬁned than Yeats’s own Homeric claims might suggest. Denis Donoghue remarked of James Joyce that, unlike Yeats, ‘he was not to be found in the writing room of a London club’,51 which is exactly where a century earlier we might have expected to ﬁnd Tom Moore. But in any case, when Donoghue observes that ‘Yeats never doubted that the imaginative life of Ireland was oral’, in the light of Yeats’s own belief that ‘Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung’,52 he draws attention to the integrity of this point of view, without disturbing the received opinion that Yeats himself encouraged, namely that ‘we three alone’ (Synge, Lady Gregory, and Yeats) were the only begetters of orality and artiﬁce in the Irish literary imagination. The Georgian romantic and the late Victorian modernist both engaged with the oral culture of Ireland not as a token of exotic identity and self-regard, but as the truest source of expressive integrity. In Moore’s case, this was a musical culture, transmitted through the agency of Bunting’s redemptive arrangements 51 Denis Donoghue, We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (Berkeley and Los 52 See ibid. 142–3. Angeles, 1986), 142.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

101

of the harp tunes he had collected. Yeats likewise depended on arrangements (which is to say, translations) of Gaelic culture, in which he discerned that synonymous ideal of speech and music which he would recover in English poetry. Perhaps the most compelling parallel between Moore and Yeats in this regard lies in the importance which Yeats attached to the correct recitation of his poetry, and Moore’s own renditions of the Irish Melodies. One characteristic account of the latter will sufﬁce here: His voice was weak—power he had none. It was not even extraordinarily sweet; and yet let it be known at any party that Moore was there, and would sing his own melodies, though the ﬁrst vocalists of the day might be present, they would be all listened to with wearisome impatience . . . When he commenced, every breath was almost hushed, lest a note should be lost. Yet his could scarcely be called singing—improvising describes it better. The soul felt the intensity—the passionate earnestness with which every word and accent were intoned, I might say declaimed, were quite indescribable, and could only be conceived by those who heard him.53

The terms of this account—an emphasis on the intonation of word and tone ‘which could scarcely be called singing’—brings us sharply forward to Yeats’s corresponding emphasis on the relationship between folksinging and the proper enunciation of his poetry. It also returns us to Yeats’s querulous (and often circumspect) regard for the power of music.

3 The perfect iambic pulse of ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’ ensures that the extravagant violence of Yeats’s imagery remains alive because a (lifelong and hard-won) allegiance to formal and rhythmic intelligibility protects the verbal music of the line. Uttered aloud or in recollected tranquillity, the intonation of the music is determined by the rhythmic demands of iambic pentameter. The furthest reaches of Yeats’s poetic imagination remain answerable to formal engagement, and the poet’s express commitment to ‘whatever is well-made’ perennially underwrites the visionary challenges of his thought. In this commingling of ancient salt and ‘all that is personal’, Yeats’s understanding of music as a presence in the literary imagination is secure and consistent. 53 Cited in Hoover H. Jordan, Bolt Upright: The Life of Thomas Moore (Salzburg, 1975), i. 83.

102

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

Somewhat less secure (if no less consistent) was Yeats’s pursuit of musical accompaniment for the public recitation of dramatic verse and poetry. The experiments in ‘speaking to the psaltery’ which Yeats conducted with Florence Farr in 1901–2, the scores which George Antheil wrote for the ballet versions of the ‘Cuchulain trilogy’ (At the Hawk’s Well, On Baile’s Strand, and The Only Jealousy of Emer) in 1929, and the late resurgence of his abstract theories of verbal and musical rhythm in the course of preparation for the BBC broadcasts of 1937, which involved him in controversy with the designer and composer (and old friend) Edmund Dulac, all attest the strange paradox of Yeats’s hostility and tone-deaf indifference to music and his insistence nevertheless that it should be the handmaid of verbal utterance. The kindest construction which we can put upon these experiments is that they afﬁrm Yeats’s own bardic conception of poetry. There is, nevertheless, a considerable gap between aspiration and achievement in this regard, if only because the music which survives also afﬁrms an uncertain, if not impoverished, alliance which has almost nothing to do with the verbal music that ‘raises a monument in the ear’. The examples cited by Yeats himself of Farr’s ‘music’ for The Countess Cathleen, together with her settings from The Land of Heart’s Desire,54 show nothing more than a rudimentary notation of sustained notes which ascend and descend at semitonal or tonal intervals, occasionally widened by leaps of no more than a third. Dynamic markings give some notion of projection, but otherwise the settings, even if we could imagine Farr plucking her monochordal psaltery, do little to enhance the texts which they accompany. The closing speech from The Countess Cathleen, for example, exhorts the impetuous heart to be still: ‘Your sorrowful love may never be told; cover it up with a lonely tune.’ The tune, if it is there, cannot be found in the elementary heightening and control of pitch that Farr’s notated chants afford.55 Nor is it by any means certain that the verbal melody of the line is thus enhanced: Bernard Shaw compared Florence Farr’s chanting to ‘a nerve-destroying crooning like the maunderings of an idiot-banshee’.56 Less intemperate descriptions by Wilfrid Blunt and Arthur Symons nev54 The most comprehensive account of Yeats’s deployment of music in his plays is to be found in Edward Malins, ‘Yeats and Music’, Yeats Centenary Papers, 12 (Dublin, 1965), 483–508. Farr’s music was excerpted in Yeats’s essay ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ (1902), and partly reproduced in W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961). 55 Excerpts from these musical settings are reproduced in Malins, ‘Yeats and Music’, 488–99 56 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I, 257.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

103

ertheless conﬁrm the poor results of any kind of explicit musical dependency which yet deprives music itself of its inherent expressiveness: ‘the one [a spoken recitation] was a spontaneous thing, profoundly felt; the other [the musical setting], a deliberate imitation in which the ﬁxing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or bad, impossible.’57 Edward Malins is worth quoting on this conﬂict: it is easy to appreciate some of the difﬁculties which Yeats encountered with musical matters. With regard to cantillation [Shaw’s term for chanting to the psaltery], these did not result in failure from Yeats’s point of view; for although his ideas may not have been adopted, yet they clariﬁed and justiﬁed for him his lifelong battle against Philistine actors who treated verse conversationally. In dealing with the music for the plays he was again handicapped by his lack of musical knowledge, though his ideas, if carried out as he wished will produce the atmosphere which he required. But he fully understood that if you marry words to any complex musical setting it is the words which become secondary, unless, as in the case of cantillating or patter, the music is reduced to a monotone, or the simplest folk song melody. His difﬁculty was to ﬁnd a union of equal partners, but on some occasions it landed him in a marriage of convenience.58

It seems fair comment, however, to remark in turn that what Yeats wanted was an unequal union, insofar as he conceived of actual music (as against its metaphorical prowess) only as an aid to rhythmic enunciation. His prescriptive remark that ‘No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must ever cease to be a man and become an instrument’,59 removes any doubt about Yeats’s awareness of the rival powers of music. ‘Mere musical note’ is a characteristic provocation, but no less explicit and exact for that. When, through Pound, he met George Antheil, the self-proclaimed ‘Bad Boy of Music’, in Rapallo,60 Yeats found an ideal musical collaborator of a different kind, one ‘whose theories about the relations between words and music seem to be exactly my own’.61 He asked Antheil to set and write incidental music for the ballet version of Fighting the Waves for Ninette de Valois at the Abbey, 57 58 59

Arthur Symons, as quoted in Malins, ‘Yeats and Music’, 492. Ibid. 493. W. B. Yeats, from the introduction to Plays in Prose and Verse (1922), cited in ibid.

499. 60 George Antheil (1900–59) published his autobiography in 1945 under the title Bad Boy of Music. 61 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 389.

104

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

possibly on account of Antheil’s brutal modernism and expressionist contempt for lyricism (he boasted that his style could break the strings of any piano except a Steinway).62 In Antheil’s case, certainly, there was no danger of the music rivalling the lyric beauty of the verse, except by dint of brutal noise, even if the settings far transcended Yeats’s own prescriptions against the lengthening of vowels and the ascendancy of musical utterance. Yeats himself conceded that ‘if I knew one tune from another I should probably hate it’. But the mechanical insistence and anti-melodic impact of the score (like ‘the falling of a tin tray on the ﬂags’) evidently pleased him, if only on that account.63 ‘Music is the natural words in the natural order,’ Yeats wrote in 1937, ‘through that formula we go back to the people. Music will keep out temporary ideas, for music is the nations [sic] clothing of what is ancient and deathless.’64 Roy Foster remarks that Yeats’s own gift was to possess and control ‘the music of words’, yet he ‘discounted it in order to pursue an abstract idea of rhythm and intonation, which incensed knowledgeable musicians like [Edmund] Dulac, much as the long-ago experiments with Florence Farr and Dolmetsch’s psaltery had infuriated Shaw’.65 This distinction between the verbal music of the poetry and Yeats’s (by now) axiomatic insistence on a theory of enunciation which for him was the only music that mattered (itself an astonishing exclusion) explains why so many of Yeats’s dramatic works—and in particular the series of ‘Noh’ plays that begins with At the Hawk’s Well (1916) and closes with The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—carry forward an explicit address upon music that is often unrelated to the verbal music of the poetry itself. These plays all feature musicians and call for music to be sung and played 62 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 389. Foster reports that when Joseph Holloway heard that Yeats liked the music, he remarked that ‘that was enough for me—as he has no ear for sound’. 63 Ibid. Antheil’s score for Fighting the Waves is published by Schirmer. The excerpts published by Yeats in Wheels and Butterﬂies (1934), and reproduced in Malins, ‘Yeats and Music’, 500, are much closer to an operatic setting of Yeats than anything envisaged or achieved by Edward Dulac and Walter Rummell, insofar as the vocal lines are melismatic and the orchestral writing is much more complex and professional than anything a gifted amateur could manage. Nevertheless, Antheil’s vocal lines are very close to Sprechstimme (the speech-song of musical modernism, associated in particular with the late operatic works of Arnold Schoenberg), and the mechanical severity of the rhythmic structures are examples of musical expressionism par excellence. As Foster succinctly remarks, ‘the combination of de Valois, Antheil, Cuchulain and Antheil was a shock to Abbey audiences’. Whatever the initial impact of this experiment, Yeats never repeated it. 64 In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 579. 65 Ibid.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

105

as an integral part of the dramatic movement. Yeats incorporates these musical elements as stylized borrowings from the Japanese originals on which they are modelled, and prescribes that certain speeches be sung rather than spoken. The challenge of writing such music which could be learned and performed by actors who were not professional musicians must have been considerable, and it was met with only modest success by Walter Rummell and Dulac. As Edward Malins has shown, the results were at best like ‘water-gruel Debussy’, and difﬁcult to sing on account of poor word-setting and wrong stresses. Malins observes that the music composed for Yeats ‘was often a stumbling and lame companion’.66 A ceremonial stiffness which poorly represents the spoken line (and which approximates but never attains the ﬂexibility and technical assurance of operatic recitative) condemns the music at every turn, even as it distracts from the verbal music of Yeats’s dramatic poetry.67 Neither Rummell nor Dulac have much standing as musicians beyond the sphere of Yeats studies,68 although one continues to feel some sympathy for the hapless Dulac, who more often than not was the victim of Yeats’s musical importunities rather than his willing conspirator. To be blunt, only someone as indifferent to the technical and expressive reach of opera as Yeats himself appears to have been could recognize much of value in the musical settings which his plays incorporated.69 66

Malins, ‘Yeats and Music’, 507. Rummell, as cited by Edward Malins, ‘Yeats and Music’, 503, gives the following guidelines as to his approach to setting The Dreaming of the Bones: ‘Music of tone and music of speech are distinct from each other. Here my sole object has been to ﬁnd some tone formula which will enhance and bring out a music underlying the scores. The process is therefore directly opposed to that of tone-music creation, which from the formless directly creates its tone form, whereas I seek a formless overﬂow from the already formed.’ In the musical excerpts printed in Malins (504–5), Rummell’s sense of obligation to melodic repetition (at least partially on account of actors having to learn the phrases quickly) produces an odd conﬂict between musical recitation and thematic correspondence. The result is that the natural stresses of the verse are sometimes distorted in order to retain the thematic integrity of the music. The musical motifs recur, but only at the expense of the scansion. How this can advance the claims of the dramatic poetry is not something I have been able to explain. 68 This is not to gainsay Dulac’s inherent importance as an artist, illustrator, and designer, nor to impugn his long friendship with Yeats; only to point out that Dulac is little regarded as a composer other than as a collaborator with Yeats in his musical settings (above all for At the Hawk’s Well ). Nor does this remark gainsay Dulac’s own knowledge of music, which eventually brought him into conﬂict with Yeats (see below). 69 What Foster describes as ‘an abstract idea of rhythm and intonation’ (as above) lies behind the motivation for these musical settings of the plays. This abstract idea must be distinguished clearly from the verbal music of Yeats’s poetry. The latter is of self-evident account, but the former has more to say about Yeats’s own preoccupations with the public enunciation of verse than about the inherent music of his poetry. These preoccupations led 67

106

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

The BBC broadcasts of 1937 brought musical matters to a head. Stormy rehearsals were made even worse by Yeats’s efforts to limit the musical settings of his verse to unaccompanied singing, so that Dulac’s objection to Margot Ruddock’s incompetence as a singer exacerbated in turn the poet’s antagonism towards any kind of professional musicianship, and signiﬁcantly reduced the number and status of musical accompaniments which Yeats had originally asked Dulac to provide for these programmes. Yeats was by now defending himself by espousing the recent provenance of his discoveries about ‘stress and intonation’.70 We can judge the merits of these discoveries by the alteration he made to the opening of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ when it was broadcast on 3 July 1937: ‘Old men should quit a country where the young . . .’.71 This drastic subordination to the claims of iambic pentameter self-evidently deprives the poem of its arresting overture (it did not, in any event, survive the broadcast), but it also attests how preoccupied Yeats had become with the singing line even in deﬁance of his own brilliance of technique. Other poems in the same broadcast also give evidence of this technical conservatism, even before Yeats digniﬁed it with a theoretical ascription. ‘The Rose Tree’, a ballad if ever there was one, had appeared in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Its singalong rhymes, metrical banality, and atrocious scansion (‘O words are lightly spoken | said Pearse to Connolly’) are as far from that ‘vaulted space in language’ which the great poems achieve as one could wish to get. Why Yeats credited this kind of routine balladeering as poetry so late in his career is anyone’s guess, other than that it gave evidence of his own proximity to ‘peasant’ Yeats to the musical settings brieﬂy inspected here, but it is to be doubted (to say the least of it) whether these settings, now fallen into disregard, materially enhanced the presence of music in Yeats’s poetry and dramatic prose. What seems beyond doubt is that these settings, constrained at every turn by Yeats’s interventions, have little inherent value as music. 70 On 15 July 1937 he wrote to Dulac: ‘Unfortunately it was only about a year ago that I discovered that for sung poetry (though not for poetry chanted as Florence Farr chanted) a certain type of “stress” was essential. It was by mastering this “stress” that I have written my most recent poems which have, I think, for me, a new poignancy. I want to get back to simplicity & can best do it—I believe—by working for our Irish unaccompanied singing. Every change I make to help the singer seems to improve the poem.’ Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 589. 71 The broadcast was entitled ‘My Own Poetry’, and is published in Johnston (ed.), W. B. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews, 283–9. See also 310–24, ‘Appendix C’, which reproduces in facsimile the typescript of this broadcast, including Dulac’s musical settings (discussed below). On 322 the facsimile shows the amended line in Yeats’s hand written over ‘That is no country for old men’.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

107

culture, but the juxtaposition of ‘The Rose Tree’ with ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ in the 1937 broadcast only conﬁrms the difference between Yeats’s adroit reliance on ﬁxed forms (as in the latter poem) and the occasional, slipshod tedium of his political ballads.72 Perhaps it is an indication of Yeats’s wayward genius that his very strong inclination to write in ﬁxed forms applied irrespective of whether he was writing opportunistic cant or imperishable masterpieces. Dulac, meanwhile, bitterly complained about the spurious claims of folk-singing and bardic chanting which Yeats had used to prop up his control of the musical settings.73 His music for the July 1937 broadcast, preserved in facsimile, comprises instrumental bridge passages between spoken recitations and actual settings of the verse.74 The instrumental passages, which occur either between stanzas or between whole poems, are lightly atmospheric creations that add something to the mood of the poetry in their suggestive motifs and cadential formulations. The tail-end of a march, for example, which fades into silence, provides an epilogue to ‘The Rose Tree’, while a succession of open ﬁfths, moving in rapid sixteenth-notes (perhaps expressive of ‘this tumult in the clouds’), broadens out into glissando chords at the end of ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. The vocal setting of ‘Running to Paradise’ is strophic, modal, and syllabic, as if to underline the ballad diction of that poem, 72 If we compare the commemoration of Pearse and Connolly in ‘Easter, 1916’ to their appearance in ‘The Rose Tree’, the ‘ballad-like simplicity’ of the latter appears all the more routine, especially given that both poems depend on ballad prototypes. The ‘refrain’ in ‘Easter, 1916’ (‘A terrible beauty is born’) is arresting, measured, and deliberate, and is modiﬁed by the accumulation of imagery and thought in which it recurs. It is selfevidently the case that here the ‘ghostly voice’ of the folk song (as in the refrain) does not subvert the complexity of the poet’s own musicality of thought. In ‘The Rose Tree’, the diction of the ballad obtrudes not wisely but too well, as in the line ‘O plain as plain can be’. ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ also depends on the ghostly music of rhyming tetrameters, but once again it is the imagery and measured transformation of Yeats’s diction that hold the imagination, rather than any ballad Urform. 73 The arguments between Yeats and Dulac are summarized and described in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 587–9. Foster refers to ‘a welter of correspondence’. The root of the problem lay in the tension between Yeats’s ‘powerful sense of rhythm’ and his ‘complete ignorance of pitch’, but this was exacerbated by Dulac’s impatience with Yeats’s concocted theories of bardic improvisation and the latter’s resistance to anything which might give music equal prominence to the poetry. 74 See n. 55 above. Dulac provided a bridge passage for harp immediately following ‘The Rose Tree’; a similar transitional passage following ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’; a vocal setting (with harp accompaniment) of the refrain ‘O what of that, O what of that | What is there left to say?’ for ‘The Curse of Cromwell’; a harp setting against which ‘Mad as the Mist and Snow’ was recited; a vocal setting with harp accompaniment of ‘Running to Paradise’; and a vocal setting with harp accompaniment of ‘He and She’.

108

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

and its vocal line is cast in an AA’BC melodic structure which preserves the rhyme scheme of the half-verse. The harp accompaniment is likewise rudimentary, and adds little more than chordal support and rhythmic reinforcement to the vocal line. Dulac’s music, in short, at most afﬁrms the rhythm and rhyme of Yeats’s verse, and thereby presumably meets the poet’s requirements. ‘Listening as a trained musician listens’ to these settings does not afford much pleasure or insight. One can only imagine why Yeats in turn could have preferred Margot Ruddock’s singing (‘to her own music’) to these modest (and demure) arrangements. In either case, it would seem that the music was at worst an uneasy detraction from the verbal music of the poetry, and at best a superﬂuous support for the rhyme and pulse of the verse. Neither Dulac nor Yeats was under any illusion that these settings amounted to independent musical interpretations. As Dulac bitterly remarked, ‘ah but in Doblin it ain’t real moosik they like . . . crooning [is] what they want’.75 The great poems have travelled into posterity, borne there by a verbal music that gives them motion and identity. Already in Yeats’s lifetime they had an iconic status, not only on account of their explicit engagement with contemporary Irish history and the myths of the Revival, but because they were deﬁnitive of a wider resurgence of poetry in English, in which Yeats’s modernism spoke to a continuity of formal discourse and neo-classical regeneration, just as surely as Pound and Eliot mapped the terrain of modern consciousness through the medium of a new poetic music which Yeats regarded with circumspection. Yeats’s achievement nourished the idea of poetry as music, and of poetry as the true domain of that synthesis of orality and artiﬁce which Yeats took from his reading of bardic culture in general and from Gaelic culture in particular. In this exchange, as it were, of music for poetry, Yeats revived a fundamental trope of English romanticism, central to Wordsworth and Coleridge, that poetry could imagine and embody the spirit of music. The crucial difference in Yeats’s case lay not in his lifelong incapacity to understand music (an incapacity which often shaded into hostility or indifference), but rather in his determination to nurture an awareness of that ‘ghostly presence’ which the musical afterlife of bardic poetry presented to his mind. I have described this awareness as a Homeric understanding, because Yeats’s apposition of art and song entailed a synthesis of music and language which he sought to recover (and celebrate) in his own verse. 75 Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II, 589. Foster notes that Dulac was here writing in ‘Poundspeak’.

Yeats and the Music of Poetry

109

It was a synthesis which would endure long after the actual music of his collaborators had fallen silent. It was, too, a synthesis which attained far greater currency in poems like ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ than it ever did in his thinly developed theories of music. As I remarked at the outset of this chapter, there isn’t much point in deploring Yeats’s indifference to music in general, if only because this left him better equipped than otherwise to cultivate the music of poetry. But there is merit in acknowledging this indifference as a consideration which bears on Yeats’s vast inﬂuence on the growth of the Irish literary imagination. That inﬂuence, self-evidently, is most apparent in the plays of John Millington Synge. There too, music strikingly defers to language.

3 Why J. M. Synge Abandoned Music

In 1893 I went to Germany (partly for a holiday), but I stayed there studying music for nearly a year. I saw that the Germans were so much more innately gifted with the musical faculties than I was that I decided to give up music and take to literature instead. I went back to Germany for a few months to work at the language only, and then on the ﬁrst day of 1895 I went to Paris for six months . . . In 1898 I went to the Aran Islands to learn Gaelic and lived with the peasants. Ever since then I have spent part of my year among the Irish speaking peasants in various localities as I am now doing once more. (Synge, in a letter to Max Meyerfeld, in 1905)1 The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. (Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding, 1907)2 Is it not even rumoured in certain quarters that the management of the Abbey Theatre, which is, as we have seen, largely supported by Unionist ﬁnance, is paid to retain the Playboy in its repertory, and produce it in England as frequently as possible, so as to indispose against Home Rule the English public mind—which, a priori, we may suspect of anything but sympathy towards the idea of Irish autonomy—and thus prevent at any price the passing of the Government of Ireland bill? (Maurice Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre)3 1 Quoted in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), J. M. Synge, Collected Works, vol. 3, Plays Book I (Gerrards Cross, 1983), p. xi. 2 See Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), J. M. Synge, Collected Works, vol. 4, Plays Book II (Gerrards Cross, 1983), 4. 3 (London, 1913; 2nd edn.), 204.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

111

1 ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory’: in this line of verse, Yeats identiﬁes that astonishing trio of personalities at the heart of the Literary Revival. ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, like Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or Elgar’s Enigma Variations, is a work which transcends the turbulence to which it adverts, in the serene aftermath of poetic contemplation. To read Yeats’s poem in the light of that animated correspondence between Lady Gregory, Synge, and Yeats, which ended only on the day of Synge’s death on 24 March 1909, is to experience the difference between artistic endurance and the pitiful transience of human existence, a difference never more clearly marked than in the fragility and ill-health of Synge’s life by comparison with the maturing richness of his dramatic imagination. It is a contrast which could lure the critic into Schubertian sentimentalism, especially because the correspondence so faithfully records the approach of death in the midst of theatre business and management of men. Lady Gregory’s letter to Yeats on the day Synge died is a heartbreaking business. It cuts through the late Victorian syntax in which each member of the ‘triangle’ customarily addressed the other, and most movingly attests the redemptive purpose which Yeats found for his friend’s short life. ‘You did more than any for him,’ Lady Gregory wrote, ‘you gave him his means of expression . . . I don’t think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you & the theatre . . .’4 This is an intuition that has carried forward into contemporary critical opinion: Synge’s career seems at ﬁrst to have been dominated by a series of actual escapes and symbolic reorderings. He moved from unionism to nationalism, from respectability to the theatre, from English to Irish, from decadence (in literature) to an originary primitivism, from class to folk community, from the bourgeoisie to the peasantry, from his own ill-health to the glamorization of physical well-being and of youth.5

This persuasive litany of transitions is striking for one omission: Synge also moved from music to language. However much he may have drifted, however decisive the means of expression which Yeats found for him, this was to be Synge’s fundamental progression. He drifted for 4 See Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), Theatre Business. The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge (Gerrards Cross, 1982), 298. The letter is editorially dated 24 March 1909. 5 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London, 1985), ‘Synge and Heroism’, 52.

112

Why Synge Abandoned Music

years, but he drifted in the same direction. Yeats’s interventions were certainly decisive, and it is easy to agree with Lady Gregory that Synge’s long apprenticeship might have continued to no deﬁnite purpose without their beneﬁt. But what he had acquired for himself would make all the difference between Yeats’s grand exhortation to represent Aran and the form this representation was to take. Synge’s years in Europe, ﬁrst in Germany and then in France, extended from 1893 until 1903, during which time his assimilation of continental languages (German, Italian, French, and Breton in particular) prepared him for his likewise rapid acquisition of spoken, contemporary Irish which began in earnest during his ﬁrst visit to the Aran Islands in 1898.6 He would remain a serious student of the language and draw upon it for the rest of his life. For all that they share, Synge and Yeats are distinguished one from the other by the difference between Yeats’s intuitive imagination and those long years of Synge’s studentship (‘he will be a very useful scholar’, Yeats remarked, shortly after having met him for the ﬁrst time).7 Yeats’s heroic imaginings in relation to bardic culture are combined with an explicit reliance on the formal and metrical conventions of English poetry which stand in sharp contrast to Synge’s retrieval of the Irish language, a retrieval which without doubt gained purpose through the agency of Yeats’s inﬂuence, but which also occurred after the fact of Synge’s immersion in European culture. The origins of that immersion lie in Synge’s aspirations towards music. His biographers and critics agree that Synge had abandoned those aspirations no later than April 1894, but the formative inﬂuence of music on Synge’s dramatic imagination would endure well beyond that date. As late as 1903, when he had already written The Aran Islands, Riders to the Sea, and In the Shadow of the Glen, he remained preoccupied with music as a fundamental expression of the relationship between life and art. A play begun in 1900, When the Moon Has Set, would remain incomplete until 1903, and even then was unproduced (Yeats characteristically declared that ‘when it was rejected by us, he took to 6 Synge began to study Irish while he was a student at Trinity College Dublin in 1888 (he took Irish and Hebrew as the subjects of his degree). Declan Kiberd has established, however, that despite his academic study of the subject in Dublin and Paris, his most sustained encounter with the language began with his ﬁrst visit to the Aran Islands in 1898. See Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, 2nd edn. (Dublin, 1993), ‘Synge’s Knowledge of Irish’, 19 ff. 7 From a letter by W. B. Yeats written to Lady Gregory on 14 February 1899, cited in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. 1, 1871–1907 (Oxford, 1983), 43.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

113

peasant work’),8 but it contains nevertheless a striking deliberation on music which the great plays have somewhat eclipsed: Music is such a direct expression of the human personality that if we know music it is not easy to take up any point of psychology without ﬁnding some strange likeness to the thing music has expressed. In these notes on the symphony I am trying to point out that this supreme ‘form’ of art is a reﬂection of the sequence that each person, and in a sense, all humanity tends to pass through life . . . . . .The world orchestra has been playing its oratorio for two thousand years and the thing has become effete. Now the players have gone out to gain new powers in lonely exaltation. The people who rebel from the law of God are not those who are essaying strange notes in the darkness of the world but the fools who linger in the aisles droning their withered chants with senile intonation . . . I mean that in the Christian synthesis each separate faculty has been dying of atrophy. The synthesis has fallen … In the end men will grow human again with a more wonderful manhood. Every passion will unite in new discords resolving in what are to us inconceivable harmonies.9

The most modest observation that this passage could elicit is that it afﬁrms Synge’s habitual perception of experience through the agency of musical form. The ﬁnal sentence cited here paraphrases Wagner (‘he continuously falls from the paradise of his inner harmony into a hell of fearfully discordant existence, and this discord again he can only resolve harmoniously as an artist’), whose essay on Beethoven Synge ﬁrst read in 1893.10 W. J. McCormack has persuasively argued that Synge showed little interest in contemporary German music, but rather that it was his aptitude for music which led him to Goethe and a cultural environment in which musical discourse was essential rather than peripheral. In that progression, Synge discovered that music meant ‘so much more’ than the colonial pastime (or disreputable profession) it seemed in Dublin.11 McCormack acutely remarks that Synge’s apprehension of German 8 From a memorandum to Synge’s executors in 1909, cited by Saddlemyer in J. M. Synge, Plays Book I, 155. 9 From a draft of the play reproduced in ibid. 176 (emphasis mine). 10 From the English translation by Edward Dannreuther of Richard Wagner, Beethoven (London, 1880), 61, cited in W. J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (London, 2000), 111. McCormack shows that Synge read the Wagner essay shortly after his arrival in Germany. 11 See the correspondence between Synge’s mother and her son-in-law on the prospect of Synge’s becoming a professional musician, cited in Ann Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, Irish University Review, 22: 1 (Spring/Summer 1992), 55–68, at 61–2. Mrs Synge characteristically regarded music as a ‘harmless amusement’, until her son began to entertain serious thoughts of making it his profession.

114

Why Synge Abandoned Music

musical culture represented a ﬁrst step towards ‘the lively (and deadly) issues which would deﬁne Modernism’.12 Synge came to an understanding of modernism through his experience of music. It does not seem too much to add that he continued to think in musical terms long after he had given up any material notion of becoming a composer. That he was overtaken by literature in Germany is now a commonplace, but in the passage cited here Synge adduces his knowledge of music as a primary means of perception, and continues to think of the relationship between experience and art in musical terms. When these terms become metaphorical—as in the ‘world orchestra’ and its ‘oratorio’—the Nietzschean rejection of Christian models of thought is framed in language that neighbours the collapse of tonality and the advent of serialism. The ‘withered chants’ of tradition are defunct, and the outer darkness of harmonic discord, with its promise of regeneration and a new synthesis of humane understanding, beckons the artist into the future. When the Moon Has Set is preoccupied by this prospect of regeneration. Although its dramatic resolution is problematic, if not naive— the son of a ‘Big House’ family persuades a nun to abandon her vows and join him in self-made matrimony—its echoes of Ibsen and its philosophical pronouncements both carry forward the notion that Synge’s modernism was grounded in his experience of Europe rather than in his Irish background. He could not become a composer when he found out what music really meant (and what it would demand), and he disdained the prospect of becoming a pallid Ibsenite. By the time he quit Paris for good in March 1903, his dramatic intelligence was centred upon Riders to the Sea and its publication by Yeats, in addition to W. G. Fay’s forthcoming production of [In] The Shadow of the Glen for the Irish National Theatre Society. He nevertheless continued to be concerned about When the Moon Has Set, and recast it from two acts to one. Synge was content to alter the chronology of his dramatic achievement (if not his dramatic development) in favour of the ‘peasant’ plays, and to place the completion of When the Moon Has Set in Paris before he wrote Riders to the Sea. This is not strictly the case. The play was ﬁrst published as late as 1968, ‘with reluctance’, by the great Synge scholar Ann Saddlemyer, who nevertheless proposed that it has its place in the canon, partly on account of its presence in later work, where it is most compellingly adduced, perhaps, in Maurya’s great lament at the close of 12

McCormack, Fool of the Family, 113.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

115

Riders to the Sea.13 But the play sounds an alien note in Synge’s work, and hovers at the edge of sentimental melodrama, as if the Winslow Boy had run into Canon Sheehan on his way home from school. It also sounds an awkwardly placed but unmistakable avowal of music as the principal interlocutor between experience and art, just at the moment when Synge was about to give himself over to the representation of a society without much formal cognizance of either. Oratorios and symphonies might mean something to ‘Sister Eileen’ in When the Moon Has Set, but they don’t have anything to do with the impoverished victims of remorseless nature who inhabit Riders to the Sea. The drownings in that play submerge the scruples of modernism, and by extension the whole indulgent enterprise of contemporary European sensibility, in irrelevance. The consolations of religious belief in Riders to the Sea are overwhelmed by the sheer force of nature, in which Maurya’s dead sons and her own grief are subordinated to the sea’s inexhaustible appetite for dominion. In dramatizing the tragic force of this circumstance, Synge departs from not only the ﬁn-de-siècle salon of French impressionism, but what Seamus Deane has called the literary myths of the Revival. Neither is it surprising (at least to me) that Yeats should have thought so well of Deirdre of the Sorrows, and hailed this unﬁnished play (his last) as Synge’s masterwork. But that play is remote from those representations of Aran and the Atlantic seaboard which preoccupied Synge for most of his dramatic career. Synge’s departure from those modes of Gaelic heroism and natural comedy which prevailed at the National Theatre Society becomes all the more marked in two plays in particular, The Well of the Saints and The Playboy of the Western World. Neither one of them comes close to the brilliant propaganda of Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan or the ceremonial admixture of ritual, dance, and verse that Yeats would achieve in the plays written after he had met Ezra Pound. But both of them owe something to a modernist reading of music which Yeats shared, and which Synge himself had identiﬁed in When the Moon Has Set. Read and rejected by Lady Gregory and Yeats in 1901 (notwithstanding further revisions in 1902 and 1903), When the Moon Has Set had a lengthy genesis. Saddlemyer has shown that the play originated in Paris in 1896, and that it was conceived coterminously with other projects in which music was as prominent, including Étude Morbide.14 In an 13 See Saddlemyer, J. M. Synge, Plays Book I, pp: xiv–xvi, for details of how Synge ‘clung obstinately’ to When the Moon Has Set, which he revised at least three times between 1901 and 1908, and which he set aside for further revision at the time of his death. 14 Synge called this ‘a morbid thing about a mad ﬁddler in Paris, which I hate’. Cited in ibid., p. xiv.

116

Why Synge Abandoned Music

early autobiographical sketch bound in with materials for the play we ﬁnd the ﬁrst occurrence of that leitmotif which would come closest to Synge’s formulation of an artistic credo: ‘Every life is a symphony, and the translation of this sequence into music and from music again, for those who are not musicians, into literature, or painting or sculpture, is the real effort of the artist.’15 Synge’s ‘strange notes in the darkness of the world’ would sound, self-evidently, in language and not in music, but they represent, without doubt, a repudiation of that ‘joyless and pallid’ art16 which the exhausted genres of symphony and oratorio had represented to his imagination in When the Moon Has Set. As Katharine Worth has shown, the central ﬁgure who stands behind this repudiation in Synge’s work is Maurice Maeterlinck.17 Given the extent of Maeterlinck’s inﬂuence on the formation of Yeats’s dramatic imagination, especially through the agency of Arthur Symons, it is no less remarkable that Maeterlinck should prove to be so decisive in the development of Synge’s concept of theatre. This is because Maeterlinck, more than any French writer other than Mallarmé, ﬁgures so prominently in the rise of modernism in European art music at the turn of the nineteenth century.

2 Thirty years after the publication of Worth’s classic study of The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, Maeterlinck remains a somewhat shadowy ﬁgure in the annals of Irish literary history. Although Patrick McGuinness’s comparatively recent study of Maeterlinck afﬁrms his inﬂuence on Yeats and Beckett, the absence of any such consideration in relation to Synge is a characteristic omission which also obtains in recent biographies by David Kiely and W. J. McCormack.18 Even when Synge is explicitly identiﬁed as 15 See ibid. 279. The passage cited here ﬁrst appears in an autobiographical sketch written in 1898. 16 The terms used by Synge to describe contemporary theatre in his preface to The Playboy of the Western World. 17 See Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London, 1978), passim. 18 For an acknowledgement of Maeterlinck’s inﬂuence on Yeats and Beckett, see Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2000), esp. 127–8, 144–5, 234–5. Synge’s plays are not a consideration of this study. Maeterlinck is not mentioned in McCormack’s Fool of the Family, nor does he ﬁgure in David M. Kiely, John Millington Synge: A Biography (Dublin, 1994).

Why Synge Abandoned Music

117

being ‘sufﬁciently a writer of the French decadence’, we ﬁnd little or no mention of the author of Pelléas et Mélisande. But Synge’s early biographer Maurice Bourgeois was sufﬁciently convinced of Maeterlinck’s importance to Synge to nominate him as Synge’s favourite author, in a consideration of inﬂuences in which French literature (Racine no less than Mallarmé) is notably prominent. Bourgeois restores a degree of credibility to this admixture of French modernism and the Irish subject-matter of Synge’s plays: He was one of the few Irish writers who europeanized Ireland without degaelicizing it—who allied the depth of an intense national spirit to the width of a broad-minded international culture. Literary cosmopolitanism enabled Synge to express Irish life so completely that his peasant characters are lifted from the narrow boundaries of their petty Robinson-Crusoe-island provinciality into a kind of universal and dateless dreamworld which makes them representative of human nature everywhere.19

This reading does not contradict Yeats’s more general disavowal of French literature in respect of Synge’s future career (despite his own debt to the French movement of the 1890s). Synge’s slow return to Dublin from Paris (via the Aran Islands, as it were) is secure as the episode which determined his growth as a writer. I would not wish to argue against the signiﬁcance of this episode, except to observe that Synge’s absorption of French literary culture was much more sustained and at ﬁrst hand than was Yeats’s secondary assimilation of symbolist poetry through the agency of Arthur Symons and his own deliberations in the Rhymers’ Club. It is partly on account of Synge’s Parisian sojourn and his career as a reviewer of French literature and drama that Katharine Worth makes the case for the inﬂuence of Maeterlinck on two of his plays in particular, The Well of the Saints and Deirdre of the Sorrows.20 Of even greater consequence is the afﬁnity which Worth detects as between the ‘theatre of silence’ invented by Maeterlinck and the stillness and ceremony of The Well of the Saints, in addition to those thematic correspondences which link Deirdre to the love triangle of Pelléas et Mélisande. The ﬁrst act of The Well of the Saints, as Worth observes, incorporates those ‘two essentials of the Maeterlinckian drama’, monotony and stillness: ‘for an audaciously long time there is nothing happening except a statuesque conversation between the two blind people followed by the hardly less static scene when they talk to Timmy the Smith.’21 19 20

Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre, 63. 21 See Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe, 120–39. Ibid. 126.

118

Why Synge Abandoned Music

The Well of the Saints was produced by the Abbey Theatre on 4 February 1905. Although it immediately neighbours The Playboy of the Western World in the Synge canon (the latter play followed almost exactly two years later, during which time Synge accompanied the Abbey Players on several English and Irish tours in which his involvement with the company, personal as well as professional, was at its most intense),22 it brings to perfection a radically different mode of theatre than that which The Playboy explores. But both plays enjoy an intimate communion nevertheless: Martin and Mary Doul will prefer the interior world of their imaginings to the brutal exposure which entails upon the restoration of sight, just as Pegeen Mike prefers the heroic account which Christy Mahon gives of himself to the prospect of seeing him as he actually is. In either case, the trope of disillusion is central. But ‘statuesque conversation’ is not the prevailing mode of The Playboy of the Western World. In the interval between the two plays, Synge’s afﬁnities with Maeterlinck all but disappear. As Synge moves further away from the years of his European sojourn, his visible reliance on French symbolism recedes in favour of a new typology of dramatic discourse. I want to suggest here that this typology is operatic, insofar as the ‘peasant comedy’ of The Playboy eclipses the interior conﬁgurations of blindness which dominate The Well of the Saints in its dramatically formal perspective on ensemble and individuated character. In the achievement of this perspective, Synge continues to rely on musical prototypes. ‘Operatic’: the word is so generous in its capacity for dramatic allusion that to use it without some degree of stringent circumspection in relation to Synge is to render it all but useless. Synge’s own attention to the formal deployment of language in the theatre is famously indicative of musical thought, as in his recommendation in the Playboy preface that, ‘in a good play, every speech should be as fully ﬂavoured as a nut or apple’. This prescription is echoed in those readings of the plays which identify many of the set-pieces (as in Maurya’s lament in Riders to the Sea) as speeches ‘which function like arias’.23 Critics as otherwise diverse as William E. Hart, Ann Saddlemyer, Declan Kiberd, and Katharine Worth have afﬁrmed of The Aran Islands and the plays that they moreor-less consciously inculcate principles of musical structure, or that they seek in language a verbal music that harbours Synge’s early inclinations as a composer, together with his self-consciously musical approach to 22 See the chronology of Synge’s life and career published in Saddlemyer (ed.), Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. i, pp. xxiv–xxv. 23 Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe, 125.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

119

language, and in particular to the Irish language. At its most extreme, this afﬁrmation leads Hart to describe The Aran Islands as ‘Synge’s First Symphony’, but it is fair comment to add that this tendency to identify music as an essential component now amounts to a principle of Synge criticism. It is perhaps no less germane to describe Riders to the Sea as a verbal opera (especially given its musical setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams), or to identify the typology of folk opera in The Playboy of the Western World.24 These musical terms nevertheless require further attention, especially given what we know of Synge’s rather conservative musical education and his swift transition from the study of music to language and literature in 1894. If, as W. J. McCormack has suggested, it was music that led Synge to literary modernism, then it is reasonable in turn to suggest that Synge’s encounter with French symbolism (as in his reading of Maeterlinck and Mallarmé) may well have impacted upon his understanding of music. In this respect, the modernity of French impressionism is of cardinal importance. George Steiner’s gloss on Mallarmé brings this matter into sharp relief: That which endows the word rose, that arbitrary assemblage of two vowels and two consonants, with its sole legitimacy and life force is, states Mallarmé, ‘l’absence de toute rose’. Unless I am mistaken, we stand here at the precise source of philosophic and aesthetic modernity, at the breakpoint with the Logos-order as Western thought and feeling had known it since, at the least, the tautology spoken from the Burning Bush.25

We know that Mallarmé’s impact on musical modernism, no less than that of Maeterlinck, was decisive. In Pierre Boulez’s words, ‘modern music was awakened by L’Après midi dun faune’.26 Debussy’s orchestral ‘Prélude’ to this work, completed in 1894, is rivalled only by the 24 For evaluations of Synge which afﬁrm music as a formative and enduring inﬂuence, see Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’; Declan Kiberd ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’ (2002), in The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge, 2005), 70–90; Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe, 120–57; and William E. Hart, Synge’s First Symphony: The Aran Islands (New Britain, Conn., 1993). We might additionally observe that the Vaughan Williams opera belongs to a wider group of settings of Irish literature by British, European, and American composers which begins with the Berlioz and Schumann works examined in Ch. 2 of this book, and which extends to such compositions as Richard Strauss’s Salome (Wilde) and Luciano Berio’s settings of Beckett. In ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, Saddlemyer adverts to George Moore’s reading of The Tinker’s Wedding as a work ‘that could easily be transposed into opera’ (67). 25 George Steiner, Real Presences (London, 1991), 96. 26 Cited in Roger Nichols, ‘Debussy, Claude’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), v. 292–314, at 297.

120

Why Synge Abandoned Music

same composer’s setting of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) in terms of its immense inﬂuence. Debussy’s interest in the Maeterlinck play dates from no later than 1889. In conversations with his teacher Guiraud, Debussy remarked that ‘Music in opera is far too prominent’, and that his ideal was ‘a short libretto with mobile scenes . . . [and] no discussion or argument between the characters, whom I set at the mercy of life or destiny’.27 Roger Nichols has identiﬁed three features of Pelléas that made it such a remarkable work: ‘the primacy of text over music (Debussy made only a few cuts in Maeterlinck’s original), a total respect for the inﬂections of the French language, and a revolutionary use of discreet orchestral colour and silence.’28 Debussy’s creative dependence on Mallarmé and Maeterlinck is by no means unique, but it not only changed the complexion of French music at the turn of the nineteenth century, it also radically internalized the discourse of art music in opposition to the narrative stability of tonality and the German/Italian hegemony of symphonic and operatic genres which had prevailed in Europe for over a century. Although German music would also respond to Maeterlinck, primarily through the agency of Schoenberg’s orchestral interpretation of Pelléas (1902– 3), the diverging paths of musical modernism, in which Schoenberg’s evolution of serialism by way of a profound engagement with atonal musical structures must be sharply distinguished from the tonal vocabulary and colour of French impressionism, originated in this dissociation of sensibility which Debussy discovered in French poetry and drama of the 1890s. No less than in Maeterlinck’s own ‘theatre of silence’, Debussy’s music is deﬁnitive of that break with realism and those conventions of narrative objectivity which literary modernism had so decisively abandoned. The correspondence between word and tone in Debussy’s music is no longer that of the ‘Logos-order’ in which narrative intelligence and the discourse of tonality consort together. Although musical modernism would entail a degree of generic stability (as in the persistence of ‘opera’ and ‘symphony’), the language of music would insist on that pre-eminence of perspective and linguistic freedom which literary modernism had so strikingly arrogated to itself in deﬁance of Zola, Ibsen, and those traditions of naturalism which it had supervened. By end of the nineteenth century the discourse of European art music was no less deﬁant in its repudiation of traditional tonality. The 27

Cited in Nichols, ‘Debussy, Claude’, 294.

28

Ibid. 295.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

121

musical world which had drawn Synge to Germany was in revolution. By the turn of the century Synge was still writing about ‘contemporary French literature’, but he, too, had conﬁrmed the change of direction on which he had embarked even before Yeats exhorted him to visit the Aran Islands. By the time he crossed the channel to close up his rooms in Paris in 1903, on which occasion he met James Joyce ‘seven or eight times’, Riders to the Sea had been published by Yeats and was awaiting production by the Irish National Theatre Society the following year. The Aran Islands, completed in 1901, would not appear until 1907, but it also conﬁrms that Synge had found his true subject-matter. The ‘universal and dateless dreamworld’ of Aran is an imaginative synthesis, not an act of reportage. For all the realism suggested by Synge’s concern for accurate representation on the stage, the plays themselves transcend the boundaries of naturalism, beginning with Riders and its espousal of tragic ceremony. Although Synge himself subscribed to the cult of peasant plays as ‘portions of Irish life . . . put upon the stage with a care and accuracy of detail that has hardly been attempted before’,29 the theatrical deportment of the action, language, and settings contradict the ‘hidden Ireland’ perspective with which they have been associated from the outset. The universal condition of Synge’s plots has a paradigmatic quality that reinforces this freedom from faithful representation: the striking parallels between The Well of the Saints and Maeterlinck’s The Sightless, identiﬁed by Katharine Worth, are a case in point.30 Nevertheless, it is self-evidently Synge’s language which was to determine the reception of his plays. The language is brand new. In that respect at least, it echoes the achievement of Debussy, many of whose operatic and orchestral works are closely contemporaneous with Synge’s plays.31 And just as Debussy immediately summons the instructive (but vitally different) example of his contemporary Ravel, so likewise does Synge summon Yeats. 29 From a brochure which explains the Abbey Theatre ‘method’ of acting, published in 1906 and cited in Saddlemyer, J. M. Synge, Plays Book I, p. xix. 30 See Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe, 127 ff. Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre, identiﬁes ‘The Maid of Malines’ (1832) by Lord Lytton as ‘a most deﬁnite and indubitable, but hitherto undetected, English origin’ for The Well of the Saints. Bourgeois’s account of the Lytton story (188–92) provides strong support for such a reading. 31 Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and the orchestral poems La Mer (1905) and Images (1905–11) had an impact in Paris on European musical modernism that closely parallels the Synge plays produced in Dublin during the same period (1902–8). I am most grateful to Ann Saddlemyer for the suggestion that Synge may have been receptive to (or at least aware of ) earlier works by Debussy and his French predecessors during his Paris years, although only Pelléas (of the works cited here) was given while Synge was in Paris.

122

Why Synge Abandoned Music 3 I imagine men spoke their verses ﬁrst to a regulated pitch without a tune, and then, eager for variety, spoke to tunes which gradually became themselves the chief preoccupation until speech died out in music . . . (Yeats, in a letter to The Academy in June 1902)32

The stately procession of ﬁxed forms in Yeats’s poetry is a verbal music far removed from the operatic ebullience and lyricism of The Playboy of the Western World. Yeats’s plays inhabit mythology; Synge’s dramas centre upon a much more immediate provenance. With the exception of Deirdre of the Sorrows, his plays are preponderantly a representation of peasant life on the Atlantic seaboard or in the Wicklow hills. He projects himself as an eavesdropper, a distant but unmistakable relation to the ethnographer with notebook (and later with tape recorder) assiduously gathering information in the ﬁeld. That famous ‘chink in the ﬂoor’ through which he amasses his vocabulary is a declaration in favour of natural regeneration, no less than a repudiation of the ‘pallid and joyless words’ of urban artiﬁce.33 In the theatre, Yeats imagines the high ceremony of Gaelic princes; Synge bends his ear to the hidden glory of peasant culture. It is The Playboy of the Western World which ﬁnally distinguishes Synge from Yeats. In a reading of the play which brilliantly conceives of Synge’s drama as ‘a rehearsal for Yeats’s achievement in poetry’, Seamus Deane reads The Playboy as a decisive emancipation from the ruined prototype of ‘national character’ which Christy Mahon leaves behind him at the close.34 This reading ﬂatly contradicts Maurice Bourgeois’s contemporary gloss (1913) on The Playboy, which allows the play to be interpreted as an unwitting indictment of the case for Irish autonomy, but in either case, then as now, no greater contrast between Synge’s conception of drama and Yeats’s theatre is available than the difference between Yeats’s meditation on ‘that play of mine’ (Cathleen Ni Houlihan) and the reaction to the ﬁrst performance of The Playboy of the Western World.35 32

Cited in Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 88. Cf. Synge’s preface to The Playboy of the Western World, in Saddlemyer (ed.), J. M. Synge, Plays Book II, 53–4. 34 See Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997), 140–4. 35 Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre, remarks that ‘we positively refuse to regard [The Playboy] as his masterpiece’, and argues instead that Synge’s 33

Why Synge Abandoned Music

123

Declan Kiberd has remarked that ‘the art of public recitation stands at the point of intersection between literature and music’, and adds that ‘Synge believed it was an art towards which many modern writers were preparing to return’.36 Kiberd concludes that Synge ‘turned to the practice of the bardic poets for instruction and inspiration’, and that this practice was recovered in Synge’s patient (and painstaking) insistence upon the hidden music of the dramatic line which his actors were obliged to disclose and enunciate for themselves.37 Yeats of course did likewise, but the music he sought cannot have been the same, to judge by the radical difference between his poetic (and dramatic) diction and Synge’s profound and daring absorption of Irish idioms into English. Whether or not we regard Synge’s English as a theatrical hybrid or as an ingenious representation of the Irish language through the medium of English (a representation that would relate him to certain aspects of Brian Friel),38 there cannot be much doubt about the fact that ‘the art of public recitation’ becomes all the more explicit in Synge’s work because the language in which it is cast draws attention to itself by virtue of its exoticism and reiﬁed familiarity. Synge’s attitude to Irish was complex, but not really ambiguous: he knew it as the source of his dramatic imagination, but not as the medium. In this distinction between the fault-lines of peasant culture and the techniques of modernist theatre lies the difference between Synge’s operatic experiments at the Abbey and the stern propaganda of the Gaelic League. Even the ‘sophisticated’ audience for which Synge wrote his plays would famously and noisily object to this distinction, so that his perceived slur upon Irish womanhood came to seem of far greater moment in the Playboy riots than any connection to the ﬁle and reacaire of classical Irish literature.39 A century after the riots, our perception of Synge’s ‘peasant’ dramas has little ‘comedy’ . . . ‘certainly constitutes the most tragic exposure of his fellow-countrymen’s besottedness’ (204). Bourgeois’s assessment of the play (193–212) continues to resonate in later readings of Synge which condemn his work either explicitly or otherwise as a new version of stage-Irishry. See e.g. the review of Synge’s letters published by Denis Donoghue in We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 209–13. 36 Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 84. 37 Ibid. 88–9. 38 I have explored this relationship (as between The Playboy and Friel’s Translations) in Ch. 7 of this book. 39 Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 86–9, offers the distinction between ﬁle (poet) and reacaire (reciter) in bardic poetry as one which can be applied to author and actor respectively in Synge’s conception and production of his plays.

124

Why Synge Abandoned Music

enough to do with any real cognizance of these conventions. To be fair, Synge’s own stamping-ground was not the courts of Gaelic Munster, but the tribal villages of Wicklow and the Atlantic seaboard. The ‘western world’ discovered by Christy Mahon is a savage and vindictive place. It is this discovery upon which so much criticism of The Playboy of the Western World has fastened. When Christy quits the stage, he leaves behind him an image of abject failure and collapse that continues to provoke commentary. Whether we regard Synge as a ‘committed Gaeilgeoir’ (Kiberd)40 or a ‘spiritual tourist’ (Seamus Deane), the play remains a source of controversy in the reception history of Irish writing. Its afterlife in the theatre (as in The Shadow of a Gunman, Waiting for Godot, and Translations) is immediately apparent, but no less obvious is its problematic indictment of art as a substitute for history.41 Synge himself is not immune to this indictment, but it is only fair at the outset to remind ourselves that he confronts this issue directly, as when Pegeen Mike observes that ‘there is a world of difference between a gallous story and a dirty deed’. Whether or not Synge’s dramatic vision may be construed as a transitional moment in the postcolonial emancipation of Irish identity, as Kiberd argues, or as the lament for an obliterated culture redeemed by the artiﬁce of the oppressor and by the myth of communion between ascendancy and peasant (Deane), his plays, and The Playboy in particular, seem destined to function as a cardinal point of reference in those deliberations on identity, nationhood, and history which continue to preoccupy the discourse of Irish literary criticism, as well they might.42 One of these preoccupations—the deliberation on identity—is forced to crisis point by The Playboy of the Western World. Although Synge disavowed any degree of political intentionality in the play, to say nothing of the storm of protest which he thereby drew upon himself and the Abbey Players, the question of identity is so prominently engaged in the play through the medium of Synge’s rhetorical deployment of language that it is impossible to believe that he could have been unaware of what he was doing. He expressly dedicated himself to a representation of the Irish popular imagination as a vital source for the European theatre: ‘In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is ﬁery 40

The word ‘Gaeilgeoir’ designates a ﬂuent but non-native speaker of Irish. Donal Davoren’s pretence to heroic action in The Shadow of a Gunman is strongly reminiscent of Christy’s position in The Playboy (just as Pegeen Mike and Minnie Powell likewise compare). The indictment of storytelling with which Davoren condemns himself at the close of O’Casey’s play echoes Pegeen Mike’s famous distinction in The Playboy. 42 See Declan Kiberd’s preface to the 2nd edn. of his Synge and the Irish Language, pp. xv–xxviii. 41

Why Synge Abandoned Music

125

and magniﬁcent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.’43 In claiming the legitimacy of this imaginative source for the stage, Synge remains an ethnographer, but he maintains this role not as a scientist, but in the sense that Béla Bartók is an ethnographer, which is to say, as a writer or composer who identiﬁes an ethnic substratum essential to the artiﬁce of high culture. (In this connection, it is useful to recall Synge’s insistence upon the creation of a new music from the disharmony of experience in order to subsume the exhausted genres of ‘symphony’ and ‘oratorio’, in When the Moon Has Set.) In Synge’s case, moreover, the artiﬁce and the source are intimately layered through the agency of Irish, and, in the case of The Playboy of the Western World, through the paradigm of opera. In order to substantiate this argument, we need to examine again the metamorphosis from music to language that animated Synge’s vision of the theatre. When Yeats writes that speech died out in music to designate the terminus from which he sought to recover the music of speech itself, we are sharply reminded of the linguistic formality and decorum of his dramatic vision, notwithstanding the failed experiments with the psaltery and Yeats’s own ambivalence with regard to the use of music in his later poetry. Synge’s collusion in this enterprise, if anything, transcended that of his mentor, to judge by his painstaking efforts in rehearsal to transmit to his players the cadential music of the line.44 Synge’s Hiberno-Irish (if we can borrow that term) is absolutely different in kind from the verse employed by Yeats inside or beyond the theatre, and even if we were to restrict ourselves to a comparison between those plays which Yeats gave to the Abbey during Synge’s lifetime and Synge’s ‘peasant work’, we would quickly determine that, not only in subject-matter but also in diction and phrasing, it is virtually impossible to map the verbal music of one writer onto the structural rhetoric of the other. Still less is it tenable to compare Yeats’s poetry with Synge’s dramatic speech, if only 43 From the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, in Saddlemyer (ed.), J. M. Synge, Plays Book II, 54. 44 Synge’s efforts to transmit the rhythm and delivery of his plays in rehearsal and sometimes in the manuscripts of his plays through the agency of musical markings and graphical indications of pace and tempo are discussed by Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, 67–8, and Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 80 ff. In particular, the ‘marking up’ of the play manuscripts (as in The Well of the Saints) shows that Synge was attempting to regulate the auditory performance of his work by means of quasi-musical resources, including tempo markings and cadential strokes.

126

Why Synge Abandoned Music

because the former relies so ostensibly and explicitly on the technical resources of English and Italian verse, resources which remained foreign to Synge’s natural mode of expression, even when he was translating Petrarch.45 The supreme irony in this difference between the two lies in Synge’s constant recourse, nevertheless, to models of European literature, not in terms of technique, but as a justiﬁcation for his modernist aesthetic. Synge knew this literature at ﬁrst hand, but unlike Yeats, he also knew Irish. He would persist in the legitimacy of European precedents for what he sought to do (as in those discriminations between Zola, Husymans, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rabelais, Ibsen, and Molière by which he brieﬂy inspects his own position as a modernist in the prefaces to his plays), but the verbal music he created for the Irish stage, and especially in the case of The Playboy of the Western World, would be his own. Neither Yeats nor Lady Gregory could or would claim otherwise, notwithstanding the inﬂuence of both writers on Synge himself. Likewise with Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht, which, as Declan Kiberd has shown, is a vital source for the sexual imagery in The Playboy: there is also a ‘world of difference’ between these translations and their afterlife of incorporation into Synge’s play.46 Neither Synge’s early training as a musician, nor his habitual recourse to musical metaphor to describe the aesthetics of his own art, nor his visits to Aran, nor his immersion in French literary culture, satisfactorily accounts for the singular presence of his dramatic imagination. Not even his knowledge of Irish can do that. And even if we concede the admixture of French impressionism and Gaelic folklore as the essence of the plays which precede The Playboy, that play in turn subverts this essence by virtue of its insistence upon a ‘Rabelaisian’ note of high comedy and a corresponding departure from the ‘theatre of silence’ and still ceremony which Yeats had so admired in the ﬁrst act of The Well of the Saints. 45 The translations from Petrarch included in Synge’s Poems and Translations (Dublin, 1911) do not attempt to render the Italian into English sonnets, but are in continuous prose which is imbued with the idiom of (Hiberno-) Irish constructions, as in: ‘Let you go down, sorrowful rhymes, to the hard rock is covering my dear treasure, and then let you call out till herself that is in the Heavens will make answer, though her dead body is lying in a shady place’ (38). 46 The process by which Synge borrows imagery from Hyde’s translations in The Playboy of the Western World is described in detail by Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, 129–39. Kiberd shows that Christy Mahon’s diction in particular is taken over from Hyde, although he also clariﬁes the difference between the sensibility and vocabulary of the original and Synge’s decisively independent embellishments. Kiberd (135) remarks that ‘Synge seldom borrowed an image from Irish poetry without altering it in some fashion’.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

127

To suggest that this subversion is operatic is to build in turn upon the suggestion made by Kiberd that The Playboy can be regarded as a species of ‘verbal opera’.47 The dangers of doing so, as I have already indicated, are considerable. It is not misleading to remark that Synge’s plays in general are a substitute for musical works, given that he ‘gave up music and took to literature instead’,48 and that they were written, moreover, for a theatre in which the quest for music in speech took special precedence. It is also not misleading to refer, as Kiberd has done, to Synge’s early writings in order to conﬁrm the connection which he drew between folk music and art music, and correspondingly between folk poetry and ‘modern’ poetry, so that the contemporary writer is one who seeks to recover the ‘hidden melody’ of bardic verse in his own work. The difﬁculties begin when we directly apply musical prototypes to Synge’s writings, especially when these prototypes are drawn from an aesthetic conﬁguration which is remote, not only from Aran, but (at least in part) from the modernism of French musical thought during Synge’s decade in Europe. Thus, when Riders to the Sea is likened to a tone poem, The Well of the Saints to a double fugue, Deirdre of the Sorrows to an opera, or the structure of The Aran Islands to a symphonic movement cast in sonata-allegro form, the comparison in each case is complicated by the radical departure from such models, and not only in France, made by composers throughout Synge’s formative years as a writer.49 A second difﬁculty lies in the reconciliation of these formal models with Synge’s own comments on and recourse to music, especially where these directly inﬂuenced the shape of his theatrical language. 47 See Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 11: Kiberd remarks that ‘Synge’s Gaelic opera [a projected setting based on the folk song ‘Eileen Aroon’] never got written (unless we count The Playboy as a sort of verbal opera)’. I am grateful to Professor Kiberd for having subsequently suggested to me that Synge may indeed have completed an opera on ‘Eileen Aroon’, which is now lost. 48 In a passage from Synge’s autobiographical recollections, he confesses that he ‘wished to be at once Shakespeare, Beethoven and Darwin’ (cited in Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, 61). 49 Saddlemyer (ibid. 65–6) describes Riders as a tone poem and observes that ‘The Well of the Saints is crafted with the deliberate design of a double fugue’; Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe, remarks that ‘an early scenario of Deirdre includes musical motifs which seem to point to Pelléas and perhaps also to Tristan and Isolde. . . . the ﬁnal version drops these effects, but many of the great speeches . . . function like arias’ (124–5); Hart, Synge’s First Symphony, divides the structure of The Aran Islands into ‘exposition’, ‘development’, and ‘recapitulation’, thereby casting the work into the conventional design of sonata form. The difﬁculty in having recourse to these comparisons is that such generic models are rarely stable, so that if Riders is a tone poem, this begs the question as to what Synge’s conception of ‘tone poem’ might be.

128

Why Synge Abandoned Music

While it is indisputably the case that Synge occasionally likened literary and musical genres to each other (as in his assertion that ‘the drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything’), his quest for the hidden melody of poetic enunciation, particularly in regard to the use of musical directions to ‘score’ the pace of dialogue, does not really advance the argument that he was thinking ‘musically’ in any literal sense, and especially not when he was advising the Abbey Players as to how his plays ought to be spoken. Indeed, he could not have done so, however carefully he marked up the rehearsal copies of In the Shadow of the Glen and The Well of the Saints: the folk melodies which Synge commends in his early writings ‘have their own signature’, but it is a signature, pace Synge’s romantic insistence otherwise, that is mechanical at every turn. A fundamental property of folk music, and of most art music for that matter, is a consistent metre which can be written down or transmitted orally, as the case may be. The cadences of Synge’s dramatic writing have nothing to do with the prevailing order of regular metrical pulses, musical or otherwise. This is not to gainsay the presence of metre in Gaelic poetry or in Yeats’s English poetry (or in certain of Synge’s own poems, for that matter).50 But the alignment of Synge’s ‘Bardic doctrines’ (Kiberd) with the dramatist’s own awareness of marks of interpretation as these conventionally apply to European art music only takes us so far with regard to those parallels between the composer and his interpreter in art music and the distinction between ﬁle and reacaire in Gaelic poetry.51 Even if the position of an actor in the Abbey Theatre was ‘almost identical to that of the reacaire’52 under Synge (and Yeats, of course), this does not obviate the difference between the status of Synge’s published plays, which are absolutely conventional in respect of layout and typography, and the expressive markings which the publication of art music has normally entailed for centuries. There is, nevertheless, sufﬁcient evidence, as Kiberd has shown, to demonstrate that 50 See Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 80–2, for a discussion of Synge’s unﬁnished novel Flowers and Footsteps (1899), in which regular scansion and rhyme in poetry are subordinated to the tempo and stress of individual words and phrases. 51 In Flowers and Footsteps, one of the interlocutors remarks that: ‘In a page of Chopin or Franz Schubert every nuance of expression is indicated with extraordinary care but at the present time the writer sends out his work—a tissue of the subtlest intonation— with no warning for the reader and in numerous cases a great part of his conception is not understood.’ (Cited in Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 84.) Given Synge’s preoccupation with the spoken word (as in the theatre), this distinction between musical notation and conventional typography underlines not only his own instincts for the music of speech in drama, but also the difference, simply, between music and literature. 52 Kiberd, ‘Synge, Yeats and Bardic Poetry’, 86.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

129

Synge’s preoccupation with the cadential music of his plays in rehearsal permits us to think of these texts as musical works by analogy. In that respect at least, some rapport between musical genres and Synge’s dramatic imagination seems tenable. The persons nominated at the head of The Playboy of the Western World tend to support this reading. A division of characters which groups the minor personages as ‘small farmers’ and ‘village girls’ (including, curiously, the Widow Quin) is strongly reminiscent of opera (and even of the musical comedy which Synge detested). This reminiscence is fortiﬁed in the play when, in Act Three, both parties unite to become ‘The Crowd’ in jeering savagery at Christy’s predicament. As the action accelerates late in the play, the small farmers and village girls are consolidated in this unitary force, so that the denouement is all the more powerfully achieved by Synge’s distinction between the principal characters and the violent, quasi-choral commentary of the mob. It is a denouement which borders on farce, so that the violence of torture and the end of love both seem more bearable than would otherwise be the case. The comic gusto of the action mitigates the tribal cruelties which it discloses. The tumult of attempted murder, betrayal, accusation, farcical recovery, and repudiation, in which ‘the famous love duet’ (in Ann Saddlemyer’s operatic rendition) of Act Three is brutally eclipsed, most brilliantly crowds the stage. The result is that Pegeen’s ‘loud lamentations’ which end the play are all the starker and more shocking when it suddenly occurs to her that she is utterly undone. It seems to me that this movement, or more properly this series of swift modulations, is more indicative of Synge’s musicianship and operatic technique than his reticence (at least in the published play) on the matter of individual phrasing.53 It is the shifting tonalities as a whole, rather than any one tonality in particular, that licenses an operatic paradigm for the play. This is not to disavow the importance of ‘the art of public recitation’ in The Playboy of the Western World, but rather to seek within its structural control of mood and action the kind of ‘verbal opera’ that Kiberd has identiﬁed. Ann Saddlemyer has observed that Synge’s ‘urgent defence of the construction of The Playboy would make sense to a musicologist’.54 Amen to that, particularly in light of the following passage from a letter which Synge wrote to John Quinn on 5 September 1907: 53 The collated editions of the plays do not encourage the view that Synge was notably consistent, however much he redrafted his work. See the editorial footnotes provided by Saddlemyer in J. M. Synge, Plays Book II, 55 ff. 54 Saddlemyer, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, 68.

130

Why Synge Abandoned Music

I was interested also to see the letters you sent me from T. Walsh. He is quite right that my early work like ‘Riders to the Sea’ has a certain quality that [my] more mature work is without. People who prefer this early quality are quite free to do so. When he blames the ‘coarseness’, however, I dont [sic] think he sees that the romantic note and a Rabelaisian note are working to a climax through a great part of the play, and the Rabelaisian note, the ‘gross’ note if you will, must have its climax no matter who may be shocked.55

Because the play is saturated in the rhetoric of violence (Pegeen Mike’s idea of a good time at the beginning of the play seems invariably to involve stories about maiming ewes or policemen, until her sexual energy ﬁnds some sense of purpose in her courtship of Christy), the ‘Rabelaisian’ note still gives one pause for thought, long after the slurs on Irish womanhood have become an important footnote in literary history (to say nothing of Irish social history). It signiﬁes precisely that impatience with ‘the fools who linger in the aisles droning their withered chants with senile intonation’ that Colm condemns in When the Moon Has Set. ‘Father Reilly’ (an offstage presence) and his numbing authority nevertheless dominate Pegeen’s world, and it is hard to escape the impression that the radical impoverishment of that world is, if anything, worsened by the religious tyranny which promises something better in the next one. Whether Synge shared this view or not is a matter for his biographers, but in any case the play he wrote is remorseless in its bleak portrayal of peasant existence, caught between the physical impoverishment of this life and the repressive authority of the life to come.56 Suddenly, the life to come is there in the middle of the play, and its arrival is signalled by the deliverance of a heroic tale. Better still than maiming policemen is Christy’s epic claim to have murdered his father (he meekly reports it: the villagers do all the rest). The promise of redemption which this offers is what moves the action to its abrupt and indomitably hopeless conclusion. The tumult and harshness of The Playboy of the Western World set it apart, not only from Synge’s other plays but from the high ceremony of Yeats’s dramatic locution and the peasant dramas of the early Abbey Theatre. Its vehement representations made early commentators like Maurice Bourgeois uneasy (and indignant), because they appeared to 55 Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. 2, 1907– 1909 (Oxford, 1984), 47. 56 As a student of this play since my late teens, I have often wondered why Synge’s cognizance of religious tyranny—and not only in The Playboy—does not feature more prominently in the commentary which his plays excite.

Why Synge Abandoned Music

131

repudiate not only the romance of Irishness (and the claims to political autonomy which Bourgeois believed to be vested in the very notion of a national theatre), but also those canons of realism by which the national longing for form might be satisﬁed. Grief and ebullience are too narrowly juxtaposed in the manic collusion between sheer physical movement and the swift modulations of language which Synge engenders for any aesthetic closure to arise. In its place is formal closure: the sudden darkening and reversal of Shawn Keogh’s approach to Pegeen, and the swift return to the dreary status quo of life without Christy, a return which is marked by ‘wild lamentations’ and those gestures of inconsolable loss and mourning which we usually associate with death. We also associate them with opera. The extreme utterance, the sheer force of annunciation with which the play closes, has a cadential ﬁnality that draws attention to this web of language as one which depends on the extravagant paradigms of operatic discourse. But this paradigm is no longer expressive of the (French) symbolism and ceremony of language which so strikingly underpins Synge’s dramaturgy in his other plays. In its place is the imperative ascendancy of that ‘Rabelaisian note’ to which Synge attaches so much importance. It is the keynote of a new modernism which remains raw and unabsorbed in the Irish theatre until the great ensembles of Brian Friel’s theatrical imagination reconﬁgure (and to an extent domesticate) its pitch and tonality.57 In the meantime, Synge’s own generic obligations to ‘peasant drama’ tend to eclipse the relationship between this tonality and European opera in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially those works which subvert the dominant paradigms of Italian and German opera in favour of a newly conceived dramatic realism.58 The mental journey traversed by Synge from When the Moon Has Set to The Playboy of the Western World was one in which musical paradigms evolved from aesthetic pronouncements into the incorporation of a speech-song self-evidently reliant on (or reminiscent of ) opera. In this respect, it is fair to remark that Synge did not abandon music out57 This is the argument advanced in Chapter 7 of this book, which also presses home the suggestion that the symbolic properties of the Irish language and of European music, speciﬁcally with regard to a discourse suppressed or distorted by colonialism, originate as a theatrical resource in Synge but are more fully exploited in the plays of Brian Friel. 58 The operas of Leos Janácˇek seem especially pertinent to this comparison. Janácˇek’s preoccupation with the rhythms and cadences of Czech, which produces such a memorable degree of vocal inﬂection and melody in works such as Kátya Kabanová (1921), lends support to the argument that Synge’s theatrical diction is more easily understood in an operatic context than otherwise.

132

Why Synge Abandoned Music

right, but rather internalized his apprehension of musical process in the composition of his plays. His patrimony in this regard would extend to Beckett and to Friel, albeit differently, just as his own plays absorbed and then discarded the symbolism of French theatre in the late nineteenth century. In that progression, and in the ascendancy of that ‘Rabelaisian’ note, music becomes a more explicit presence than would otherwise be the case. The possibility of Irish opera hovers in the wings of The Playboy. Before this possibility could be realized, however, Bernard Shaw was to promote operatic possibilities of his own.

4 Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw and ‘The Brandy of the Damned’

Will you think me very ungrateful and unkind if I tell you that though you cannot possibly applaud my plays too much at each fall of the curtain to please me, yet the more applause there is during the performance the angrier I feel with you for spoiling your enjoyment and my own? Would you dream of stopping the performance of a piece of music to applaud every bar that happened to please you? And do you not know that an act of a play is intended, just like a piece of music, to be heard without interruption from beginning to end? (Bernard Shaw, ‘To the Audience at the Kingsway Theatre, a Personal Appeal from the Author of John Bull’s Other Island’)1

‘That hell of littleness and monotony’: Larry Doyle’s description of Roscullen in John Bull’s Other Island is a vivid summary of what Bernard Shaw believed himself to have left behind when he departed Dublin for London in 1876. ‘I am not enamored of failure,’ he wrote, ‘of poverty, of obscurity, and of the ostracism and contempt which these imply; and these were all that Dublin offered to the enormity of my unconscious ambition.’2 The fulﬁlment of that ambition, and the creation of those immense solitudes of exegesis and commentary in which Shaw deliberated with robust certainty on his own signiﬁcance, present a formidable challenge to cultural history. It is difﬁcult to distinguish between Shaw’s 1 In Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904), ed. Dan H. Laurence (Harmondsworth, 1984), 165. 2 Cited in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. 1, 1856–1898, The Search for Love (London, 1988), 59.

134

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

indomitable sense of achievement (‘the making of G.B.S. the brilliant’)3 and a less personality-driven conception of his work, in which critical theory might take precedence over the triumphant accomplishments of a self-made man. Shaw, as everyone who reads him will recognize, is not for the faint-hearted. He is such a constant advocate of his own position, that the currency of ideas which he championed (Fabian socialism, the reform of the English theatre, the brilliant conversion of German philosophical discourse into an apology for the ‘life force’) is increasingly vulnerable, as the years pass, to the charge of animated self-promotion. Its terminus is the manifestation of a stupendously talented degree of self-consciousness. The schoolboy wins the debate, but he remains a schoolboy nevertheless, setting statesmen straight, but concerned that posterity might construe his writings as ‘the senile drivellings of a garrulous and too old man’.4 Shaw, of course, was the ﬁrst to see that ‘G.B.S.’, with ‘all his public strength and assurance’, is an invention,5 but the public ﬁgure, for all the shyness and quest for love beneath, was sufﬁciently real to exert a phenomenal inﬂuence on the English theatre and to redeem it by virtue of his own contributions to it. In this respect, as in so many others, Shaw resembles Richard Wagner. In either case, the failed outsider would end by occupying the very heartland of theatrical discourse. Wagner and Shaw provide the sense of an ending to Beethoven and Shakespeare respectively, with such monumental (and, to be fair, enduring) credibility of interest, that no cultural history of European drama could conceivably void their claims (made with the same intolerable gusto) to canonic greatness and permanence. In the context of this book these claims have little part, except in one respect. It is not original to read Shaw’s achievement as a reconﬁguration of Wagner’s work (an enterprise signalled by Shaw when he remarked that ‘there is a music of words as well as of tones’),6 but Shaw’s deeply felt engagement with music as the fundamental source of his education, his extraordinarily intimate absorption of Wagner, and his prodigious (and obstinately critical) writings on the British music of his own day (until the advent of Edward Elgar) collectively justify a reading of Shaw’s 3

Shaw uses the phrase in Sixteen Self Sketches (London, 1949), 68. Ibid. 134. Shaw characteristically abuts this fear with the remark that, ‘I have still enough kick left to make fresh outbursts possible’ (134). 5 The distinction between this public ﬁgure and the private man would appear to be the primary objective of Shaw’s biographers, from Frank Harris to Michael Holroyd. 6 Cited in Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, i. 57. 4

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

135

achievement as a deliberate and radically considered alternative to musical composition. This reading alone is sufﬁcient to advance Bernard Shaw as a decisive ﬁgure in the cultural history of music in the Irish literary imagination. In order to justify it, three aspects of Shaw’s engagement with music require particular scrutiny. The ﬁrst of these is Shaw’s professional career as a music critic, towards the end of which he wrote The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Shaw not only took his bearings from Wagner as a dramatist—his reading of The Ring approaches Wagner’s music dramas as a commentary on nineteenthcentury history—but positioned his own voice in the English theatre in direct opposition to the condition of late nineteenth-century English art music. His championing of Wagner thereby gains in signiﬁcance when it is set against his hostility to Brahms and his notably severe (and revealing) indictments of the Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford. Chief among these indictments is that Stanford was unable to reconcile his apprehension of Irish music with his aspirations as a European composer. This (perceived) inability is resolved by Shaw on Stanford’s behalf, as it were, by ﬁrst rejecting the model of musical discourse which Shaw condemned in Brahms, and then by espousing a spoken drama grounded in Wagner’s monumental address to the world. The second aspect draws us nearer both to Shaw’s own dramaturgical dependence on music and to Ireland. John Bull’s Other Island (1904) is, in the Shavian canon, a ‘middle-period’ play, but it is also a salty rebuff to the whole prospect of literary revival envisaged by Yeats and Synge. In this latter respect, as the prefaces which Shaw added to subsequent editions make clear, the play recontextualizes contemporary Irish drama (notably The Playboy of the Western World ), so that the English playboy of Shaw’s drama, Tom Broadbent, temporarily eclipses the operatic expressionism of Synge’s peasants in favour of verbal music of a very different kind. Despite its explicitly political address and its subversive rendition of Irish nationalism, John Bull’s Other Island, shorn of its prefaces, remained in Shaw’s ear a play to be heard without interruption other than between the acts into which he divided it. Shaw believed that, ‘like a piece of music’, each act should fall on the ear without the distraction of laughter. In this poignant expectation, politely rehearsed in a ‘personal appeal’ to the audience of the Kingsway Theatre in 1913, we ﬁnd Shaw’s own apprehension of his work as something which deserves the formal attention afforded to music. Regarded thus, the play also encourages some consideration of Michael Holroyd’s tantalizing suggestion that the ‘innate’ conﬂict between Irish background and European

136

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

aspiration which Shaw ruthlessly identiﬁed in Stanford’s music is one which he resolved for himself through the agency of this work.7 The third and ﬁnal consideration in respect of music as a formative presence in Shaw reveals itself in the play which immediately precedes John Bull’s Other Island, namely, Man and Superman (1903). It is necessary to show how, in this play, Shaw afﬁrms the connection between his dramatic imagination and German music drama, not only with regard to the obviously Shavian alliance between Man and Superman and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (an alliance which Shaw would extend to other of his plays, notably Pygmalion),8 but much more fundamentally between Shaw and Wagner. Shaw remarked of the play, ‘that I fully intended every word of it to be given when my Bayreuth is founded’. This Wagnerian allusion (and self-fulﬁlling prophecy) points in the right direction, even if Shaw also conceded that the third act of Man and Superman is ‘grand opera in the middle of a musical comedy’.9

1 I cannot too often repeat that though I have no academic qualiﬁcations I am in fact much more highly educated than most university scholars. My home was a musical one; and the music was the ‘learned’ music that began for me with Handel, and the dramatic music that began with Gluck and Mozart, the two constituting a body of modern cultural art to which the literature of the dead languages can make no pretension . . . My family, though kindly, might be called loveless; but what did that matter to a child who could sing A te O cara and Suone la tromba intrepida10 before he was perfect in the Church Catechism. In these there was sentiment and chivalry enough for any child. 7 See Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, i. 241–2, for a discussion of Shaw’s reaction to the music of Stanford and his proposition that John Bull’s Other Island represents a ‘healing’ of the division between Europe and Ireland which Shaw heard in Stanford’s ‘Irish’ Symphony. 8 In a ‘shorthand fragment’ reproduced in the Bodley Head edition of Pygmalion (London, 1972), 799–800, Shaw remarks that ‘there is a serious side to the play in the fate of the girl’s father [Alfred Dolittle], whose story is really a modern version of the old Don Juan play, “il dissoluto punito” ’. This subtitle is also used by Lorenzo Da Ponte in his libretto for Mozart’s opera. 9 Cited in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. 2, 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power (London, 1989) 79. 10 Two arias from Bellini’s opera I Puritani (1835).

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

137

This education has never ceased. It has gone from Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Verdi to Wagner, from Beethoven to Sibelius, from British dilutions of Handel and Mendelssohn to the genuine English music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams . . . (Bernard Shaw in 1949)11

Shaw’s quest for identity as a writer was mediated from the outset through his engagement with music: it became for him the primary means not only of education (as in the apposition he draws between his experience of ‘learned’ music and his superiority to ‘most university scholars’), but also of perception. It is scarcely an exaggeration to propose that music also became for him the principal conduit of artistic experience and the supreme expression of that conﬂuence of feeling and thought which he sought to reproduce in his own work. He began as a music critic in London in 1876, the year in which Wagner’ Ring was ﬁrst performed in its entirety, and brought his career as a music journalist to its climax in 1898, when he published a commentary on that work entitled The Perfect Wagnerite. By then he had written seven plays, including Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Devil’s Disciple. The failed novelist had become London’s most ebullient music critic and controversial dramatist in close succession. Two features in particular of Shaw’s music criticism reinforce the argument that his self-taught encounter with the European repertory was foundational in respect of his own dramatic formation: one is that Shaw rapidly became the bête noire of contemporary British music, and in that process tirelessly proclaimed the deadening impact of German ‘scholasticism’ on the English musical imagination. The other is that, by contrast, he saw in Wagner’s operas and music dramas ‘a straightforward dramatic purpose’ which would animate his own reform of the English theatre. In Shaw, the Yeatsian formula ‘words for music’ becomes newly invested with imperative meaning: his own dramatic intelligence would insist again and again on the ‘play of ideas’ as the only viable alternative to Wagner’s exhaustive exploration of drama through music. The preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession, published in 1902, makes this alternative characteristically clear: The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious, 11

Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, 69.

138

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner’s Tristan, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany. Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the public of this. The voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod’s Faust and Bizet’s Carmen has captured the common playgoer; and there is, ﬂatly, no future now for any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time without knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as the normal materiel of the drama.12

These sentiments bring us close to Synge’s avowed abandonment of music, on the grounds that the Germans were so much better at it that he ‘took to literature instead’. But in his determination that there could be ‘no future . . . for any drama without music except the drama of thought’, Shaw can be sharply distinguished from Synge, because he wrote, as it were, with the precedent of Wagner at his elbow. It is not simply that Shaw’s experience of music was lifelong and pervasive, but that he came to terms with Wagner by inventing a drama of ideas which might rival the Wagnerian synthesis of music and dramatic poetry. His pragmatism in this regard is reﬂected in The Perfect Wagnerite, which insists at every turn on the immediacy of Wagner’s ‘music-plays’ by contrast with the ossiﬁed condition (as Shaw believed it to be) of the music of ‘the professors’. ‘Modest citizens’ will ﬁnd that: There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in The Ring—not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama . . . The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at once ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? . . . The man is no musician.’ The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professors with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom the familiar and dreaded ‘classical music’ would descend like the inﬂuenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them; the Ring music is perfectly single and simple. 12 From the preface to the ﬁrst edition of the play, published in 1902 and cited in Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton, 1963; repub. 1976 by Greenwood Press), 44.

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

139

It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn; and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate.13

It was necessary for Shaw to explain Wagner to the great British public in order to prepare the ground for his own contribution to the theatre, but also to justify that contribution in musical terms which would satisfy Shaw’s own anxiety of inﬂuence, given the impact of Wagner on his dramatic imagination and given, too, his longstanding hostility to the ‘music of the professors’ which stood in his way, as it once had stood in Wagner’s path. Shaw’s music criticism was itself formative, insofar as he repeatedly tested (and reﬁned) his own response to the agency of music as a dramatic medium by means of it, but it was also wayward. His decisive repudiation of the British music of his own day (until he discovered Elgar) extended to a more pervasive incapacity with the whole enterprise of German instrumental music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One only has to read his ebullient dismissals of Handel to gain some ﬂavour of this.14 In relation to Wagner, his reading of this instrumental tradition in the nineteenth century is especially enlightening: Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not, like Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures independently of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because, that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not cultivate it. As Shakespear, compared with Tennyson, appears to have an exclusively dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner compared with Mendelssohn … he [Wagner] produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music-drama.15

It is fair comment to add that this reading of Wagner as the culmination of Beethoven was not unique to Shaw (although the likening between Shakespeare and Wagner brings it home to roost), but the historicism of Shaw’s position was galvanized by the completeness he saw (and heard) 13 Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), ‘Preliminary Encouragements’, repub. in Dan H. Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 3, 1893–1950 (London, 1981), 423. 14 As, for example, his comments on a performance of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt in 1893. Given that Shaw’s objections to the performance of eighteenth-century vocal music by ‘huge lumbering choirs’ are both prescient and plausible, his dismissal of the work itself as ‘a monumental bore’ is attenuated by fantastically wayward misreadings of baroque compositional technique. See Shaw’s Music, iii. 52–4. 15 From The Perfect Wagnerite (‘The Nineteenth Century’), in ibid. iii. 531.

140

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

in Wagner’s achievement (‘making symphony articulate’). In Wagner, the contract between opera and drama had not only been fulﬁlled, but exhausted. It had no future. It was left to Shaw to invent another contract, as between his instinctive appetite for opera (nourished in the ﬁrst instance by an artistic environment in Dublin in which ‘the sound of Italian opera . . . had almost completely overwhelmed the sound of the spoken word on stage’),16 and his ambition to reform the English theatre through the agency of his own plays. Although the terms of that contract were established by reading Wagner’s music dramas in the light of nineteenth-century progressivism (so that the inﬂuence of Ibsen in Shaw’s early work was conditioned by the permanent presence of Wagner, as the ﬁrst title of Widowers’ Houses [Rhinegold ] indicates), Shaw’s preoccupation with the sounding form of opera would endure. Music, in Robert Anderson’s telling phrase, ‘haunted his work’.17 As a music critic, Shaw was something of a ghost himself (not least in the technical sense),18 and his dread visitations upon the work of his British and Irish contemporaries in the pages of The Star and The World, under the pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’, made him the foremost commentator of his day in the British press. In this role he vented his disdain for ‘academic music’, ‘oratorio mongering’, and what he regarded as the inexplicable inﬂuence of Johannes Brahms, and never more explicitly than in his reaction to the music of his Dublin contemporary, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924). Shaw’s antagonism towards Stanford is also part of another story,19 but in one fundamental respect it claims our attention here. However much it may have been animated on personal as well as aesthetic grounds, Shaw’s diagnosis of artistic failure in Stanford’s work drew him close to a more general indictment of Irish art music which, in the case of Stanford’s ‘Irish’ Symphony (1887), he

16 See Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2000), 107. 17 Robert Anderson, ‘Shaw, (George) Bernard’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xvii. 232–3, at 233. 18 Shaw began his career as a writer in London in 1876 by ghosting music criticism for his ‘damaged svengali’ Vandeleur Lee (with whom he had lived since childhood), in the Hornet. 19 In his account of Vandeleur Lee’s inﬂuence on the young Shaw, Michael Holroyd reports that Sir Robert Prescott Stewart, Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin and teacher of Stanford, ‘hounded Lee out of Dublin’, a fact which may account in part for Shaw’s lifelong antagonism towards the work of Stewart’s pupil. See Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, i. 48–9.

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

141

characterized as a ‘fearful conﬂict between the Celt and the Professor’. Writing of a performance of this work in 1891, Shaw commented that: It is only in the second subject of this movement [the last movement of the Irish Symphony], an original theme of the composer’s own minting, that the form and the material really combine chemically with sonata. And this satisfactory result is presently upset by the digression to the utterly incompatible aim of the composer to display the charms of his native music. In the ﬁrst movement, the sonata writer keeps to his point better: there are no national airs lifted bodily into it. Nevertheless, the ﬁrst movement does not convince me that Professor Stanford’s is a symphonic talent any more than Meyerbeer’s was. In mentioning Meyerbeer I know I run the risk of having the implied comparison interpreted in the light of the Wagnerian criticism—that is, as a deliberate disparagement. I do not mean it so.20

It seems fair to take Shaw at his word in this passage, and to accept at face value his implication that Stanford’s true abilities lay as a composer for the stage rather than the concert hall (a judgement that eclipses his more generally severe indictment, expressed in the same article, of any attempt to reconcile ‘native’ music with the structural and expressive complexities of the symphonic tradition).21 However ‘utterly incompatible’ the recourse to folk music in the concert hall, Shaw could at least implicitly concede its relevance in the opera house. This concession (implied or otherwise) is of some moment here, because in his one explicitly ‘Irish’ play, John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw has brief recourse to Irish airs himself, even if their ‘native charm’ is sardonically ironized in that context. No such irony attaches to their deployment in Stanford, and especially not in his one explicitly ‘Irish’ opera, Shamus O’Brien, ﬁrst performed in 1896, the year in which Shaw completed You Never Can Tell and wrote The Devil’s Disciple. Shaw was silent on Shamus O’Brien (he had by then all but given up professional music criticism),22 but his immersion in (and reading of ) Wagner leaves little doubt as to how he might regard any Irish operas but his own ‘dramas of thought’. Stanford would withdraw Shamus from public performance in 1910, lest it encourage home rule in Ireland.23 Shaw, by 20 Shaw, ‘Going Fantee’, The World, 19 May 1893, repr. in Laurence, Shaw’s Music, ii. 876–83, at 881. 21 Shaw’s indictments of Stanford are considered in Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (New York, 2002), 185–6, 226–7, 255–6. See also Harry White, The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork, 1998), 105–10, and The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2005), 79–82. 22 Additionally, it is perhaps signiﬁcant that Shaw’s sister, Lucy, sang in the ﬁrst performance of Stanford’s opera. 23 See Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford, 282.

142

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

ebullient contrast, used John Bull’s Other Island partly to promote the same objective. The ‘preface to the Home Rule edition’ makes this intention explicit. The ‘personal appeal’ to the Kingsway Theatre audience in 1913 likewise makes explicit that Shaw believed his play to deserve the silent, uninterrupted attention accorded in the concert hall to musical works. The text solicits laughter at every turn: the writer demands the high seriousness of art music. Behind this apparent contradiction lurks the Shavian ache for opera.

2 By the time Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island in 1904, ‘at the request of Mr William Butler Yeats’,24 he had not only attained mastery of the English theatre, but had written Man and Superman (1903), the work which most clearly engages opera as the fundamental source of Shaw’s dramatic imagination. Although it would not be until 1911 that he unequivocally endorsed Edward Elgar’s position as the greatest composer in English music since the death of Purcell, his admiration for his older contemporary was as determined as was his scorn for the ‘music of the professors’.25 This high regard was founded upon Elgar’s mastery of two genres that Shaw had hitherto condemned in the music of his British predecessors—the symphony and the oratorio. Opera did not come into question (there was none by Elgar in any case). But we might add that Shaw’s championing of Elgar in these genres was in some measure strategic: through the agency of his music criticism, he had seen off any rivalry which an older generation of composers (including, pre-eminently, Stanford himself ) might create in their operatic works. He had absorbed the signiﬁcance of The Ring as an essential prelude to his own voice in the theatre, and in 1911 he would reclaim in Elgar those very modes 24

As stated in the preface to the ﬁrst edition of the play (1906). See Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. 3, 1918–1950, The Lure of Fantasy (London, 1991), 164 ff. Holroyd reports that Shaw told readers of the Morning Post in 1911 that ‘the history of original music, broken off by the death of Purcell, begins again with Sir Edward Elgar’. Given that Purcell died in 1695, one can perhaps appreciate the extreme (but not eccentric) reading of English musical history which this assertion represents. Although Elgar and Shaw did not meet regularly until both men were in old age, Shaw’s acclamation of Elgar as the English Beethoven, and his endorsement in particular of Elgar’s symphonic and orchestral works and his oratorios (in particular The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles), reverse years of hostility towards the popularity of precisely such genres in British music from 1880 onwards. 25

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

143

of music-making which he had so strongly disavowed as meaningless pastiche in his years as a critic. Meanwhile, at the end of his own galley years as a dramatist, he would produce a play that not only juxtaposed, as Michael Holroyd has put it, ‘the twenty years of his upbringing in Dublin versus the twenty years of his career in London’,26 but also his own position as a dramatist preoccupied by European opera with the ambitions of the Irish National Theatre Society, in which Yeats, Miss Horniman, Lady Gregory, and John Synge were at the helm. Shaw saw the company at the Royalty Theatre in London in 1904 when it gave, among other works, Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea. His own contribution to Yeats’s theatre would be otherwise: a play whose object is ‘to teach Irish people the value of an Englishman as well as to shew the Englishman his own absurdities’.27 This was not to Yeats’s purpose in the smallest degree, which is one reason why he refused the play. Shaw was content to admit as much in his ‘Preface for Politicians’ (1906), when he remarked that it was given in London because it was ‘uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland’.28 It is also a presentment which invites some appraisal of Shaw’s imaginative reliance on music. In his exemplary study entitled Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (1963), Martin Meisel has not only put this reliance beyond doubt, but related it clearly to Shaw’s experience of that intimacy between the spoken drama and opera which formed his dramatic imagination in Dublin. Meisel’s identiﬁcation of character types in the melodramas and operas of Shaw’s youth persuasively lends support to a reading of the plays which foregrounds their absorption of such stock-company prototypes, as in ‘Aged Suitor’, père noble, ‘Juvenile Lead’, and so on. Although Meisel is careful not to assume some kind of formulaic transference of such types into the characterization of Shaw’s plays, he shows how they nevertheless provide the foundation for Shaw’s own tendency to create types of his own: ‘For example, there is a strain of passionate “womanly women”—Shaw mocks the idolatrous proponents of the concept, but again and again projects the type—which includes such personages as Julia Craven, Blanche Sartorious, Ann Whiteﬁeld, Hesione Hushabye, and King Magnus’s Orinthia.’29 26 27 28 29

Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, ii. 84. From the ‘Author’s Instructions to the Producer’, cited in ibid. 81. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 7. Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, 29.

144

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

Meisel goes on to suggest that the plays also exploit the close correspondence between such character prototypes in the drama of Shaw’s youth and the stable (and indeed formulaic) disposition of voice ranges which he discovered in opera: In his author’s task, Shaw was immensely assisted by the unmistakable coincidence of dramatic line and operatic voice which further underlines the operatic quality of so much of nineteenth-century drama. In the drama itself certain voice qualities were associated with certain types. Heavy villains, for example, were expected to speak in deep, reverberating tones. In opera, where vocal qualities were paramount . . . there was a much more thorough-going identiﬁcation of particular plot functions with particular kinds of voice . . . For example, corresponding to the male Heavy parts in the written drama were the bass or baritone parts in opera (as, drawing on opera available in Dublin, Pizzaro in Fidelio, Kaspar in Der Freischütz, Rigoletto and Sparafucile in Rigoletto . . . Telramund in Lohengrin). . . . In providing his casts of characters, Shaw did not obviously equip each play with a leading quartet of soprano, alto, tenor and bass, though a number of his plays are precisely so equipped, and scarcely one strays further from this ideal than the ordinary opera. Among those plays with an obvious operatic quartet are Major Barbara . . . Heartbreak House . . . and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.30

In these provisions, as Meisel argues, Shaw conjoins his almost instinctive reliance on operatic prototypes with his much more programmatic (and determined) reading of Wagner’s music dramas in which he perceives the exhaustion of drama through music. It is in this sense that the plays become a radical alternative to Wagner, even as they explicitly depend on the precedent of The Ring for Shaw’s own development of the ‘play of ideas’: in Wagner’s music-drama Shaw believed he had found the possibility of conveying impassioned thought to an audience, thought interpenetrated with intense feeling. . . . if thought was to be conveyed with all possible passion, music would have to come with the coherent words; to infuse thought with the life and passion he had found in opera as a boy, Shaw would have to bring the world of music to his playwriting. The consistent aesthetic direction of Shaw’s entire playwriting career was toward the creation of a drama of impassioned thought, a heroic drama of ideas.31

If the creation of this impassioned drama of ideas depends so ostensibly on Shaw’s absorption of Italian opera in Dublin and his discovery of Wagner through the agency of his music criticism in London, 30

Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, 48–9.

31

Ibid. 61.

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

145

John Bull’s Other Island offers compelling evidence that this imaginative synthesis can be examined in relation to his engagement with the Irish question, dramatic and otherwise. The prefaces to the play which Shaw published between 1906 and 1929 (characteristically) explore those concepts of identity, governance, and social psychology which dominate the dramatic text itself, but the ﬂow and feel of the work, ‘like a piece of music’, is another matter. Even when we concede that Shaw maps onto his text those musical considerations identiﬁed here by Meisel, we cannot turn John Bull’s Other Island into an opera manqué. For one thing, the play is dedicated to subverting those very prototypes upon which it depends (as in the role-reversal of romantic Englishman and cynical Irishman between Broadbent and Doyle), and for another, Shaw’s objective is to ﬂy past the net of musical feeling in pursuit of the drama of ideas. In this connection, it is not helpful to suppress Shaw’s limited conception of instrumental music as (mere) feeling, as in his reception of Beethoven and the German symphony. That is why Wagner remains decisive: his music dramas engage (for Shaw) the currency of ‘coherent words’ that ‘come with the music’.32 In turn, it seems useful to consider the play as one in which the currency of music as the language of feeling contextualizes the coherence of language itself. Shaw’s preoccupation with national identity helps us to do just that. If we can suggest that Shaw achieves a new kind of operatic expressionism in relation to Irish identity which is radically distinct from both the Gaelic-derived verbal music of Synge’s Playboy and the musical stage-Irishry of Stanford’s Shamus O’Brien, it is partly on account of this preoccupation. Shaw’s music criticism, as we have seen, did not extend to a consideration of Stanford’s opera, but in 1896, the year in which Shamus was given its premiere, he did make plain his contempt for those models of stage-Irishry which lie behind such works, and in particular Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn (1860), which was revived in London also in 1896. Boucicault’s play was to be the source of Julius Benedict’s opera The Lily of Killarney (1861), a work which is rightly regarded as an important precedent for the style and success of Stanford’s opera. Writing about the 1896 revival of The Colleen Bawn, Shaw remarked that: To an Irishman who has any sort of social conscience, the conception of Ireland as a romantic picture, in which the background is formed by the Lakes of Killarney by moonlight, and a round tower or so, whilst every male ﬁgure 32

Bernard Shaw, Music in London. iii. 134, cited in ibid.

146

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

is a ‘broth of a bhoy’, and every female one a colleen in a crimson Connemara cloak is . . . exasperating . . . The occupation of the Irish peasant is mainly agricultural; and I advise the reader to make it a ﬁxed rule never to allow himself to believe in the alleged Arcadian virtues of the half-starved drudges who are sacriﬁced to the degrading, brutalizing, and, as far as I can ascertain, entirely unnecessary pursuit of unscientiﬁc farming. The virtues of the Irish peasant are the intense melancholy, the surliness of manner, the incapacity for happiness and self-respect that are the tokens of his natural unﬁtness for a life of wretchedness. . . . Of all the tricks which the Irish nation has played on the slow-witted Saxon, the most outrageous is the palming off on him of the imaginary Irishman of romance.33

Anyone who reads these deeply felt criticisms will recognize in them the point of view which John Bull’s Other Island dramatizes, and the image of Ireland and the Irish which it seeks radically to correct, round towers and all.34 Such a corrective would have to come from the theatre rather than the opera house: between 1896 and 1904 the story of English opera would remain a chronicle of failure, identiﬁed by a critical press headed by Shaw himself. And Shaw remained notably hostile to the viability of such enterprises as Richard D’Oyly Carte’s heroic (if impracticable) efforts to create an English National Opera, which culminated in the production of Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe in 1891. The early reception of Sullivan’s Ivanhoe by Shaw and J. A. Fuller Maitland, for example, foundered upon that work’s failure to emancipate itself from what Maitland calls ‘the set pieces of old-fashioned opera’,35 and Shaw’s more trenchant indictments: I maintain that it is disqualiﬁed as a serious dramatic work by the composer’s failure to reproduce in music the vivid characterization of Scott, which alone classes the novel among the masterpieces of ﬁction. . . . Take for example Scott’s Bois Guilbert, the ﬁerce Templar, the original ‘bold, bad man’, tanned nearly black, disﬁgured with sword-cuts, strong, ambitious, going on for ﬁfty, a subject for Verdi or Velasquez. Is it possible to sit patiently and hear the music of the drawing-room, sensuous and passionate without virility or intel33

Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 270, cited in ibid. 28–9. Larry Doyle’s remonstrations with Tom Broadbent in the ﬁrst act of John Bull’s Other Island echo these 1896 observations almost to the pitch of paraphrase: ‘Man-alive, dont you know that all this top-o-the-morning and broth-of-a-boy and more-power-toyour-elbow business is got up in England to fool you, like the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music? No Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland, or ever did, or ever will’ ( John Bull’s Other Island, 78). 35 Fuller Maitland’s assessment, originally published in The Times, is cited by Arthur Jacobs in Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Oxford, 1984), 326–7. 34

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

147

ligence, put into the mouth of such a ﬁgure? Not with all the brass and drum sauce in the world.36

Shaw, with his malicious appetite for damning with faint praise, would later allow that ‘the Savoy Opera is a genre in itself ’, and then proceed to nominate Sullivan’s one work in this genre without Gilbert (Haddon Hall) as ‘the highest and most consistent expression it has yet attained’.37 The underlying tenor of such criticism was that English music was incapable of (and temperamentally unsuited to) a mature achievement in serious opera. The serious genre could not be part of the story, except by way of parody or risible pretension. In such a climate, the path lay open for something new: a spoken drama which would subvert the prototypes of stage-Irishry and the romance of English opera alike. But Shaw would remain immune neither to the seduction of the ﬁrst of these nor to the expressive reach of the second: John Bull’s Other Island is powerful in its repudiations precisely because it summons both of them so persuasively. The opening scene of the play between Broadbent, his Jeevesian manservant Hodson, and Tim Hafﬁgan is the very essence of West End comedy, as worthy of Wilde as it is alien to the swift modulations of register and action which follow. (Hafﬁgan’s disappearance from the play after this scene is instructive of this change in gear.) The brittle comedy gives way before those massive arias in which Larry Doyle’s impassioned indictments halt the play of stereotypes in exchange for the play of ideas. A line like ‘Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!’ is more than argument and certainly more than comedy can afford. The rhapsodic insistence of these speeches in the latter part of the ﬁrst scene will, if anything, increase in intensity as the play progresses, but never at the expense of Broadbent’s natural innocence, which so strikingly borrows from the buffo conventions of the good-hearted baritone. Broadbent, whether Shaw liked it or not, was (and perhaps remains) the author’s insurance against the tragic tedium of watching too long a sacriﬁce unfold. In a related way, Peter Keegan’s mystic demeanour is redeemed by his self-ironizing dismissals (‘the dream of a madman’), so that his beggar-saint composure at the opening of the second act (Lear on the heath, with shades of Synge), and his ceremonial iterations at the close of play (‘three-in-one and one-in-three’) are never far 36 Bernard Shaw, ‘A Suppressed Notice of Ivanhoe’ (The World, 4 Feb. 1891), repr. in Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Music ii. 253–60, at 253–4. 37 Cited in Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan, 342.

148

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

removed from the subversions of laughter. The more nearly we identify Keegan with Shaw himself, the more poignant these adjacencies can seem. Ireland as ‘the land of derision’ and the locus of hell on earth are projections which throw Broadbent’s ebullient optimism and Shaw’s own indulgence in farce into sharp relief. In its emphatic repudiations of romance (operatic or otherwise), the play begins to approach the determinism of The Playboy of the Western World, however differently Tom Broadbent and Christy Mahon impose themselves upon Irish society. In either case, to recover Synge’s pronouncement in When the Moon Has Set: ‘The world orchestra has been playing its oratorio for two thousand years and the thing has become effete.’ We can justiﬁably read ‘joyless and pallid drama’ as a synonym for ‘oratorio’ in relation to The Playboy, but in relation to Shaw it stands for the romance of stage-Irishry and the redundancy of opera in the light of Wagner’s music dramas. The terminus of opera lies elsewhere: not in effete stage-Irishry but in the verbal music of Shaw’s comedy.

3 Music itself makes a pale appearance in John Bull’s Other Island, when Doyle sings part of an aria from Offenbach’s comic opera Whittington (1875) and tails off into Moore’s ‘Let Erin Remember’. Faced down by Nora, he is momentarily lost for words and resorts to music instead. When she challenges him on that account, he dismisses the Offenbach lyric (‘Tell England, I’ll forget her never’) with a mild and thoughtless anti-Semitism: ‘The Song! Oh, it doesn’t mean anything: it’s by a German Jew, like most English patriotic sentiment.’ For Shaw, as for Doyle, the operatic feeling of Offenbach’s music and the political sentiment of Moore’s song are ﬁnally an irrelevance. What remains of account is the invitation to laughter and the usurpation of these resources by the new music of Shaw’s text, ‘the music of thought’. This usurpation of one medium in favour of the other is most explicitly realized by Shaw in the third act of Man and Superman. Although earlier works (notably Arms and the Man) would prominently represent operatic allusions in the course of advancing the drama (as Verdi’s Ernani does in the latter play), Man and Superman represents music itself as the stuff of dreams from which the mind must awaken. It is the

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

149

trance of feeling which the written word, if it is to rival music as a mode of theatrical expression, has to supervene. In this respect, the arguments about music in Man and Superman take their cue from the preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession. The play meanwhile, in resuming the action of reality in the fourth act, suggests that it is time to move on from the musical fantasies of the third, heralded as these fantasies are by excerpts from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.38 As a journalist, Shaw never doubted his duty in regard to the promotion of music in general and Wagner in particular: ‘in this philistine country a musical critic, if he is to be any good, must put off the learned commentator and become a propagandist.’39 He fulﬁlled this objective in The Perfect Wagnerite, but thereafter his plays would promote the ‘music of words’ at the expense of music itself. ‘Grand opera in the middle of musical comedy’: Shaw’s description of the third act of Man and Superman gives due notice of the difference in style between this dreamlike deliberation on the life force, on good and evil, and on heaven and hell, and the other acts of this ‘comedy and philosophy’. If, in the most memorable phrase from the play, ‘music is the brandy of the damned’, there is more at stake than a witty aphorism.40 The third act of Man and Superman examines the Wagner38 Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, 38–64, contains an invaluable assessment of the inﬂuence of opera on Shaw’s plays. Meisel confesses, however, that it is not always easy to relate Shaw’s explicit insistence on the formative nature of this inﬂuence to the plays themselves. In the context of this study, my concern is not to read the texts of Shaw’s plays as verbal operas in any literal sense, but rather to suggest that Shaw’s own transcendence of opera and music drama led to a spoken theatre which he regarded as a decisive progression from both of these inﬂuences. Meisel remarks that ‘the relevance of Shaw’s operatic background to his spoken drama is at least fourfold: He uses direct operatic allusion, because of the arch-romantic associations of opera, as part of his attack on romantic sentiment. He uses operatic conceptions in combining the dramatis personae of each play. He uses operatic conceptions in creating scene and dialogue, shaping them as overtures, arias, ensembles, and duets. He brings operatic ideas to acting, and seeks a rhetorical notation based on musical pitch and dynamics’ (46–7). I would argue that only the ﬁrst of these is empirically evident in Shaw’s work, given that the other considerations nominated here can be attached so easily to spoken drama in its entirety because of the close afﬁnity between opera and drama. Moreover, when Shaw writes that ‘there is much more of “Il Trovatore” and “Don Giovanni” in my style than of “The Mourning Bride” and “The School for Scandal”; but it would take me too far to pursue this’ (in an article published in the New York Times, 12 June 1927), Meisel adds that ‘it is not at all certain what he is talking about’ (45, emphasis mine). 39 Cited in Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, i. 238. 40 Although Tanner’s Revolutionary Handbook (published as an appendix to the play) is ﬁlled with such aphorisms, the context in which this one occurs afﬁrms its ideological function, which is to distinguish between what the devil calls ‘the sublimest of the arts’ and the ‘intolerable’ strain of living in heaven.

150

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

ian contract between opera and drama (through the agency of Mozart’s music), and then rejects it in favour of the ‘Life Force’ which has the play in its grip, no less than it has ensnared Tanner, and for that matter, Ann Whiteﬁeld. Max Beerbohm’s perceptive remark that Shaw, ‘using art merely as a means of making people listen to him, naturally lays hands on the kind that appeals most quickly to the greatest number of people’,41 can be read in conjunction with Shaw’s own observation at the end of his life that ‘opera taught me to shape my plays into recitatives, arias, duets, trios, ensemble ﬁnales, and bravura pieces to display the technical accomplishments of the executants . . .’.42 But Wagner taught him something else, namely that opera could give way to music drama, and that music drama could give way to the drama of thought. This acutely self-conscious progressivism, the distillation of half-a-lifetime’s absorption with music as a necessary preparation for the drama, ﬁnds its most poignant realization in the third act of Man and Superman. The whole episode is a dream from which the protagonists of Man and Superman (John Tanner and Ann Whiteﬁeld) must awaken if they are to play out the implications of submitting to the Life Force. As a consequence, they are reimagined here as Don Giovanni and Donna Anna (along with Roebuck Ramsden as the Statue and Mendoza as the Devil), in order to rehearse an afterlife to Mozart’s opera which becomes ‘grotesquely adulterated’ with the music of Gounod’s Faust. The allegory is plain: Shaw would examine the dreamworld of operatic discourse as an alternative to the play of ideas on which he is embarked, and which he has interrupted in order to bid farewell to the seduction and warmth of musical engagement. The notation of Mozart’s music (beginning with the overture) in the body of the text signiﬁes an obvious transition to this operatic world which the play now inhabits. From the ex nihilo of ‘No sky, no peaks, no time nor space, utter void’,43 the strains of Mozart become gradually coherent. But these strains will die at the sound of those Shavian interrogations which follow. One exchange in this act pushes the play beyond any direct engagement with the story of Tanner and Whiteﬁeld towards what is perhaps the central declaration on music which Shaw’s dramatic work affords: 41 Cited in Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, 181. Beerbohm’s comments come from an appraisal of Man and Superman published in 1930. 42 From an article published as ‘The Play of Ideas’ in New Statesman and Society in 1950, and cited in ibid. 50. In London Music (1890), Shaw had remarked that ‘Harley Granville-Barker was not far out when, at a rehearsal of one of my plays, he cried out “Ladies and gentlemen: will you please remember that this is Italian opera” ’. 43 Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (London, 1927), 87.

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

151

the devil: Beware the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human . . . the statue: And who the deuce is the Superman? the devil: Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman— what was his name? Nietzsche? the statue: Never heard of him. the devil: Well, he came here ﬁrst, before he recovered his wits. I had some hopes of him; but he was a conﬁrmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the ﬂesh, and your humble servant. the statue: Superman is a good cry; and a good cry is half the battle. I should like to see this Nietzsche. the devil: Unfortunately he met Wagner here, and had a quarrel with him. the statue: Quite right, too. Mozart for me! the devil: Oh, it was not about music. Wagner once drifted into Life Force worship, and invented a Superman called Siegfried. But he came to his senses afterwards. So when they met here, Nietzsche denounced him as a renegade; and Wagner wrote a pamphlet to prove that Nietzsche was a Jew; and it ended in Nietzsche’s going to heaven in a huff. And now, my friend let us hasten to my palace and celebrate your arrival with a grand musical service.44

So it is about the music after all. Hell in this act is not the Hell of Rosscullen; it is a debating chamber in which to dispute the claims of art and the claims of the Life Force. More narrowly, it is an invented space in which the claims of music as art are consigned to damnation and the claims of music as an expression of the Life Force (in which music becomes intelligible only through language) ascend into heaven. In that resolution, Shaw achieves a decisive emancipation from the lure of opera and afﬁrms the integrity of music drama instead. Wagner remains in hell, not on account of his anti-Semitism, but because he turned away from music drama in the ﬁnal part of The Ring (Götterdämmerung) and reverted to grand opera. In 1899 Shaw publicly enquired whether his fellow critic J. F. Runciman could mistake ‘the mere bandmastership and stage management’ of the third act of Siegfried and the whole of Götterdämmerung for the music drama of the remainder.45 In Man and Superman, this fundamental distinction between opera and drama informs 44

Man and Superman, 136–7. See Bernard Shaw, ‘Some Imperfect Wagnerites’ (1899), republished in Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Music, iii. 553–60, at 558. 45

152

Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw

the devil’s delight in the brandy of the damned and his corresponding despair at the music of the Superman. No one could accuse Shaw of giving the devil all the best lines, but there is more than a hint that he has all the best music. Shaw’s admiration and feeling for opera would endure, even if his intellect, ambition, and socialism led him beyond that genre in pursuit of the drama of ideas. He would persist in the identiﬁcation of his dramaturgy with musical structures and sub-generic models drawn from opera long after he had sought to establish the music of words as a natural development from the language of music. His conception of Back to Methuselah (1921) as a cycle of plays modelled on The Ring both afﬁrms and transcends this vital connection.46 In that transcendence, clearly signalled in the third act of Man and Superman, we can recognize a literary imagination which not only takes its bearings from music, but which situates its own dramatic engagement as an imperative progression from music drama to the drama of words. It is not hard to see that, in this progression, Shaw ﬁnds common cause with Yeats, notwithstanding their considerable differences on the question of Ireland. Yeats’s The King’s Threshold was also written in 1903, and like Man and Superman, it apostrophizes that distinction between ‘Speech delighted with its own music’ and ‘notes, that lacking words escape Time’s chariot’ which Shaw was to make his own. ‘Speech delighted with its own music’: there could scarcely be a more apt description of the laughter and shapely intelligence which so many of Shaw’s plays engender. In that passionate merriment, Shaw emancipated himself from the spell of opera which had formed and held him from childhood.

46

See Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, 60–1.

5 The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of James Joyce

The comedy of the supper table is excellent and so is the end. I wonder will any scruffy old professor recognise Jim’s ability to write general noise on paper, a kind of comic chorus, and to balance it against solo and silence. (Stanislaus Joyce, Triestine Book of Days, 20 September 1907)1

It would be difﬁcult to imagine a greater intimacy between music and language than the one which James Joyce espouses both within and beyond the domain of the Irish literary imagination. Stanislaus Joyce’s early recognition of his brother’s ability ‘to write general noise on paper, a kind of comic chorus, and to balance it against solo and silence’ is prophetic of a formidable legacy of scholarship and commentary on music in Joyce which has been notably increased in recent years. The nature and signiﬁcance of literature so radically inﬂected by music remains high, it would appear, on the agenda of Joyce studies.2 Four features of this literary musicianship dominate the landscape of Joycean commentary: the empirical retrieval of allusions to musical works in Joyce; the extent to which Joyce relies upon or adapts structural models of musical discourse; the extent to which Joyce’s ﬁction is a 1 Cited in John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin, 2000), 127. 2 A comparatively recent edition of the James Joyce Quarterly, 38: 1 and 2 (Fall 2000), devoted to ‘Joyce and Opera’ and guest-edited by Timothy Martin, attests to the enduring interest of music in general and opera in particular to Joyce scholars. This issue includes ‘James Joyce and Opera: A Bibliography’, by Ruth Bauerle (157–82). See also Matthew Hodgart and Ruth Bauerle, Joyce’s Grand Operaroar: Opera in Finnegans Wake (Champaign, Ill., 1996).

154

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

literary re-creation of opera; and the signiﬁcance of music in Joyce as an expression of modernism.3 Taken together, these features self-evidently attest to the fundamental presence of music in Joyce’s imagination. But they also attest to something else, namely the degree to which Joyce’s ﬁction represents a terminus for art music in Ireland. The absence of opera in particular is redeemed by the presence of Joyce’s ﬁction.4 There are several good grounds for such a reading, but the terms by which it might be advanced require some measure of clariﬁcation. Four motifs of structural allusion, technical mimesis, formal integration, and synthetic modernism which correspond to those patterns of empirical presence, structural imitation, operatic forms, and musico-linguistic synthesis which dominate Joyce studies in music can be enlisted here for the purposes of deﬁning these terms, just as they can be employed to reconstruct, as it were, the mental journey which Joyce’s progressive engagement with music represents. The great inventions of Joyce’s prose, in their explicit recourse to music, provide an animated afterlife for the otherwise hidden history of art music in Ireland. Joyce, like Shaw before him, was not shy about comparing himself to Wagner, and meditated on his own ﬁction in terms which allow us to situate his major works not only as an outgrowth of literary Wagnerism, but as the retrieval of opera in particular through the agency of language. Indeed, this is precisely how much of Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake has been construed not only in the aftermath of scholarly commentary, but in the ﬁrst instance by Joyce himself.5 3 The ﬁrst of these (the retrieval of allusions) is the focus of Zack Bowen’s classic study Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce (Albany, NY, 1974); Sebastian Knowles (ed.), Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce (London, 1999), contains several essays which focus upon Joyce’s absorption of music in Dublin and Trieste (by Seamus Reilly and John McCourt respectively), and which offer readings of ‘Sirens’ and ‘Circe’ as verbal operas. The volume also includes an important essay by Vincent Martin on the incomplete setting of ‘Cyclops’ by George Antheil, discussed below. Bowen’s Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music (Gainesville, Fla., 1995), also encounters ‘Sirens’ in terms of musical analysis. A chapter entitled ‘ “Sirens” and the Problem of Literary and Musical Meaning’, in Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2001), conﬁrms the central importance of this episode to Joyce scholarship in the speciﬁc context of modernism as a mode of integrated expressionism of music and literature. Timothy Martin, Joyce and Wagner (Cambridge, 1991), is likewise decisive in its scrutiny of Joyce’s lifelong dependence on his ‘German predecessor’ (Martin). 4 I have discussed this absence in relation to Joyce in ‘Cultural Theory, Nostalgia and the Historical Record: Opera in Ireland and the Irishness of Opera during the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny (eds.), Music in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Irish Musical Studies, 9) (Dublin, 2007), 17–44. 5 This commentary begins with Joyce’s own regard for ‘Sirens’ in preference to actual opera (in this case a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre), as reported in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1959; repr. 1977), 473–4.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

155

To establish Finnegans Wake as a work that can only be adequately understood by means of detailed reference to The Ring (as Timothy Martin has done) is not only to fortify the connection between Joyce and Richard Wagner. The four music dramas of The Ring and the four books of the Wake are not in casual apposition: the detailed retrieval of Wagner in Joyce comes after the more general retrieval of opera in Ireland which his earlier works so assiduously promote. The desire for a masterwork, which Ulysses both investigates and satisﬁes, ﬁnds its most powerful articulation by means of this musical retrieval, and more precisely still through the engagement of opera as a massive conduit of remembrance, sensibility, and emotional intelligence. In that progression, Joyce’s ﬁction ﬁlls the void created by the failure of opera not only in Ireland, but in England throughout his lifetime.6 Ulysses in particular also provides a destination for that whole seam of Irish operatic reception history which, were it not for Joyce’s attachment to it, would lie in abeyance. Joyce’s operatic remembrances have an authority and presence which are all the more striking because they have no visible correlative in opera itself. Shaw’s ebullient dismissal of opera as a viable mode of dramatic engagement after Wagner is thereby qualiﬁed by Joyce’s absorption of music in language.7 The musical works on which he so memorably depends have an a priori essence, and as iconic symbols of culture, of consciousness, and of the past itself, they attain new signiﬁcance in literature. This means, in short, that the operas of Joyce’s formative years, as in the so-called ‘Irish Ring’ (comprising The Bohemian Girl, Martha, and The Lily of Killarney) inhere in literature and not in music. They produce ﬁction (by way of Wagner) and not operas. The comedy of the supper table, however much it may depend upon those dispositions of chorus, solo, and silence, is not music. And yet: those radical proximities between music and literature which Joyce’s ﬁction afﬁrms at every turn gain in signiﬁcance when we consider not only the condition of Irish musical culture which informs Joyce’s 6 When Declan Kiberd writes of ‘the virtual absence of good [Irish] writers in both languages through the whole nineteenth century’ prior to the Literary Revival, he echoes the more general perceptions of music historians who point to the absence of serious English opera from the death of Purcell in 1695 to the ﬁrst performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945. See White, ‘Cultural Theory’, 21 ff. Cf. Declan Kiberd, ‘Writers in Quarantine? The Case for Irish Studies’, in The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge, 2005), 52–69. 7 See the discussion of Shaw in Ch. 4 above, and also in White, ‘Cultural Theory’, 31 ff., in which Shaw’s condemnation of Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe (1891) is assessed as a characteristic refusal of the possibility of opera as a serious English (or British) genre.

156

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

ﬁrst maturity as a writer, but also those modernist ambiguities between literature and music which his own work would foster. Between these two extremes—as between Dubliners and Finnegans Wake—we can map the geography of Joyce’s engagement with music, as in that pattern of allusion, structure, generic adaptation, and heroic modernism which characterizes it. The striking feature of this pattern is that it begins and ends in Ireland.

1 In Ireland . . . the pre-eminence of verbal art forms stands in dramatic contrast to the reduced understanding of music, not as a folk art but unquestionably in terms of classical traditions or forms. . . . Whereas every other western country can listen to its own musical past, Ireland—apart from its ethnic traditions—cannot. (Axel Klein)8 In ‘The Dead’, Dublin faces a West which is past and future, undergoing two revivals, one involving Michael Furey, the other Molly Ivors and Irish native culture. Two versions of the dead, locked away for years, now give promise of a rebirth. But there are other deaths—actual, impending, symbolic. The great opera singers of the past have gone . . . the grace and hospitality of the old generation is going . . . Every item in the story accentuates the contrast between a deep past and a shallow present. (Seamus Deane)9

The complaint that Ireland cannot listen to its musical past begs the question as to what that past might be. The answer which Joyce provides to this question in ‘The Dead’ afﬁrms the function of music in Ireland as an intelligencer of feeling and emotional truth, but it also afﬁrms a process of cultural self-consciousness which made opera an impossibility in the ferment of revival. The song that issues from the opera-singer’s mouth in ‘The Dead’ is an Irish air in the ‘old, Irish tonality’.10 The 8 See Axel Klein, ‘Stage-Irish, or the National in Irish Opera, 1780–1925’, Opera Quarterly, 20: 1 (2005), 27–67. 9 See Seamus Deane, ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge, 2000), 21–37, at 34. 10 James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, in, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford, 2000), 138–76, at 165. All subsequent references are to this edition.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

157

terminus of truth in music, in contrast to those ‘lame, useless words’ which Gabriel Conroy condemns, lies in the ‘distant music’ of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ and its power to awaken those memories of a dead lover which give the story its meaning. Without a word of commentary or exegesis, a ﬁrst reading of ‘The Dead’ would disclose how those rich reminiscences of Italian opera which occupy so much of the narrative nevertheless die away before the prepotent impact of the air itself. Those rival claims of old decency, ‘when something like singing was still to be heard in Dublin’, and the ebullient insistence of Miss Ivors’s ‘propagandism’ which preoccupy Gabriel’s attention are disturbed by the power of traditional music. Aunt Julia’s poignant rendition of the Bellini aria ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’, becomes a prelude to the still more striking performance of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, which comes indirectly and indistinctly amid the clamour of departure, when it is least expected. The salutary formalities of classical music have been done with; the evening is almost over when the song appears. This adjacency of two cultures lies near the heart of Joyce’s musical portraiture and the ‘distant music’ which his story evokes. His protagonist is acutely aware of the transitional moment in Irish affairs which is at hand, and of the fragile transmission and ultimate departure of those ‘Three Graces of the Dublin musical world’ which he celebrates: — A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening to-night to the names of all those great opera singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we are living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as these we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.11

This adieu, with its subtle leitmotifs of anxiety (‘thought-tormented music’ becomes ‘thought-tormented age’) and its rhetorical lyricism (‘gone beyond recall’),12 echoes beyond the conﬁnes of the story itself: it 11

‘The Dead’, 160. This phrase seems to be an unconscious echo of ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, which begins ‘Once in the dear dead days beyond recall’. Given Joyce’s recourse to this song in Ulysses, the allusion here seems plausible. 12

158

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

bears an unmistakable trace of Irish musical consciousness at the turn of the nineteenth century. Gabriel fears the future and its threat of cultural chauvinism, and these are apprehensions which also loom large in Irish music, as the Gaelic League and the ‘necessity for de-anglicising Ireland’ threaten to eclipse what was in any case a modest presence for art music in Ireland.13 Within the story that presence is fading fast, even if Joyce’s own nostalgia for it abides. Within the story, too, as throughout Joyce’s ﬁction, there is not the smallest admission of opera as an art form indigenous to Ireland. Nor could there be: ‘Irish opera’, notwithstanding the decisive contribution of composers such as Michael Balfe and Stanford to the development of English opera, did not exist as a self-standing tradition, but rather manifested itself as a local variant within English opera of an earlier vintage. As Joyce’s ﬁction constantly attests, the performance of regular seasons of English opera and a limited repertory of Italian works between 1840 and 1880 in Dublin gave way to a muchreduced operatic life in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.14 This operatic presence was more notable for its cultural isolation than perhaps anything else. Those few newly composed works which might satisfy the desired conjunction of Irish subject-matter and European music, such as Stanford’s Shamus O’Brien (1896), merely perpetuated an outmoded concept of musical stage-Irishry not likely to appeal to anyone concerned with cultural revival (of any kind) in Ireland. Meanwhile, as we have seen, English opera itself languished under the critical repudiations of Shaw and the pervasive (if not complete) British and Irish indifference to its development as an art form to rival Verdi and Wagner. But Joyce’s goodbye to the good old days of Dublin bel canto in ‘The Dead’ is a contrivance. Two features make it so: one is that the sheer felt life of operatic remembrance domesticates the genre in an Irish context at a time (1907) when it was otherwise ignored. The memory of opera, together with its functional signiﬁcance, will become common currency in Ulysses. (In this respect, one can sense the wonderment—if not the exasperation—of Joyce scholars even now at the apparent ubiquity of 13 For an account of the impact of cultural revival on art music in Ireland, see Joseph Ryan, ‘Nationalism and Music in Ireland’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Maynooth (1991), passim, and Harry White, The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork, 1998), 94–124. Douglas Hyde’s lecture, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1892), was a key text in the reanimation of cultural ideas inimical to European art music. 14 On this point see Klein, ‘Stage-Irish’, 30 ff., and the discussion of Irish operatic performances in White, ‘Cultural Theory’, esp. 23 ff.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

159

opera as a model of consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin.)15 The second feature is that operatic arias in ‘The Dead’ comprise an essential precedent for the reliance on music as the deﬁnitive conduit of feeling in the story. In this delicate apposition, apostrophized by the pairing of Aunt Julia’s performance of Bellini and Mr D’Arcy’s performance of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in Gabriel’s mind, the symbolic properties of vocal music supervene the cultural antagonism which separates Italian opera from the ‘old, Irish tonality’. Miss Ivors is undone by her hasty exit (marked by a laughing, Irish salutation): in her ‘hypereducated’ condition she misses the song and its signiﬁcance both. Gabriel, for his part, the steward of a musical culture that is almost gone ‘beyond recall’, remains to discover the disturbing impact of music afresh. Music self-evidently attains remarkable importance in ‘The Dead’, if only because it is essential to the resolution of the story, but at every turn its signiﬁcance to life in Dublin is afﬁrmed.16 Aunt Kate’s description of her favourite singer (‘old Parkinson’), which itself effects a modulation from the discussion of bel canto to Gabriel’s speech and the unexpected performance of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, is ‘A beautiful pure sweet mellow English tenor’.17 Only Aunt Kate and Mr Browne have heard of him, but this ﬂotilla of adjectives is surely mimetic of his vocal power. It prepares the way for Gabriel’s ‘poor powers as a speaker’ and the song which will eclipse his best efforts. It is the song itself which brings us back to Stanislaus Joyce’s operatic reading of ‘The Dead’. When the chorus of high comedy which surrounds the song gives way to the duet between Gretta and her (at ﬁrst) uncomprehending husband in the Gresham Hotel, and when that in turn gives way to the silent aria of Gabriel’s interior musings, the shape of the story gives due notice of Joyce’s operatic technique. Gabriel’s despondent recapitulation of the narrative at the close afﬁrms that musical balance which Stanislaus so keenly identiﬁes. So too does Joyce’s arrangement of the air itself. In the context which he provides for it, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ attains a thematic and emotional intelligibility which is vital to the story. The memories of opera, the performance of an operatic aria, and the supremely powerful rendition of the Irish air 15 More positively, we can assert that scholars such as Bowen and Martin have put beyond doubt the structural as well as the emotional function of opera in Joyce’s work. 16 As when Aunt Kate complains of the papal ruling that has recently (1902) decreed the expulsion of women from church choirs and the substitution of ‘little whippersnappers of boys over their heads’: ‘The Dead’, 153. 17 Ibid. 157.

160

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

combine in a musical synthesis through which the plot and its signiﬁcance are advanced. In that synthesis, Joyce’s verbal opera achieves an integration of Irish folk song and ﬁction, of music and drama, which is all the more persuasive given the long-lamented failure of Irish art music to do the same thing. In this sense alone, perhaps, ‘The Dead’ satisﬁes the ambition of Irish opera to effect such a synthesis.

2 Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary? Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, . . . . Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience? Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both . . . professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. (Ulysses, ‘Ithaca’)18

‘The Dead’ was Joyce’s ﬁrst ‘song of exile’, his ﬁrst sustained deployment of what he would afterwards laconically describe as ‘the Tommy Moore touch’ in Ulysses. Although Joyce did not scruple to make fun of Moore, this did not prevent his drawing upon the Irish Melodies in Ulysses (and in one memorable episode in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), just as the Moore song ‘When We Dead Awaken’ had, in Richard Ellmann’s phrase, proved to be an important ‘impulsion’ towards the writing of ‘The Dead’ itself.19 Nevertheless, the habitual allusion to and dependence upon elements of Dublin’s musical life which Joyce inaugurates in ‘The Dead’ are signiﬁcantly complicated by two further musical developments in Ulysses. Notwithstanding the symbolic importance of Wagner’s Siegfried (and of literary Wagnerism in general) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is Ulysses which conﬁrms the function of music 18 James Joyce, Ulysses, edited with notes and an introduction by Jeri Johnson (repr. of the 1st edn. 1922) (Oxford, 1993), 619. All subsequent citations are from this edition. 19 Ellmann, James Joyce, 253, reports that Joyce’s ‘feelings about his wife’s dead lover found a dramatic counterpart in the jealousy of the dead for the living in Moore’s song’.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

161

as a metalanguage in Joyce’s ﬁction.20 This conﬁrmation is achieved through the intensiﬁcation of musical allusion with speciﬁc regard to Italian and English opera, and also by means of the imitation of musical structures and generic paradigms, most obviously (but not exclusively) in two episodes (‘Sirens’ and ‘Cyclops’) which are next to each other. This reliance on musical allusion and structure is not sufﬁcient in itself to justify a reading of Ulysses as a modernist reworking of the Wagnerian music drama in ﬁction. But when we give due consideration to the principal narrative technique of Ulysses—the interior monologue or stream of consciousness—as an invention which (as Joyce himself believed) is derived from Wagner’s technique of ‘inﬁnite melody’, then this reading is allowable, at least in part.21 Ulysses remains a supreme ﬁction, but one which is technically and expressively informed by vocal music in general and by opera in particular. To adapt a phrase from David Lloyd which has an especially rich resonance in respect of Joyce, Ulysses is a prime instance of ﬁction adulterated by music. In that process, Joyce’s novel is emblematic of the adulteration of Irish culture in general.22 To propose that the terminus of opera in Ireland was literary rather than musical is an argument that depends on a reading of Irish culture which acknowledges the hegemony of literary revival over every other consideration or mode of expression at the turn of the nineteenth century. The ascendancy of verbal culture, particularly with regard to opera, may well be related to that tension between the loss of one language and 20 The deﬁnitive discussion of Wagner’s inﬂuence on the Irish literary imagination is in Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 1–32 (‘Joyce and Literary Wagnerism’). Martin observes that ‘pervasive as Wagner was in French aesthetics late in the [nineteenth] century, the Wagnerism that came to Joyce [principally through the agency of Arthur Symons] was decidedly more literary than musical’ (8). Martin identiﬁes the inﬂuence of Wagner’s ‘inﬁnite melody’ through the medium of Édouard Dujardin’s ‘interior monologues’ on Joyce as the decisive one, notwithstanding Joyce’s close absorption of Wagner’s symbolism and social thought through the writings of George Moore and Shaw respectively. 21 Martin (ibid. 150–64), traces the relationship between the musical leitmotif as an expression of character in Wagner’s music dramas and the literary version of this technique in Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One of the problems which this relationship sooner or later reveals is that in Wagner’s case the leitmotif, as an instrumental idea, depends on a mode of auditory recognition that language cannot afford; a second problem which pertains to Joyce is that so many of his leitmotifs are in fact taken over directly from Wagner, rather than invented anew. 22 I follow here the essay ‘Adulteration and the Nation’, in David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin, 1993), 88–124. Lloyd’s brilliant diagnosis of the anxieties of cultural adulteration as these are expressed in the ‘Cyclops’ episode in Ulysses depends in signiﬁcant measure on a reading of Douglas Hyde’s insistence on the recovery of a Gaelic culture which must be puriﬁed and distinguished from the hybrid cultural and political condition of late nineteenth-century Ireland.

162

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

the mastery of another which gives the Literary Revival its impetus in the ﬁrst place, but in any case the faltering narrative of Irish opera gains considerably if we read it not as a chronicle of failure but as a construct which is reviviﬁed by the reception history it receives in Joyce and Shaw. Joyce’s structural and expressive reliance on opera allows the ‘musical past’ to ﬁnd a functional afterlife in his own ﬁction. This means that in Ulysses (and more problematically in Finnegans Wake), we seem to be presented with a literature which countenances and promotes the regulation of music as an end in itself. The whole process summons that famous discrimination which Stephen Dedalus makes in Portrait between his mastery of English and the command of the native speaker: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write those words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its word. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.23

These sentiments will intensify through the course of Joyce’s work, but the notion of English as ‘an acquired speech’ establishes the primary condition of adulteration (in this case, linguistic adulteration) in Joyce’s literary imagination. It seems fair and fruitful to regard Joyce’s recourse to music in similar terms. If Joyce devotes much of his time to a diagnosis (and indictment) of Irish cultural autonomy both within and beyond the parameters of Ulysses, it is partly on account of his resistance to that sudden surge of ‘cultural puriﬁcation’ represented by newly established institutions in Ireland towards the end of the nineteenth century, such as the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the National Theatre, and so on. In place of such purity, Joyce advances ‘a disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines’, and a marked preference for Europe.24 23 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, cited in Declan Kiberd’s introduction to Ulysses (Harmondsworth, 1992), pp. xxxvii–xxxviii. Kiberd goes on to remark that Joyce hated the repression and humiliation of the Irish language: it may be fair comment to add that he assuaged these feelings by his recourse to music in the invention of a metalanguage of his own. 24 This reading of Ulysses in general and of ‘Cyclops’ in particular as an indictment of Gaelic revivalism has been modiﬁed by a revisionist scrutiny of Joyce’s attitude to nationalism persuasively argued by (among others) Emer Nolan, Declan Kiberd, and Marianna Gula. A summary of this postcolonial critique is available in Gula’s essay ‘ “As good as any play in the Queen’s Royal Theatre”: Performing the Nation in the “Cyclops” Episode in Ulysses’, Irish University Review, 36: 2 (2006), 257–79.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

163

This is a preference shared and undermined in unequal measure by the dramatis personae of Ulysses, and it is one moreover, which ﬁnds notably consistent expression in music. The ﬁrst direct speech in the novel is sung rather than spoken, so that the ceremony of musical allusion is immediately tied to the fabric of ordinary life in Dublin. From Gregorian chant (‘Introibo ad altare Dei’) to ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, from Don Giovanni to The Ring, from Bellini to Bella Cohen’s singing whores, the texture and tang of that whole day is suffused with the leitmotifs of musical utterance. It is this suffusion which habilitates such a striking gamut of songs, arias, composers, singers, performers, musical reminiscences, and totemic musical works. The sheer plenitude of musical experience in Ulysses normalizes what otherwise might seem an obscure (if passionate) preoccupation. As Timothy Martin shrewdly observes, ‘the operatic “turn” in Ulysses involves not a transition from one style to another but from a dramatic principle of unity and economy . . . to one of multiplicity’.25 It is this turn which distinguishes Wagner’s dramatic principles from Joyce’s. Joyce would afterwards turn again, and this time directly towards Wagner in Finnegans Wake, but in Ulysses his musical-dramatic techniques stand closer to the ‘operatic in opera’ and the ‘cult of the individual performer’ which Wagner had so severely repudiated in his decisive emancipation from the constraints of Italian and French opera. Wagner had rid himself of the curse of bel canto. Joyce not only restores its currency, but adapts its afterlife in Dublin (the performance of selected arias from operas in concert) to his own dramatic purpose. If Ulysses is an opera, then these arias must signify something beyond the operas from which they are excerpted, even if they explicitly retain their status as agents of betrayal, desire, memory, and receptive consciousness. The fundamental signiﬁcance of music as a metalanguage in Ulysses might daringly be construed as a newly minted currency of expression which rivals the individual sources (as in: Italian 25 Martin, ‘Joyce and Opera’, ‘Introduction’, 34. In his writings on Joyce to date Martin distinguishes between Joyce’s absorption of Wagner’s technique and his disdain, nevertheless, for the music itself. Here, he remarks that ‘it should not surprise us that Joyce did not care for the music of Wagner, the reformer who had made Rossini and Meyerbeer his whipping boys and had done his best to steer opera away from the “beautiful singing” of the Italian tradition’ (27). Joyce’s own bel canto in Finnegans Wake is perhaps another matter: in its motivic dependence on The Ring and Tristan und Isolde, and also in its extreme condition of linguistic–musical synthesis, we can at least suggest that Joyce was content to emulate Wagner, if not uncritically to admire his music. I make this suggestion with something of Harold Bloom’s concept of ‘the anxiety of inﬂuence’ in mind.

164

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

opera, street ballads, printed ballads, references to Wagner, Bellini, Moore, and so on) from which it is composed. If, as John McCourt has persuasively demonstrated, the novel is a tale of two cities rather than one, it does not seem excessive to propose that those adjacencies of Irish and European musical culture to which Joyce repeatedly draws attention (above all in ‘Sirens’ and ‘Cyclops’) are merged in a prose which afﬁrms Ireland and Europe, Dublin and Trieste, Gael and Jew, ballad and bel canto at one and the same time.26 A passage from ‘Sirens’ makes this process explicit: — Qui sdegno, Ben, said Father Cowley. — No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered, The Croppy Boy. Our native Doric. — Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. Good men and true. — Do, do, they begged in one. . . . — What key? Six sharps? — F sharp major Ben Dollard said. Bob Cowley’s outstretched talons gripped the black deepsounding chords. . . . But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic. The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth’s fatigue made grave approach, and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men and true. The priest he sought, with him would he speak a word.27

What strikes home in this passage is the strategic traversal of Mozart (The Magic Flute),28 ‘The Croppy Boy’, and the opening chords of Das Rheingold, so as to recast the ballad as an operatic aria in F sharp major. The Mozart tag adverts to a different kind of homecoming, but a homecoming nevertheless. It occurs in the aftermath of so much Italian opera (in Bloom’s thought processes as in the Ormond Bar) that we are inevitably reminded of the reminiscences of Bellini which precede ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in ‘The Dead’, if only because in ‘Sirens’ Joyce moves in the same direction, as it were, from bel canto to Irish ballad (‘our native Doric’). But in ‘Sirens’ the urgent imperatives ‘But wait’, ‘But hear’ signal something more than a straightforward progression from sweet old Italian opera to the bourgeois balladry of the pianoforte. Instead, the narrative absorbs the Prelude to Rheingold into the rhymed betrayals of 26 This synthesis of Irish and European culture, of fundamental importance to Ulysses, was achieved by Joyce in Trieste, as John McCourt has decisively shown in The Years of Bloom. 27 Ulysses, 271. 28 Father Cowley’s request for Qui sdegno refers to the opening words (in its Italian version) of Sarastro’s aria, ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’, from The Magic Flute.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

165

‘The Croppy Boy’: ‘The voice of dark age, of unlove . . . called on good men and true.’ That sentence begins by alluding to the subterranean music of Rheingold and ends with the versiﬁcation of an Irish ballad. In this trajectory, which is mimetic of the episode as a whole (from ‘fuga per canonem’ to Robert Emmet’s ‘Speech from the Dock’), the technique of remembrance and allusion effects a modulation from music into language, and from Europe to Ireland.29 But Bloom cannot resist the impulse to hold these two in apposition, and to associate one with the other: ‘Robert Emmet’s last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.’30 Bloom has once again confused Meyerbeer for Mercadante,31 but there is no ambiguity about the connection which he instinctively makes between Irish history and European music, even if the Wandering Jew at the close of ‘Sirens’ ends with a burgundy-induced fart which all but occludes a verbal tag (Emmett’s ‘I have done’) and not a musical one. By the end of this chapter, with its deliberate insistence on musical technique from the outset, the speech-song of Joyce’s imagination is sufﬁciently established so as to supervene the difference between the two. It is hardly surprising that Joyce was so vain of his achievement in this (musical) regard, almost to the point of silliness.32 To begin with a fugue and end with a fart suggests the nightworld of Finnegans Wake rather than the nighttown of Ulysses, but the intimacy between music, language, and politics which Joyce afﬁrms in ‘Sirens’ is

29 The technique of ‘Sirens’ as a ‘fuga per canonem’, ﬁrst described, with Joyce’s authority, in the schema provided by Stuart Gilbert in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1932), echoes Joyce’s own description of ‘Sirens’ as ‘a fugue with all the musical notations’, cited in Ellmann, James Joyce, 473. The authority of these contrapuntal descriptions is problematized, to say the least of it, by the tenuous connections which they sponsor. To describe ‘Sirens’ as a fugue is to summon John Joyce’s reaction to the Brancusi ‘symbol of Joyce’ when it was shown to him (‘The boy seems to have changed a great deal’). 30 Ulysses, 278. 31 This, or its converse (mistaking Mercadante for Meyerbeer), happens several times throughout Ulysses, notably in ‘Sirens’ and ‘Cyclops’, and it also happened once to Zack Bowen, as he reports in the introduction to Bloom’s Old Sweet Song, 5. In any case, Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) and Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870) were close contemporaries whose musical styles might also well be confused if restricted to a small number of works, if only because Mercadante absorbed the inﬂuence of Meyerbeer in Paris during his short sojourn there. Meyerbeer, of course, as the great Jewish exponent of French grand opera whom Wagner detested, has his own individual relevance to the cultural politics of Ulysses. 32 As in his reported conversation with George Borach in June 1919, when he remarked that after the composition of ‘Sirens’ he couldn’t listen to music any longer. ‘I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more’. Cited in Ellmann, James Joyce, 473.

166

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

vocal rather than instrumental, and operatic rather than fugal, to judge by the structural afﬁnities which Joyce pursues between overture and operatic scena on one side and the prologue and main text of ‘Sirens’ on the other. These afﬁnities have encouraged Joyce scholars to promote ‘Sirens’, as Joyce did himself, as a species of opera, as a manifestation of polyphony in prose, and indeed as a rehearsal for the absolute synthesis of music and language which he avowed in Finnegans Wake.33 In the present context, we can perhaps situate the whole of ‘Sirens’ as an extended prelude to ‘Cyclops’, given that in both episodes Bloom begins as a ﬁgure on the periphery (of musical experience in one and parodic cultural discourse in the other), and ends as the principal agent (of narrative consciousness in one and plot resolution in the other). Bloom’s active engagement with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub is preﬁgured by his passive reception of music in the Ormond Bar, just as the technical prominence of music as a narrative agent in ‘Sirens’ is correspondingly reduced by the very different (if related) narrative technique of ‘Cyclops’. To borrow an operatic usage, we might suggest that ‘Sirens’ represents the ‘overture and beginners’ whereas ‘Cyclops’ takes us into the drama itself. The conjunction between music and politics effected by the transition from bel canto to balladry at the end of ‘Sirens’ is differently afﬁrmed in either chapter. In ‘Sirens’, the plenitude of operatic (and other vocal) allusion is formally controlled by Joyce’s self-conscious exploitation of afﬁnities between musical and literary structure, as in the musical disposition of verbal phrases and neologisms with which it begins. In ‘Cyclops’, the restoration of narrative voice eclipses the formal presence of musical structure and allusion in ‘Sirens’ in favour of Joyce’s own invention. This invention has its origins in the ‘comic chorus’ which Stanislaus Joyce identiﬁed in ‘The Dead’, but the verbal opera in ‘Cyclops’ is much more subtly achieved: whereas ‘Sirens’ sustains the admixture 33 Brad Bucknell is enlightening in this last regard: ‘Joyce’s foregrounding of the text [in ‘Sirens’] as both sound and script returns us to its phenomenality, to its presence as something seen and (if inwardly) heard, not something seen through and immediately interpreted and understood. Joyce’s particular way of clouding lexicality brings language into closer proximity with music, and at the level of language, offers a kind of parodic continuity which the narrative itself picks up.’ See Bucknell, Literary Modernism, 121–61, at 139. For a different reading of ‘Sirens’, in which Joyce’s literary technique is compared to Schoenberg’s method of composition with twelve tones, see David Herman, ‘ “Sirens” after Schönberg’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31: 4 (Summer 1994), 473–94. Among many operatic readings of this chapter, one to which I feel particularly indebted is Chris Ackerley, ‘ “Tutto è sciolto”: An Operatic Crux in the “Sirens” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Martin (ed.), ‘Joyce and Opera’, 197–204.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

167

of musical subject-matter and formal disposition inaugurated in ‘The Dead’, ‘Cyclops’ does not. In ‘Sirens’ the recourse to music is materially explicit; in ‘Cyclops’ the music itself has been submerged, while the prose continues to attest the generic presence of musical drama, speciﬁcally in terms of structural organization. ‘Cyclops’, in short, is underwritten by a much more integrated musical dependence than is ‘Sirens’. In ‘Cyclops’, moreover, the operatic mode of discourse has very little to do with Richard Wagner.34 The principal impact of Wagnerian allusion on the felt life of Joyce’s ﬁction, as Tim Martin has shown, begins in earnest only with Finnegans Wake.35 Other than the darkening chords from Rheingold in ‘Sirens’ and the explicit citations from Siegfried in ‘Circe’, the musical allusions upon which Joyce depends are a faithful echo of Bloom’s own experience and taste, woven into the fabric of Joyce’s fantastically detailed remembrance of Dublin musical life throughout the chapter.36 Although ‘Sirens’ effects its musical transitions (from opera to ballad) by means of two central renditions (the aria ‘M’appari’ from the opera Martha by Flotow and ‘The Croppy Boy’), the structural alignment between musical memory, expressivity of vocal performance, and Bloom’s own consciousness is pervasive, so that the prologue-scena structure of the episode has the paradigmatic force of an extended aria, complete with an introduction (in which a survey of the materials to be developed in the body of the text concludes with the imperative ‘Begin!’) and a postlude (in which Bloom’s exit from the bar closes with 34 Perhaps the clearest indication of this distance from Wagner’s inﬂuence in ‘Cyclops’ is the almost complete disappearance of interior monologue (as in the ‘stream of consciousness’ which otherwise characterizes the presentation of Bloom to a greater or lesser degree in the novel). 35 See the discussion of Martin’s appendix, below. It is important nevertheless to emphasize that Wagner’s inﬂuence on Ulysses, as Martin clearly demonstrates, extends to several important afﬁnities between Joyce and Wagner in respect of characterization and its symbolic properties, notably those of the ‘Wandering Jew’ which preoccupy Wagner and Joyce in The Flying Dutchman and Ulysses respectively. And the prominence of interior monologue (or ‘stream of consciousness’) throughout Ulysses (notwithstanding its disappearance from certain episodes, as in ‘Cyclops’) afﬁrms the inﬂuence of Wagner in terms of literary technique (if not musical allusion). 36 In the comparative calm of ‘Eumaeus’, Bloom and Stephen ‘pass on to chatting about music, a form of which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love’ (Ulysses, 614). Joyce registers in the following passage Bloom’s mild disavowal of Wagner (‘a bit too heavy’) and his corresponding appetite for Wagner’s predecessors in opera (mixing up Mercadante and Meyerbeer once again). It is interesting that Bloom avows, in addition to his predictable admiration for Mozart and Flotow, a penchant for ‘the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn’.

168

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

a similar cadence, ‘Done!’).37 From opera, to ballad, to ‘Emmet’s last words’: Bloom breaks wind and is on his way. An arresting observation from Zack Bowen on this moment gives some indication as to where Ulysses might be headed after ‘Sirens’, at least in musical terms: ‘As he [Bloom] looks at Robert Emmet’s picture and stirring last words in Lionel Mark’s window, he is reminded of Mercadante’s oratorio version of the seven last words of Christ . . . Here we have one of the most obvious associative patterns in the novel, as Bloom goes from Emmet’s last words to Christ’s last words, to Mercadante’s (mistakenly called Meyerbeer’s) oratorio.’38 From the archetype of Irish nationalism to Christ, and from Christ to oratorio: if this is a pattern, it is one which is most explicitly dramatized not in ‘Sirens’, but in ‘Cyclops’. In that progression, Joyce effectively transcends musical allusion. The operatic arias are gone, but something unmistakably related to these has taken their place. Opera, at one remove, remains in vital play.

3 Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and the old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera. — Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God. . . . — By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. (Ulysses, ‘Cyclops’)39

37 This prelude–aria–postlude structure seems to me a more persuasive model than the rigorous interrogation of the chapter as fugue or opera, because the formal paradigm on which this structure depends is so commonplace in the music to which Ulysses refers. The thematic introduction (prelude), vocal setting (aria), and closing instrumental passage (postlude) into which ‘Sirens’ can thus be resolved does injury neither to the narrative ﬂow of the episode nor the explicit musical elements upon which it relies. 38 Bowen, Bloom’s Old Sweet Song, 74, emphasis mine. 39 Ulysses, 298, 327.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

169

. . . each successive episode dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic) leaves behind it a burnt up ﬁeld. Since I wrote the Sirens, I ﬁnd it impossible to listen to music of any kind. (Joyce, in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, July 1919)40

It is difﬁcult not to read ‘Cyclops’ as a fresh start: it has the vigour of new beginnings, signiﬁed by the ﬁrst-person narrative which appears ebulliently to repudiate the ebb and ﬂow of consciousness in ‘Sirens,’ with its colloquial reportage and directness of address. The neologisms and collocations of ‘Sirens’ are absent: there are no ‘lugugubrious chords’ or ‘lumpmusic’ in ‘Cyclops’, and nor is there an authorial voice which might produce and strategically deploy them, as it so strikingly does in ‘Sirens’. In ‘Cyclops’, we are presented instead with the ad hominem rhetoric of the casual storyteller, whose vigorous diction establishes a regulating tenor for the whole episode. Ulysses is suddenly in new hands. The prevailing force of Bloom’s consciousness is temporarily suspended: Bloom will participate in the episode, but through the agency of the storyteller (or ‘the nameless one’, as he is subsequently designated in ‘Circe’).41 Even at the close, when Bloom ascends into heaven (taking with him the illusion of narrative control that the storyteller has periodically recovered throughout the episode from the successive waves of parodic engagement that wash over the tale itself ), he remains an agent in the discourse. It will not be until halfway through the next episode (‘Nausicaa’), when Cissy Caffrey has limped away, that Bloom recovers his primacy of narrative consciousness. Meanwhile, ‘like a shot off a shovel’,42 the storyteller at the end of ‘Cyclops’ has the last six words. The phrase itself functions as an abrupt but unmistakable cadence to the biblical parody which precedes it, and the tale is done. The diction of the storyteller in ‘Cyclops’ is one of three elements that support a reading of the episode as an analogy to musical drama. The other two—the direct speech of the participants and the sonorous ﬂow of stylistic parody—strengthen the impression of ‘Cyclops’ as verbal opera, especially given its preoccupation with the politics of Irish culture which, as David Lloyd remarks, causes the narrative to circulate ‘not only thematically but stylistically around adulteration as the 40

Cited in Ellmann, James Joyce, 475. I have called him ‘the storyteller’ in preference to ‘Noman’, as Gilbert designates him, in order to emphasize his narrative voice and function. 42 The words which close ‘Cyclops’ (Ulysses, 330). 41

170

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

constitutive anxiety of Irish nationalism’.43 Given especially that it is precisely this anxiety which predominated in the debate about Irish art music throughout Joyce’s lifetime (and for long before), it is indeed tempting to seek in ‘Cyclops’ the Irish opera par excellence.44 The Citizen and Bloom play out their drama of cultural nationalism (the European Jew routed by the Catholic Gael) with all the prerequisites of grand opera—sovereign tirades, expressive excess, heroic action—except one. There is no music. In its place, we discover afresh that ‘speech delighted with its own music’ which Shaw and Synge (however differently) realized as a vital usurpation of music itself. But wait. But hear: we also discover, through the agency of Joyce’s own technique, a better musical analogy which connects the drama of ‘Cyclops’ to the missing history of Irish opera in general and to that explicit engagement with opera in particular (‘Sirens’) which immediately precedes it. The ‘acquired speech’ of musical discourse in ‘Cyclops’ is domesticated not through explicit recourse to operatic arias and musical allusions as these obtain in ‘Sirens’. Instead, Joyce rehabilitates opera as oratorio, and in that paradigm-shift engages the narrative voice and choral prominence which, as in some of Handel’s oratorios, relate this genre to spoken drama.45 From Emmet’s last words to the last words of Christ; from the shibboleths of a verbal and nationalist culture to Bloom’s own preferences for oratorio: this trajectory in ‘Sirens’ is realized in full in the narrative and dramatic extravagance of voice which animates ‘Cyclops’. Indeed, the voice itself, the sheer presence of the writing, attains to unusual prominence and (expressive) signiﬁcance in this episode.46 43

Lloyd, ‘Adulteration and the Nation’, 106. I have discussed this central preoccupation in ‘Nationalism, Colonialism and the Cultural Stasis of Music in Ireland’, in Harry White and Michael Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism. Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800–1945 (Cork, 2001), 257–71. On the manifestation of this problem in Irish opera, see Klein, ‘Stage-Irish’, passim. 45 The oratorio by Handel which almost automatically comes to mind is Messiah (1742), given not only its premiere in Dublin, but its status as a cultural icon of Irish musical life. The deﬁnition of oratorio most germane to this discussion is one which denotes a musical drama on a sacred subject. For much of the genre’s history the oratorio has maintained very close stylistic allegiances to opera. The distinguishing feature of Handel’s oratorios—the virtuoso condition and prominence of the choral writing—is especially pertinent to the virtuoso parodies in ‘Cyclops’. 46 This prominence of voice has become a principal focus of critical commentary no later than the publication of Colin McCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word in 1978. 44

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

171

The signiﬁcance of voice in ‘Cyclops’ may also be construed in terms of Joyce’s generic dependencies, and by his operatic dependencies in particular. To advance the genre of oratorio as an instructive model for Joyce’s ﬁctional strategies is not to explain these latter as a naive transposition of oratorio technique into literature, but to reﬁne those alignments between musical and literary technique which Joyce’s ﬁction constantly afﬁrms. With respect to ‘Cyclops’, these alignments were recognized in a special way by Joyce’s contemporary and friend, the Paris-based composer George Antheil.47 As Richard Ellmann reports, Antheil began to set ‘Cyclops’ as an opera, whole and entire, with Joyce’s enthusiastic assent.48 Given the extravagant resources which Antheil envisaged (‘voice, chorus, ampliﬁed gramophone, eight xylophones, electric motors with steel and wooden attachments, electric buzzers, and sixteen mechanical pianos’ operated from a masterroll and controlled by switchboard), it is perhaps not entirely regrettable that the project lapsed. It is certainly not unlikely that the modernism of Antheil’s scoring would have eclipsed the modernism of Joyce’s prose, but the mere indication of a chorus in Antheil’s list of resources (especially in apposition with a single ‘voice’) fortiﬁes the generic connections between opera and oratorio which I have nominated here.49 Timothy Martin has observed that, ‘when Joyce and Antheil saw the possibility of an opera in “Cyclops”, they may have been thinking not only of the episode’s histrionic trajectory, but also of its striking alternation between two contrasting modes of discourse . . . the analogy to the standard recitative and aria format of opera, which . . . include[s] the bel canto tradition of which Joyce was so enamoured, is almost perfect’.50 47 We have already encountered him in Chapter 2 of this book as the composer of incidental music for the Abbey, including Yeats’s own plays. 48 See Ellmann, James Joyce, 569. Joyce later approached Antheil with the proposal that he set Byron’s Cain as an opera intended to feature the Irish tenor John Sullivan. 49 For further details of the envisaged setting by Antheil, see Paul Martin, ‘Mr Bloom and the Cyclops: Joyce and Antheil’s Unﬁnished “Opéra Mécanique” ’, in Knowles (ed.), Bronze by Gold, 91–105. Oratorio as a genre often depends on a narrator (variously called ‘testo’, ‘historicus’, and in the case of Bach’s passion oratorios, ‘Evangelist’) whose main responsibility is to convey the narrative of the biblical account. In Handel’s oratorios, which rarely feature a solo narrator, the choral movements regularly comment on the narrative or on the general development of the story as it unfolds. In two of Handel’s oratorios, however, Israel in Egypt (1739) and Messiah, the tenor recitatives often function in a manner that is closely analogous to that of an Evangelist or ‘historicus’, especially when Handel’s librettist is quoting directly from sacred scripture. 50 Timothy Martin, ‘ “Cyclops” as Opera’, in ‘Joyce and Opera’, 227–30, at 227–8.

172

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

I think that these identiﬁcations in favour of opera can be fortiﬁed in favour of oratorio: there are three modes of discourse rather than two (dialogue in addition to narrative and parody), and the bel canto tradition, so evident elsewhere in Ulysses (above all, perhaps, in ‘Sirens’) strikingly recedes as another music takes its place. The incantations of the catalogue are self-evidently the primary music of ‘Cyclops’ rather than the formal representation of operatic arias, so that the verbal music of lists supervenes the actual music of allusion. So too does the verbal music of Victorian legend, in which the prosody recasts the banal indicatives of the storyteller (‘around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the courthouse’) in ﬂorid excess: the route to Barney Kiernan’s pub summons the ﬁrst of these ﬂourishes (‘In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan’), which includes ‘lovely maidens’ who ‘sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs which they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden ingots, silvery ﬁshes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings, creels of ﬁngerlings, purple seagems and playful insects’.51 In such passages, the sheer wilfulness of sound (the mesmeric accumulation of collective nouns) is commingled with the undermining gusto of satire. Joyce’s bravura is constantly indentured to a massive indictment of the whole enterprise of representing Gaelic culture through English. Stuart Gilbert calls the technique by which this is achieved ‘gigantism’, a noun which gives fair notice of Joyce’s intense interest in the sheer impact of sound, whatever purpose (in this case, indictment) it might serve. Between the plain reportage of the storyteller and the lustrous catalogues with which it is interspersed, we can detect the transformation of two musical paradigms which support ‘Cyclops’ as a literary transformation of oratorio rather than opera: simple recitative and elaborate chorus. It is satirical indictment which affords coherence to the formal catalogues or choruses in ‘Cyclops’, the ﬁrst of which affects to describe the ‘tribal images’ which adorn the girdle of the Citizen now transmogriﬁed from the storyteller’s rudimentary description (‘There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause’). These images include the following ‘Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity’: ‘Goliath’, ‘the Mother of the Maccabees’, ‘the Rose of Castille’, ‘John L. Sullivan’, ‘the Bride of Lammermoor’, ‘Dark Rosaleen’, ‘Tristan and Isolde’, ‘the Bold Soldier Boy’, ‘Ludwig Beethoven’, ‘the Colleen Bawn’, ‘the Lily of Killarney’, ‘the Queen of Sheba’.52 51

Ulysses, 282.

52

The passages discussed here are taken from ibid. 283–5.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

173

The adulteration of Gaelic culture which these inclusions represent is obvious: biblical ﬁgures, operas, Beethoven, Wagner, an Irish tenor, a play by Boucicault and the opera based upon it,53 a few ballads, and James Clarence Mangan consort among eighty-seven such nominations to press home the absurd condition of cultural integrity which the Citizen pursues from the moment he orders his ﬁrst pint (‘wine of the country’). The Polyphemic utterances of the catalogue give some notion of the contest between the Glorious Gael and his hapless interlocutor: the ‘bloody jewman’ will run for his life before this omnivorous monster of Irish purity. Although recent readings of ‘Cyclops’ incline to exonerate the Citizen’s blatant chauvinism and anti-Semitism in favour of an appraisal more sympathetic to the quest for an idea of cultural identity which might be emancipated from nationalism and colonialism alike, it is difﬁcult to escape the impression that Joyce’s satire rests upon a fundamental contrast between the mild remonstrations of Bloom and the crude repudiations of Europe which the Citizen loudly maintains. Contemporary arguments about the cultural meaning of ‘Cyclops’ can illuminate the question of Joyce’s technique, as when Terence Killeen brilliantly remarks that such arguments establish that ‘the nationalism the citizen represents proved historically to be the agent of Irish modernisation and the music of the future’.54 Killeen presumably means the music of the Irish future, and in that respect the oratorical techniques of ‘Cyclops’ are especially germane, because they articulate not simply the condition of Irish cultural discourse in which art music is incidental to the principal energies of national formation, but also the expulsion of the Jewish Bloom, with his simple deﬁnition of national residency, from the postcolonial nexus of an Ireland that deﬁnes itself as being non-English and non-European. For all the immensity of his awareness in Ulysses, Joyce does not countenance one contemporary Irish or British composer in the novel: there is nothing of Stanford, or Esposito or Elgar or Parry, despite the plenitude of Irish (and English) opera of an earlier vintage. As of 16 June 1904, all that remains of art music is the present tense of remembrance (actuated by performance) and the absorption of music by prose. In this progression, from The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross (the remembrance of an oratorio in ‘Sirens’) to the six last words 53 i.e. The Colleen Bawn and The Lily of Killarney. It may be relevant to note that the alternative title of Boucicault’s play was The Brides of Garryowen, given that ‘Garryowen’ is the name of the Citizen’s dog. 54 Terence Killeen, Ulysses Unbound (Bray, 2005), 139.

174

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

concerning Bloom’s ascent into heaven (the enactment of an oratorio in ‘Cyclops’), Joyce achieves not only the desired masterwork in parvo (of which Ulysses itself is the ultimate fulﬁlment) but the deﬁnitive expression of a musically adulterated ﬁction. The arguments about Irish culture initiated by Miss Ivors and Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’ are now conducted on a grander scale by the Citizen and Bloom. The choral commentaries which issue from these arguments complete the transition from music to literature by means of an incantatory synthesis which surrounds the debate in a sound-world of Joyce’s own making. Recited aloud or silently read, these processions and parodies simultaneously afﬁrm and undermine the dramatic unfolding of the episode itself. As a collective tour de force, they also prepare the ground for Bloom’s ascension, including its subversive tailpiece. The comic chorus identiﬁed by Stanislaus in ‘The Dead’ has come into its own. The two remaining modes of discourse in ‘Cyclops’—narrative and dialogue—afﬁrm the consistency of this episode in contrast to the multiplicity of narrative voices which Joyce allows as a rule in Ulysses: here, there is one narrator and only one. The storyteller’s narrative gives way to the magisterial choruses, and is resumed again without comment because these parodic interventions do not impinge on his consciousness.55 Like the Evangelist in a Bach passion, he tells the story, and the choruses, as it were, elaborate upon it.56 Between these two extremes— the familiar diction of the storyteller and the self-standing rhetoric of the parodies—lies the reported dialogue, invariably ﬁltered through the sly asides of the narrator himself. The parodies can be read as choral commentaries interjected between progressive stages of the action. Likewise, the storyteller’s diction reads as the plain recitative of an Evangelist. So, too, the dialogue is strongly suggestive of the paradigms of aria and duet (rather than actual allusions to such movements). One of the storyteller’s asides, which likens the Citizen’s conversation in Irish with the dog to ‘a duet in the opera’, conﬁrms the domesticated model of music drama which informs the whole episode. When taken in conjunction with the jeering savagery of the Citizen’s anti-Semitism (in which the 55 This technical feature suggests another strong afﬁnity with oratorio, wherein choruses comment on the action without engaging directly with the protagonists, who correspondingly show no awareness of these (sometimes monumental) interjections. 56 The role and disposition of the Evangelist, soloists, and choruses in the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion afford an interesting musical precedent for Joyce’s juxtaposition of narrative, dialogue, and parody in ‘Cyclops’: in Bach, the Evangelist relates the story in comparatively ‘neutral’ recitative (except for singular moments of high feeling), but the sum of commentary and dramatic dialogue is invested in the direct speech and extra-scriptural poetry of the other participants.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

175

narrator and his companions eagerly participate), this remark also alerts us to the parallels which Joyce wishes to draw between the Wandering Jew (a classic operatic trope)57 and the aspirations of Irish nationalism: — That’s the new Messiah for Ireland! Says the citizen. Island of saints and sages! — Well, they’re still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that matter, so are we.58

It is strongly tempting to add that ‘Cyclops’ itself is the new Messiah for Ireland: not the Handel oratorio premiered in Dublin in 1742, nor the ‘roaratorio’ of Finnegans Wake,59 but an oratorio nevertheless, in which Bloom as Christ is arraigned before the Citizen as high priest of Gaelic revivalism. Notwithstanding Martin Cunningham’s shrewd aside (to say nothing of the Citizen’s Joycean formula, ‘Island of Saints and Sages’),60 the whole episode begins and ends in an anti-Semitism fortiﬁed by a corresponding nationalism that entails expulsion of the stranger both literally and ﬁguratively: we progress from ‘the little jewy getting his shirt out’61 at the opening to ‘I’ll brain that bloody jewman’ at the close through the agency of the Citizen’s blistering repudiations and the massive parodies which adorn them. That Bloom should attempt to defend himself against these assaults is bad enough (‘Mendelssohn was a jew’), but when he tries to press the point (‘the Saviour was a jew . . .’) such representations of musical and biblical culture are too great to be borne. The saints and sages of Ireland, in their Catholic-Gaelic zeal, will not endure this European outrage a moment longer. The mighty Polyphemus of Irish national and cultural identity is goaded beyond verbal violence into attempted murder. Because ‘the responsibility of forms’62 is so evident and so complete in ‘Cyclops’, especially with regard to the three modes of narrative, dialogue, 57 See Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 54–77, for a comprehensive exploration of the Wandering Jew in Joyce’s ﬁction as a ﬁgure derived expressly from Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. 58 Ulysses, 323. 59 See Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth, 1978), 41: ‘. . . with their priggish mouths all open for the larger appraisiation of this longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios . . .’ In 1979 the American composer John Cage took the title of his setting of excerpts from Finnegans Wake from this passage. 60 The title of a lecture by Joyce ﬁrst delivered in Trieste in 1907, which is adduced in contemporary criticism to justify the Citizen’s nationalist rhetoric. See in particular Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London, 1995). 61 Ulysses, 281. 62 I borrow this term from the English translation of Roland Barthes’s Lóbvie et lóbtus (1982), but not with any ascription as to its meaning. In this context, I intend the phrase to denote the relationship between event and expectation fulﬁlled by musical forms,

176

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

and parody which Joyce employs, it is less extravagant a claim than might otherwise be the case to advance ‘Cyclops’ as a modernist Messiah. This claim is supported, too, by the subject-matter (Ireland, identity, culture, Europe, the authority of myth, the subjugation of religious intolerance) in which so many striking parallels are foregrounded. In addition to Ireland and Israel (‘the new Jerusalem’), Gaelic culture and European culture, Bloom–Christ and Citizen–High Priest, and enlightened creeds of universal love versus the coming vengeance of emancipation, there is the fundamental contrast between the Citizen’s nationalism and Bloom’s plural tolerance. In a (Yeatsian) phrase: ‘Great hatred, little room.’ Or little Bloom, as Joyce might have it. Bloom is, in any case, a much-reduced ﬁgure, and even his grand apotheosis ends like a shot off a shovel. He is a pale Christ, whose ascension cannot eclipse the dropsied world, the poisonous provincialism, of the dull pub he leaves behind.63 In this scenario and its dramatic resolution, Joyce’s allegiance to the regulation of musical paradigms, his sense of the inherent responsibility of musical forms, is most clearly evinced, perhaps, in his multiple renditions of the Citizen. All three modes of discourse are engaged in this portrayal, so that the general consistency of Joyce’s alternation of storytelling, dialogue, and self-standing parody is exempliﬁed by his recourse to these techniques in relation to the Citizen himself. It is without doubt the tonal consistency of these techniques which afﬁrms the reliance upon (or absorption of ) musical paradigms. The experience of reading ‘Cyclops’ can include the experience of these formal categories, simply because they are there. The resolution of Joyce’s prose under these categories does not in itself attest the presence of musical paradigms, but such a resolution, when combined with some scrutiny of the categories themselves, does attest a level of formal control which is strongly suggestive of those paradigms of musical drama (recitative, aria-duet, and chorus) which underlie, in this reading, the narrative, dialogue, and parody techniques I have already identiﬁed.64 Each of the parodic sections, as when in sonata-allegro form (for example) expectations (in the listener) of thematic exposition, development, and recapitulation are either satisﬁed or deliberately subverted by the composer. In ‘Cyclops’, Joyce very notably adheres to the formal expectations which his narrative-parody-dialogue establish at the outset. 63 Just before he is roused to action, the storyteller reports that he ‘saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door, pufﬁng and blowing with the dropsy’ (Ulysses, 327). 64 In this connection, the tonal consistency in ‘Cyclops’ is afﬁrmed by consistency of style, and stylistic consistency is afﬁrmed by function. On these grounds alone, a rudimentary resolution into chorus, recitative, and aria-duet of Joyce’s prose throughout this episode is possible (and underlies the analysis offered here).

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

177

for example, relates to the others because it remains tonally aloof from the colloquial chatter of the narrator even as it comments, directly or otherwise, on the material which he has introduced into the text. (In this latter regard the designation ‘chorus’ is especially apt.) We recognize the parodic diction at once; we recognize the pervasive litanies and sonorous sequences; we can hear, as it were, the change of tonality from one mode to the next, however abrupt the transition. When the Citizen and Bloom argue about sport (the Citizen extolling the manly merit of Gaelic games and scorning Bloom’s meek recommendations in favour of tennis), Joyce allows us to hear the dispute only through the agency of the narrator’s account, and then swiftly modulates to a full-scale chorus which recasts the same material as a priceless piece of Gaelic League propaganda. The Citizen, now signiﬁcantly transformed into ‘The Irish Caruso-Garibaldi’, sings ‘A Nation Once Again’. At second hand, but with unmistakable (comic) force, the ‘superb high-class vocalism’ of this rendition, with its Young Ireland hostility to European music borne aloft by the gushing reportage, apostrophizes the complex chauvinism of the nationalist who broods over his pint at the bar.65 One such adjacency (as between pedestrian gossip and extravagant set pieces which frequently exhaust their own motivic potential)66 would not be enough to identify Joyce’s structural dependence on such strong tonal contrasts, but a proliferation of them removes any real doubt about the matter. The contrasts colour the story, they regulate the drama of expulsion, and they register the poetry of disaffection with which it is imbued. The distinction between narrative, dialogue, and parody, when related to an underlying distinction between recitative, aria, and chorus, gains in perspective not as a literal mapping of musical forms onto prose, but as a reliance upon them. Throughout the episode, the Citizen’s tonal register is largely conﬁned to an explosive recitative: (‘Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no more 65 This rendition afﬁrms the bel canto-ballad modulation of ‘Sirens’; and the conjunction ‘Caruso–Garibaldi’ apostrophizes the same process (from Great Tenor to Great Nationalist). Thomas Davis was notably hostile to European art music. For a discussion of Davis’s writings on music, some of which adumbrate Hyde’s insistence on cultural purity and the dangers of adulteration, see Harry White, ‘ “Paltry, scented things from Italy”: Ireland the Discourse of Nationalism in 19th-Century European Musical Culture’, Musica e Storia, 12: 3 (Venice, 2005), 649–62. 66 The Gaelic League parody discussed here closes with a catalogue of priests which ostensibly belongs to the reportage of the evening, but which in its pedantic fetishism (clerical modes of address, pre- and post-nominal letters) and in the emphatically indigenous music of its Irish surnames, attains its own ceremonious indulgence.

178

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

strangers in our house’, is a fair example of this),67 but on ﬁve occasions Joyce allows him to articulate his malevolence at a rhetorical pitch which begins to rival the verbal excess (and sometimes the grandiloquence) of the choral movements.68 The ﬁrst of these is an impassioned attack on English culture: — Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of bastards’ ghosts. — The European family says J.J. . . . — They’re not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin Egan of Paris. You wouldn’t see a trace of them or their language anywhere in Europe except in a cabinet d’aisance.69

An article published in The Nation newspaper in 1896 on the exclusion of English music and orchestral musicians from the newly formed Irish Feis Ceoil (music festival) provides a characteristic backdrop to the sentiments expressed here: we therefore welcome and applaud the decision of the Feis Executive, and we rejoice that it is destined to be made clear that we possess amongst the treasures of our nation a wealth of melody, both rare and beautiful, and within limits of our shores musicians and vocalists cultured and dowered with all the gifts which make the glory of the art they love . . . if, in too many cases, we have to allow the Saxon to make our boots, he shall never make our music.70

This is what the Citizen would sound like were he an ‘Irish Ireland’ music journalist (in some cases, even today), but the connection between this kind of express musical chauvinism and the Citizen’s repudiation of England (which rapidly extends to Europe in general and to France and Germany in particular) is especially relevant to the structural afﬁnities between music and literature which this episode promotes: when the Citizen speaks of England, his ﬁrst remarks are prefaced by a choral parody which ends as follows: ‘whereby they might, if so be it might 67

Ulysses, 310. See ibid. 311 (‘Their syphilisation, you mean . . .’); 312–13 (‘Where are our missing twenty millions . . .’); 314 (‘Our harbours that are empty . . .’); 316(‘We’ll put force against force . . .’); 319 (‘We know those canters . . .’). After the last (and briefest) of them, the Citizen takes over the role of chorus himself, by reading a ‘skit in the United Irishman by that Zulu chief that’s visiting Ireland’ (320). 69 Ibid. 311. 70 From an article entitled ‘The Irish Feis’, published in the Nation, 20 June 1896. 68

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

179

be, bring once more into honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadvided Gael.’ After which the Citizen comments: ‘It’s on the march . . . To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois.’71 The contrast between the ‘winged speech of the seadivided Gael’, expressed here as an idea of the Irish language versed in fulsome English, and the brutal impatience of the Citizen’s diction, is, at ﬁrst issue, a contrast between one verbal music and another. It is indeed possible to describe this contrast as one between solemn chorus and urgent recitative, and to discern likewise in the Citizen’s second extended speech the properties of ‘solo and silence’ which we attach to an aria, especially when his rhetoric stimulates in Joyce the virtuoso enjoyment of the catalogue which we ﬁnd in so many of the choral parodies: Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the ﬁnest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our ﬂax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white ﬂint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world!72

It is difﬁcult to imagine a greater contrast between the snarling bigot who ‘clears the spit out of his gullet’ in response to Bloom’s assertion of belonging, and the prince of luxurious lamentations who speaks here. No model of narrative realism could support such a difference, but the models of musical structure which I have identiﬁed are wholly consonant with these decisive tonal shifts. It might begin to seem that Joyce moves his prose to the very border of musical utterance. When the Citizen’s second speech (discussed here) closes with the impassioned appeal to ‘Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O’, the invitation to song is at its keenest. A brief interjection from Lenehan (‘Europe has its eyes on you’) does not eclipse the answering chorus with its magisterially comic inventory of trees.73 Nor does this prevent the Citizen’s conversational retort (‘And we have our eyes on Europe’), which little recitative urges him again into the full ﬂourish of another set piece that also begins with an explicit invitation to oratory and song: ‘Our harbours that are empty will be full again . . .’ The narrator’s response to these roulades is to draw a ﬁrm line under them, 71

Ulysses, 311.

72

Ibid. 312.

73

Ibid. 313–14.

180

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

to sound again the colloquial tonality of pub talk: ‘all wind and piss like a tanyard cat’, and the drama is resumed.74 So much of the verbal music in ‘Cyclops’ is devoted to the (mis)representation of Gaelic culture that the sheer extravagance of the language tends to conceal the formal paradigms by which it is so carefully regulated. Joyce remains answerable to the story, to the reader, to the reassurances of embedded conventions and formal responsibilities which he enlists, so that the comparatively simple story (Bloom chased out of a pub) and its sonorous elaboration (the new Messiah ascends into heaven) are connected to each other by means of these three musical paradigms. Choral elaborations (especially litanies), solo set pieces, and dramatic recitative are never again so tightly deployed together in Ulysses, however prominently they may feature independently, because no subsequent episode so cogently engages with the morphology of musical drama as ‘Cyclops’ does.75 In so many respects, musical and otherwise, ‘Cyclops’ stands alone.

4 . . . we are inevitably bewildered by a book—Finnegans Wake— in which Joyce chooses not to exert the authority he exerted in Ulysses, disowns the ﬁnality of a single voice, dissolves the demarcations between one thing and another, and goes as far as possible to undermine the imperium of the language—English, it is worth saying—in which the book is, however deviantly, written. (Denis Donoghue)76 The near-continuous presence of the Ring in Joyce’s ‘great myth of everyday life’ and the near-perfect consonance of the Wagnerian theme of sin and redemption in Joyce’s mythic score suggest that 74

Ulysses, 314. The descriptions in ‘Circe’ are literal, rather than ceremonious, as they are here. They do not have the performative function of the litanies in ‘Cyclops’. In ‘Circe’, moreover, Joyce begins with a neutral narrative voice and continues with the direct speech of an explicitly nominated dramatis personae, both of which eclipse the tonal and structural consistency of the narrative, dialogue, and parodic movements of ‘Cyclops’. For this reason alone, it is difﬁcult (and undesirable) to read the varieties of discourse in ‘Circe’ in relation to explicitly oratorical or operatic paradigms. 76 ‘Bakhtin and Finnegans Wake’, in We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 120–38, at 129. 75

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

181

Finnegans Wake was shaped from its inception, both structurally and conceptually, by Joyce’s lifelong experience of Wagner and the Ring. (Timothy Martin)77

We cannot really argue that in Finnegans Wake the imperium of language is undermined by the imperium of music unless we attend to Joyce’s recourse to the agency of musical forms in his earlier ﬁction. The progression which Joyce achieves from a literature adulterated by music to a ﬁction wholly engaged by its own verbal music, but nevertheless made intelligible by operatic and oratorical paradigms, is one which does not extend to Finnegans Wake. We can read ‘Cyclops’ as the grand Irish oratorio it really is partly because Joyce’s dependencies on that genre conﬁrm ‘the ﬁnality of a single voice’, which in that instance is the voice of the storyteller. We can also read ‘Cyclops’ as an Irish dramma per musica because it ﬁlls the void created by the cultural history of music in Ireland: it speaks where opera might otherwise sing. It does not seem possible to make a similar argument about Finnegans Wake, because in that book Joyce’s generic strategies have disappeared. Without the imperium of musical forms, the distinction between music and language is lost. A harmony which is indifferent to this distinction takes its place.78 It is a harmony whose grammar we cannot learn, because it does not exist beyond its application in Joyce’s novel. It is also a harmony which encourages us to read literature as music and music as literature. In this advocation, Finnegans Wake decisively eclipses Joyce’s own assent to the referential condition of literary discourse in Ulysses, in which, as Karen Lawrence remarks, ‘the text as a verbal composition supersedes the text as an imitation of musical composition’.79 As Martin has put it: ‘We might say that whereas Ulysses borrows from music, Finnegans Wake aspires to be music.’80 77

Joyce and Wagner, 115. Deane, ‘Dead Ends’, 34, writes of the closing sections of Joyce’s ﬁction from ‘The Dead’ onwards as ‘ﬁnales’ in which Joyce ‘surrenders critique for aesthetics, and in doing so, becomes a characteristically modernist writer’. This musical usage nevertheless can be reﬁned to suggest in turn that, in Finnegans Wake, the formal connotations of a ‘ﬁnale’, as with any other musical form, no longer apply. The order and meaning which musical forms guarantee disappear in favour of ‘a harmony of indifference, one in which everything is a version of something else’, as Deane puts it in Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea (1984), cited by Denis Donoghue, ‘Is There a Case Against Ulysses?’, in Vincent Cheng and Timothy Martin (eds.), Joyce in Context (Cambridge, 1992), 19–41, at 37. 79 Cited in Herman, ‘ “Sirens” after Schönberg’, 474. 80 Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 162. 78

182

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

It has been argued that the disintegration of this contract between reader and writer originates in ‘Sirens’, where, as Colin McCabe puts it, ‘the reader can no longer pass through signiﬁer to signiﬁed, can no longer bathe in the imaginary unity of a full self ’.81 These obstructions, as I have tried to suggest here, are obviated by the restoration of such traditional comforts in ‘Cyclops’, but there can be little dispute about their absence from Finnegans Wake. Even if we read ‘Sirens’ as an exemplar of musical modernism controlled by ‘the creation of unique compositional forms for speciﬁc compositions’ in relation to Arnold Schoenberg,82 we will sooner or later encounter the contradiction between Schoenberg’s insistence on an organic grammar of musical modernism (his method of composition with twelve tones) and the absence of such universalising principles in the grammar of Finnegans Wake. To put the problem differently: where langue and parole are exactly coterminous, it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. This problem alone makes the reception of Finnegans Wake extremely complex. The book itself stands as a deﬁnitive exemplar of modernism which rivals Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (1932) in its supreme interrogation of music and language as modes of expression.83 Schoenberg’s opera has the same implacable condition as Joyce’s novel: both are somehow unanswerable, to judge by their general reception (more or less puzzled neglect), and also by the direction taken by Anton Webern and Samuel Beckett as either one loosened the bonds of intimate discipleship which tied them to Schoenberg and Joyce respectively. In either case, the heroic modernism of the master does not materially inhere in the work of the disciple, a factor which can help us to achieve some perspective on Beckett’s recourse to music in relation to Joyce.84 In the present context, however, Joyce’s ﬁnal engagement with music summons not Schoenberg but Wagner. 81

Cited in Herman, ‘ “Sirens”, after Schönberg’, 474. Ibid. 484. Although I am sympathetic to the general thrust of Herman’s reading of Joyce in relation to musical modernism, the particular case of Schoenberg’s compositional technique tends to argue against it. Schoenberg’s atonal compositions would certainly support the notion of ‘unique compositional forms for speciﬁc compositions’, but only if ‘forms’ are taken to mean ‘harmonic voice leading’ or vocabulary. And in the evolution of twelve-tone music, Schoenberg’s drive towards a general and organic principle of musical organization in his compositions is paramount, even if he continues to rely on notably conservative generic designations of his work. 83 For a classic introduction to this work and its preoccupation with the betrayals of language and music in respect of meaning, see George Steiner, ‘Moses and Aron’ (1965), in George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondsworth, 1984), 234–45. 84 I discuss this point further in the following chapter. 82

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

183

Timothy Martin’s scrutiny of Finnegans Wake in relation to Wagner establishes not only that Joyce’s novel is underpinned by the structure of The Ring,85 but that Joyce’s reliance on Wagner dramatically increases in Finnegans Wake to the extent that actual allusions to Wagner’s operas and music dramas in Joyce’s earlier works are so comparatively fewer as to seem incidental. Martin, for example, ﬁnds ﬁve references to Tristan und Isolde in Ulysses, but 242 in Finnegans Wake. He likewise registers seventeen references to The Ring in Ulysses and 178 in Finnegans Wake. He ﬁnds no Wagnerian allusions whatever in Dubliners, and only the bird-call from Siegfried in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.86 This radical imbalance in favour of Finnegans Wake begs the question as to why Joyce should imbue his nightworld with Wagner to such an extent that the book itself can scarcely be read without a corresponding awareness of Tristan and The Ring in particular. As Martin himself modestly puts it in the wake (a predestined pun) of his own research: ‘Wagner’s Ring deserves a place among the “structural books” at Finnegans Wake.’ More recent musical excavations which extend Joyce’s range of operatic allusions still further afﬁrm the same point.87 Although structural parallels between Wagner and Joyce loom much larger than actual references and allusions in Joyce’s work before Finnegans Wake (Martin makes a brilliant and exactly referenced case for The Flying Dutchman as the exemplary artwork that beckons Exiles and Ulysses into existence), the presence of so many allusions to Tristan and The Ring remains acutely problematic, even if these conﬁrm Martin’s authoritative reading of Richard Wagner as ‘Joyce’s German predecessor’.88 At the close of The Ring the gold is returned to the Rhine. At the close of Finnegans Wake Joyce’s ﬁction ﬂows back into the riverrun of the Liffey. Two great rivers recover the prelapsarian innocence of a world without power, and indeed without art. Agreed (I think): the synthetic condition of Joyce’s prose in Finnegans Wake leaves his other work far 85 See Martin, Joyce and Wagner, passim, but especially ch. 3, ‘The Comic Rhythm’ (112–41), in which Martin traces with immense care the structural, referential, and dramatic dependencies on The Ring which Finnegans Wake attests. 86 Ibid., ‘Allusions to Wagner in Joyce’s Work’, 185–221. Martin countenances the risk of making ‘false identiﬁcations’, but argues persuasively for ‘a more unrestrained search than would be conducted in a less obscure and less highly wrought text [than Finnegans Wake]’ (185). 87 See ibid. 115. Hodgart and Bauerle, Joyce’s Grand Operaroar, takes this excavatory task to its most extreme to date: the identiﬁcation of some 3,000 references to opera in Finnegans Wake conﬁrms the importance of The Ring in this regard. 88 Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 180. For Martin’s reading of The Flying Dutchman in relation to Joyce, see 54–77.

184

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

behind, stranded on the shores, as it were, of narrative and syntactic intelligibility. Proven (I know): the verbal recourse to Wagner as a speciﬁc mode of reference in Finnegans Wake far exceeds such recourse in the earlier works. Proven also: the interior monologues of Joyce’s ﬁction, beginning with Dubliners, are not only beholden to Wagner’s unendliche Melodie (through the agency of French literary modernism in general and Édouard Dujardin in particular), but maintain allegiance to a narrative responsibility in Ulysses (unless they are rescinded, as they are in ‘Cyclops’) which does not obtain in Finnegans Wake.89 Agreed, ﬁnally (I hope): that no matter how intimately Joyce draws upon his ‘German predecessor’, Stephen Dedalus is not Siegfried, and Finnegans Wake is not The Ring. Nor is Finnegans Wake, in Bakhtin’s famous description of Dostoevsky’s ﬁction, ‘a polyphonic novel’. Bakhtin requires of the author of such a work that ‘he must to an extraordinary extent broaden, deepen and rearrange [his] consciousness in order to accommodate the consciousness of others’.90 This sounds as if it is a formula that could be applied to Finnegans Wake, but it is far better suited to Ulysses. So too is the designation ‘polyphonic novel’, because in Ulysses the polyphony is obedient to the deep grammar of forms (many of them musical), and to the closely regulated paradigm of the Greek story to which it gives new utterance. Finnegans Wake, by contrast, is a heterophonic novel, because, as the term ‘heterophony’ implies, the multiplicity of voices is never suborned to the authority of a single voice. We cannot doubt that it is Molly who speaks in the ﬁnal episode of Ulysses, but who is it who speaks ‘In the name of Annah the Allmaziful . . . her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven’?91 And of whom does he speak? Allah? Anna Livia? To decode is not to understand, at least not in the immediate and local sense that ﬁction ordinarily requires, even if we can extract general principles, as it were, from Joyce’s statutory reliance on the aural recognition which his halfpuns systematically induce: ‘unhemmed as it is uneven’ will become ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, and ‘ﬁendish park’ will become Phoenix Park, and ‘faulters-in-law’ will become fathers-in-law, and so on. The music, 89 Martin ( Joyce and Wagner, 155) points out that in Dujardin, as in Joyce, the technique of interior monologue is structurally fortiﬁed by recourse to verbal motifs that have a similar function to that of Wagner’s leitmotifs. He adds that Joyce’s later works ‘show . . . the most thoroughly Wagnerian . . . use of the literary leitmotif in the device’s history’. 90 Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in Donoghue, ‘Bakhtin and Finnegans Wake’, in We Irish, 125. 91 Finnegans Wake, 104.

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

185

the melodic and rhythmic cadence of each phrase, deliberately points to its original form. But this is one signiﬁer pointing to another. If we had the patience for it, we could conceivably imagine an order of meaning between Joyce’s heteroglossia and the original signiﬁers (including 3,000 operatic tags in Finnegans Wake alone).92 If we confront ourselves with the immense archaeology of Wagnerian allusion which Finnegans Wake discloses to scholarship, what then? It is the imperium of sound rather than the imperium of music which subverts in Finnegans Wake. Narrative contracts in Joyce’s earlier work are decisively fulﬁlled, not in spite of music, but by means of it. In his allegiance to the imperium of sound, however, Joyce approaches, albeit by a radically different route, the word–music synthesis of Yeats’s aesthetic. This approach explains not only the abandonment of explicit musical forms in Finnegans Wake, but also the principled, practised reliance on sound which Joyce employs to relate ‘ﬁendish park’ to its original. Such a practice is initiated in Ulysses, but not elevated to the status of a self-standing language. ‘Cyclops’ stands aloof from this practice, even as it borrows freely from the regulating intelligibilities of musical form its advancement of an equally transparent relationship between narrative and technique. ‘Sirens’ is closer to Joyce’s synthetic approach to language in Finnegans Wake, except that its agencies of aria and ballad, its thematic alignments between musical motif and the narrative clarity of Bloom’s consciousness (‘Jingle’), tie it ﬁrmly to the local and general meanings which Joyce constructs throughout the novel. But when sound and sense are of equal account, when, in Beckett’s famous declaration, ‘the writing is not about something. It is that thing itself ’,93 Joyce’s assent to the imperium of sound, and to the new music which Finnegans Wake thereby achieves, voids the contract of intelligibility to which he still assents in Ulysses. In that eclipse, we pass into the nightworld of Joyce’s speechmusic, even if we can still glimpse Ireland there. If opera meant more to Joyce than any other art, this was perhaps because it represented to his imagination that synthesis of music and 92 ‘Heteroglossia’ is (an obvious) Bakhtian borrowing here, but I am also thinking of Julia Kristeva’s approach to Finnegans Wake, in which she identiﬁes not only ‘the intertwining of music and letters’, but also ‘the toppling over of meaning’s inﬁnity into a nothingness of meaning’. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Joyce “The Gracehoper” or the Return of Orpheus’, in Bernard Benstock (ed.), James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Proceedings of the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium. Frankfurt 1984 (New York, 1988), 167–80, at 167. 93 Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factiﬁcation for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), cited in Martin, Joyce and Wagner, 164.

186

The ‘Thought-Tormented Music’ of Joyce

speech which he sought and found in his own ﬁction. However extreme the condition of this synthesis in Finnegans Wake, it is difﬁcult not to conclude that Joyce discovered afresh the fundamental premise of opera—that music gives dramatic life to language—through the agency of a soundworld he himself had to invent. The long voyage out from musical allusion, when ‘something like singing was still to be heard in Dublin’ (‘The Dead’) to the imitation and integration of operatic techniques in ‘Sirens’ and ‘Cyclops’ respectively, to the synthesis of music and language in the Wake, was a journey he completed alone. En route, he might have recognized his operatic preoccupations, however differently expressed, in Synge and Shaw, to say nothing of those strong connections which bind Joyce to Yeats through the agency of Wagner’s literary afterlife in European modernism. We might in turn conclude that Joyce responded to Ireland through the agency of music (and not only the music of his ‘German predecessor’), just as Yeats responded through the agency of Gaelic mythology and bardic culture. We might also attend to the modernism of Finnegans Wake as an autonomy of diction which Joyce’s most brilliant disciple refused. In that refusal the presence of music nevertheless survived.

6 Words after Music: Samuel Beckett after Joyce

At ﬁrst it can only be a matter of somehow ﬁnding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that ﬁnal music or that silence that underlies All. (Samuel Beckett in 1937)1 Schoenberg is dead. (Pierre Boulez in 1952)2

1 The proposition that in the Irish literary imagination words are ‘words for music’ is radically reformulated in the theatre of Samuel Beckett. Although he rivals Shaw in the magnitude of his inﬂuence on English drama in particular (so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Caretaker, for example, both strikingly reconﬁgure Waiting for Godot (1955) ),3 and, although like Shaw he determines upon a stringent 1 From a letter (in German) to Axel Kaun, dated 9 July 1937. The translation cited here is taken from Seamus Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry, 1991), iii. 258–9. 2 The title of an article by the composer Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), published less than a year after the death of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). 3 I have given the date of ﬁrst performance in English for Godot and all successive works.

188

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

originality of dramatic voice in the aftermath of his own ﬁction, Beckett does not stop there. In a phrase, he goes on. In the winter’s journey upon which he embarks after Endgame (1958) and Happy Days (1961), he takes music with him. The problem is that this itinerary has been eclipsed by Beckett’s own reception history, if not in the aftermath of critical commentary (where the later plays enjoy the scrutiny one would expect), then in the theatre itself. The trace of Godot is plainly visible (and audible) in the early Stoppard and in Pinter, but the later plays ﬁnd no obvious after-echo in contemporary drama without the suggestion of parody. As I have already argued in the Introduction to this book, Not I (1972) drives the speaking subject to the edge of reason, whereas contemporary Irish drama leads elsewhere.4 In Beckett, too, the trauma and terror of Not I are redeemed by the lulling compassion of its companion piece, Rockaby (1981), and the consolations of reprise which Beckett introduces into that play provide some measure of peace at the close of a long day. The nocturnal mantras of Rockaby (interrupted only once by an obscenity which conﬁrms the otherwise soothing verbal sequences of which it is composed) and the frenzied (but no less systematic) utterances of Not I are in obverse relation to each other.5 In either case, the tonality of dramatic discourse is subverted by Beckett’s habitual reliance on the notion of series.6 To suggest that this reliance, this evolution of a dramatic disposition towards

4 The inﬂuence of Beckett in this regard seems to me to endure in Pinter’s later plays (so that works such as Mountain Language and One for the Road carry forward the preoccupations of a late Beckett play such as What Where (1983) ); in Stoppard, by contrast, later plays such as Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia leave the formalism of Beckett decisively behind. For all its imaginative brilliance, Stoppard’s theatre sustains a contract of intelligibility between word and world (even when it is the world of a Shakespeare play seen from an unexpected perspective) that dispenses with that fundamental ambiguity upon which modernism in general, and Beckett in particular, insist. 5 I have explored the thematic and structural afﬁnities between these two plays in ‘ “Something is taking its Course”: Dramatic Exactitude and the Paradigm of Serialism in Samuel Beckett’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), 159–71; see esp. 169–70. 6 Thus the fourfold (but strictly limited) sequence of physical gestures, the severe tableau in which the human person is reduced to a speaking mouth, and the systematic repetitions (many of them enlisted in the vehement denial of the ﬁrst-person pronoun) of Not I ﬁnd a close correspondence in the sequence of visual, physical, and verbal elements disclosed in Rockaby, including a fourfold division of the text which structurally mirrors the divisions of the earlier play. In either case, a discrete series of such elements contains the hysteria of one and the paciﬁc resignation of the other, even to the point where the central motif of Not I (‘what? . . . who? no! she! SHE!’) is revisited and acknowledged in Rockaby (‘to herself | whom else’).

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

189

language in the theatre, proﬁts from a wider engagement with musical modernism in general and with serialism in particular still seems to me a persuasive likening, if only because Beckett’s later plays constantly draw attention to the idea of a limited series of language, posture, movement, lighting, and sound. In short, they engage with a notion of exactitude which similarly governs pitch, duration, rhythm, and timbre in the domain of total (musical) serialism.7 They summon Theodore Adorno’s pithy characterization of the late works of Anton Webern (1883–1945), in which ‘the musical subject grows silent and abdicates’.8 Even if we were to concede nothing of this comparison between Webern and Beckett in relation to Webern’s teacher Arnold Schoenberg and Beckett’s master James Joyce, Adorno’s identiﬁcation of silence and abdication would satisfy the most hermetic reading of Beckett’s late plays. It is a formula, moreover, which echoes Beckett’s own diagnosis of the writer’s task made in the 1937 letter cited above. Two features of this diagnosis seem especially relevant in the present context: one is that Beckett situates his own enterprise as a writer in relation to music, and the other is that he distinguishes between this enterprise and the achievement of Joyce: is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? . . . Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages one can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested . . . With such a programme in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do. There it seems rather to be a matter of an apotheosis of the word.9

When taken in apposition with a reading of Beethoven that is notably modernist in its narrative identiﬁcation of sound and silence, this repudiation of Joyce’s ‘apotheosis of the word’ deﬁnes the writer’s task as one instructed by the precedent of musical discourse. Beckett can 7 The identiﬁcation of this afﬁnity, as between the serial technique of Anton Webern and the sequential technique of Beckett’s later plays, is the principal business of my ‘ “Something is Taking its Course’ ”. 8 Cited in Kathryn Bailey, ‘Webern, Anton (Friedrich Wilhelm von)’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. edn. (London, 2001), xxvii. 178–95, at 189. 9 Beckett, ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’ (n. 1 above), 258.

190

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

perceive in Beethoven an abyss of silence which is eclipsed by the clamour of Finnegans Wake. He calls this clamour ‘the terrible materiality of the word surface’, and in the same letter he proposes that ‘to bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through’, is the highest goal he can envisage for himself as a writer.10 Beethoven and Joyce: the aspiration towards one and the separation from the other in this letter would not count for much were it not for the trajectory of Beckett’s own work, in which the sound of language and the experience to which it refers attain an unrivalled intimacy, other than in music itself. Beethoven and Beckett: we could do worse than to acknowledge the customary division into three periods which attaches to the critical reception of them both as one which signiﬁes in either case a retreat from the established genres of public musical and literary discourse (the symphony, the novel, the stage play) into the chamber music of private deliberation (the string quartet, the fragment for radio).11 In Beckett’s case, this retreat is accompanied by a striking reliance on musical paradigms which is sometimes indicated in the titles of his late plays. Some of these echo Beethoven and Schubert (as in Ghost Trio (1977) and Nacht und Träume (1983) ); others, more allusively, refer to domestic, essentially private genres of instrumental and vocal music: Ohio Impromptu (1981), Words and Music (1962), Act without Words I and II (1957; 1960).12 In all such instances, the prevailing mode is strictly provisional, rigorously organized, and self-contained.13 No later than Krapp’s 10 Beckett, ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’. Even if Beckett appeared later in his career to repudiate any sense of overt purposefulness as a writer, this struggle against the materiality of the word, when taken together with his abiding sense of musical form as an intelligencer of experience, continued to deﬁne his work in the theatre and related media. 11 The works of Beethoven’s late period are conventionally dated from 1816 until his death in 1827: these compositions (many of them are chamber works for strings and/or piano) are characterized by a degree of introspection, formal concentration, and generic experiment which is in striking contrast to the explicit ‘heroism’ of the composer’s middle period (1807–16), with its notable reliance on public musical genres (pre-eminently the symphony). 12 Ghost Trio takes its title from Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D major, op. 70, no. 1 (1808), and Nacht und Träume from Schubert’s B-major setting of a poem by Matthäus von Collin for voice and piano, D. 827, written in the mid-1820s. Beckett includes excerpts from each work in each respective play. The phrase ‘act without with words’ is strongly suggestive of the Mendelssohnian sub-genre ‘song without words’; the term ‘impromptu’ is likewise a characteristic mid-nineteenth-century generic description of a work for piano. 13 Act without Words I offers a convenient example of how this mode is realized: although few of the plays dispense with language completely, this piece countenances a theatre deprived of the sovereignty of language in its very title. The sequence of visual,

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

191

Last Tape (1958), Beckett abandons the comparatively stable narratives of his middle-period ﬁction and drama in favour of this retreat. In the late plays, something new is taking its course, even if it is the middle-period work which, from the outset, has enjoyed greater attention.14 But it is the later plays which beckon most strongly in the direction of music.

2 I wouldn’t suggest that G.B.S. is not a great playwright, whatever that is when it’s at home. What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s Well, or the Saints’, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further. (Beckett in 1956)15

However conspicuous are the signatures of Beckett’s dramatic art, explicit Irishness is not usually one of them. In this respect he resembles Wilde and Shaw (with the sovereign exception of John Bull’s Other Island), but this does not mean that those shards of Irishness which glint and gleam in the fabric of his plays are insigniﬁcant.16 His ﬁrst radio play, All That Fall (1957), is unique in its expressly Irish setting (the village gestural, and musical elements which comprise it constitutes a metalanguage whose terms are strictly limited: a man is ﬂung upon the stage in dazzling light, and everything that happens, everything that is seen and heard, is derived from this opening move. When the man attempts to quit the stage, to break out, as it were, from the sequence of elements to which he belongs, he is ﬂung back on. The symbolic address of this sequence is allowably independent of its composition, but the pattern itself depends on recurring elements (a blown whistle, a tree, scissors, a carafe, cubes, a rope) which are heard or which appear in one sequence and are then withdrawn in reverse order. Whatever sense of play may arise in Act without Words I is coterminous with these manifestations of the sequence or series. In this respect, the exemplar of musical serialism is notably apposite. See ‘ “Something is taking its Course” ’, 166–7, from which these remarks are adapted. 14 It is striking that Beckett’s biographer could remark in 1996 that the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, together with Godot, ‘are almost certainly the most enduring works that Beckett wrote’. Such works deﬁne the achievement of Beckett’s middle period. See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), 371. 15 Published in the Shaw Centenary programme, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, and cited in Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London, 1978), 242. 16 Knowlson reports that in Happy Days (1961) Winnie’s rendition of the Merry Widow waltz at the end of the play took the place of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’. Beckett’s change of mind, which Knowlson describes as ‘more poignant, less geographically speciﬁc’, typiﬁes his tendency to avoid explicitly Irish references in the plays which come after All That Fall (1957). See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 485.

192

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

of Foxrock, near Dublin), and still more in its pervasively Irish diction, but such resources are universalized in the context of Beckett’s return from the French of En attendant Godot and Fin de Partie to the barren terrain of Mr and Mrs Rooney in All That Fall: both of them seem to be ‘struggling with a dead language’ (‘Well, you know,’ Mrs Rooney adds, ‘it will be dead in time, just like our own poor dear Gaelic, there is that to be said’), which is a difﬁculty that apostrophizes Beckett’s own predicament as a dramatist from start to ﬁnish.17 At the very outset, Beckett directs that we should hear Schubert, but the ‘music dies’. In its place are the dislocated interrogations of Mrs Rooney and her self-confessed ‘bizarre’ way of speaking. She will drag the dead weight of language after her, impeded at every turn by that ‘terrible materiality of the word surface’ in which her suffering is so memorably inscribed. When the Schubert returns, it is to signal disclosure, a dramatic resolution of torment, an apology for the unremitting cruelty of the story itself. There is even a tantalizing suggestion in this return that the local conditions of the tale are universalized (or at least Europeanized) in the Schubert string quartet (‘Death and the Maiden’) which Beckett introduces into his text.18 Between French and English, Music and Language, Ireland and Europe, Beckett’s dramatic imagination surveys the abyss as a universal condition. One indication of this is the gradual disappearance of speciﬁc locations from his plays after All That Fall, a feature that tends to throw individual references, including musical allusions, into sharper relief. In the bleak landscape of the late plays (‘always winter then endless winter’)19 the smallest fragment of tangible reality, musical or otherwise, attains pronounced signiﬁcance. The more hermetic and restricted the series of ‘elements’, the more prominent (and therefore signiﬁcant) the admission of a stable signiﬁer.20 In such cases, the signiﬁed perhaps 17 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1990), 169–99, at 194. All subsequent references to Beckett’s plays are to this edition. 18 Mr Rooney identiﬁes the piece (with indistinctness typical of his creator) late in the play, but in any case we are not told which movement is heard. Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, D. 810, is in four movements, the second of which is a set of variations on his song ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (‘Death and the Maiden’). The quartet dates from 1824. It enters the Beckett’s play not as an extraneous indication of mood (nor for that matter as a portent of the play’s own preoccupation with the death of children), but as an element of the story: Mrs Rooney can hear the music as she passes the house in which a ‘poor old woman, always alone’ lives. On the way back from the railway station Mr and Mrs Rooney pass the house and hear the music again. 19 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (That Time, 1976), 392. 20 Beckett uses this term to describe the materials of which his play Nacht und Träume is comprised, but it could reasonably be applied to many of the dramatic works that follow Krapp’s Last Tape.

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

193

belongs to those moments of reprieve, those ‘whispers’ behind language which (for Beckett) make the effort to speak worthwhile. Such moments—fragments of Schubert, shards of Beethoven—do not in themselves attest Beckett’s principal reliance on music in the late plays. Beckett’s turn away from the ‘apotheosis of the word’ in Joyce, his general dislike of opera, and his marked distance from the rational certainties of Bernard Shaw should alert us to a wider disengagement from the generic stabilities of language and music which his later works afﬁrm. That such disengagement is fundamental to late modernism in general is self-evident, but the extent to which Beckett’s anti-romanticism is expressive of musical paradigms in his late work is another matter. The dead weight of language is not the only oppressor, to judge by the severe reductionism of the late plays, in which intensely concentrated sequences exclude the romantic possibility of development, even as they enlist the structural paradigms of music. In Beckett’s late plays, ‘the Irish drama of Europe’ has become an Irish drama of European modernism, as decisively removed from Maeterlinck and Wagner as it is from Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey. This is not to dispute the clear lines out from Beckett back to his Irish forbears, but to give due emphasis to Beckett’s own apprehension of music which the later plays materialize.21 The dissonance between the signiﬁer and the signiﬁed is the principal expression of anxiety in Beckett (its harsh melody sounds throughout The Unnamable (1959) in speciﬁc response to the two novels that immediately precede it, and it can be heard no less clearly in Not I ), but this maddening distress is nevertheless redeemed, quieted, made bearable through the agency and system of formal control. The dissonance itself is emancipated, or more properly domesticated, by this means. Even as the dramatic subject ‘grows silent and abdicates’, a radically musical degree of invention takes its place. This invention has nothing to do with Beethoven and Schubert. However compelling (at least to me) the precedent of Beethoven’s approach to genre in relation to Beckett’s evolution of dramatic discourse may be, the presence of such composers in Beckett’s late work is of far less structural account than is the dismantling of the subject in favour of the system. This new ascendancy summons the precedent of 21 Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe, 242 ff., has clearly established how closely Yeats and Synge anticipate Beckett’s interiority as a dramatist (particularly in relation to The Well of the Saints and At the Hawk’s Well). Worth also identiﬁes strong afﬁnities between Maeterlinck and Beckett which have been subsequently explored in greater detail by Patrick McGuinness in Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2000).

194

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), and not the First (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven).22 This does not mean that the sound-world of Viennese classicism is insigniﬁcant to Beckett, but it does mean that the quotation of a Schubert song, or more strikingly still the direct allusion to a whole song-cycle in the late plays, is radically inﬂected by the context in which it occurs. The harrowing adieu which Beckett makes to Schubert at the close of What Where (‘It is winter. | Without journey.’) is an apostrophe of that chilly domain of formal sequences which Beckett creates in his late work, in which the utterance, and indeed the exchange of utterances, issues from a system that abrogates anything other than solitude and silence.23 There is no theme but its own variation. There is no bridge back to the false consciousness of a veriﬁable condition of narrative. Bam, in What Where, is talking to himself. A small megaphone, through which the voice of Bam controls the movement of the sequences, is switched off at the close. No sound, and no light. Not even the allowance of a journey, despite the passage from Spring to Winter which the play avows, and the reported interrogations and promised interrogations which it discloses. People will scream and beg for mercy, but will afﬁrm nothing, as What Where afﬁrms nothing. Only the sequence itself is afﬁrmed, and that leads to nothing in any case. This desolate terminus to Beckett’s work for the stage is so strongly suggestive in parvo of his whole oeuvre that it tends to resist any wider consideration, other than in terms of Beckett’s own characteristic strategies and preoccupations as a dramatist: ‘Time passes. | That is all.’24 But it is not all. The mere ceremony of rendition is something else, insofar as the exactitude of this representation of passing time is its most disturbing feature. The work itself intervenes between our received idea of ‘play’ or ‘theatre’ and the thematic preoccupation (beginning with the author’s own) with terror, stillness, solitude, and the resolution of 22 The Second Viennese School—namely, Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg (1885–1934) and Anton Webern—stands at the epicentre of German idealism in European music of the early twentieth century. Its inﬂuence on the subsequent development of music through the agency of serialism can legitimately be compared to Beckett’s inﬂuence (and the inﬂuence of Godot in particular) in the theatre. 23 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (What Where), 467–76, at 476. The phrase ‘It is winter. | Without journey’ is a reference to Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, written in 1827, the year before the composer’s death. The cycle was very dear to Beckett, and the allusion to it here is both a salute and a sadness, insofar as only winter remains and the voice is silenced (‘I switch off ’). With these words, The Complete Dramatic Works ends. 24 Ibid. 476.

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

195

these into a grey system at the edge of silence.25 We might enlist biography to explain how Beckett ended up like this: his depression, his love of Schubert, his accomplishment as a pianist, the torture and death of friends at the hands of the Gestapo (to say nothing of his own exposure to danger) are all germane to a reading of What Where.26 So too is Beckett’s lifelong struggle with the dead weight of words, and the mastery of language which he sought through its deployment as an ‘element’ in a system of his own devising. The penultimate line of What Where is a cool, if not detached, exhortation in the light of such considerations: ‘Make sense who may.’27 Kathryn Bailey’s account of the late compositions of Anton Webern enlists a different kind of reading which might also help to make sense of Beckett’s achievement, not least in relation to music: The idea of a musical unity that was to be achieved through the synthesis of the horizontal and the vertical, an idea so often given voice by Schoenberg, was carried out relentlessly by his one-time pupil, whose distillation of material to its very essence resulted in minute masterpieces of such concentration and brevity that they were generally perceived as entirely enigmatic.28

Extreme concentration of utterance, radically limited distillation of material, enigmatic expression: this characterization of Webern’s style and technique might be strongly suggestive of Beckett’s later plays, but 25 The four players nominated at the head of the text are ‘as alike as possible’ in every respect: grey gowns, long grey hair, and monosyllabic designations which are variants of each other (Bam, Bem, Bim, Bom). The ceremonies of the play are monitored and introduced by the ‘Voice of Bam’, which is a small megaphone through which Bam’s recorded voice can be heard. It is hard to imagine an assembly more remote from ordinary human consciousness which yet engages with language and memory (even if many of the later plays don’t even concede as much as that). Beckett’s directions throughout the text conﬁrm the hegemony of system: the ﬁgures move at ‘V’s’ command, their ritual dialogues controlled by verbal formulas that admit only the smallest degree of variation in order to allow the play to proceed. The great gulf between this systemic formalism and the chronicle of torture which it seeks to address can only be traversed by some acknowledgement of the fact that in What Where the dramatic subject has abdicated. In its place are the chanted reminiscence (or promise) of terror and the ceremonial progress towards silence and darkness. 26 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 684 ff., for an account of the genesis of What Where which addresses these biographical elements. Knowlson also intriguingly identiﬁes Thomas Moore’s poem ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ (from the Irish Melodies) as an inspiration for the play, although it is difﬁcult to locate its presence in the text. At best, the presence of Moore is marginal, but it is interesting nevertheless to discover how much the poem meant to Beckett at the time he was writing this play, given Moore’s formative inﬂuence on the Irish literary imagination. 27 What Where, 476. 28 Bailey, ‘Webern, Anton’, 189.

196

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

it does not suit the middle period of the Trilogy (of novels), Godot, and Endgame. In these works, Beckett stringently interrogates the expressivity of genre which his late plays abandon, but even The Unnamable, in its ﬁtful subversion of Molloy and Malone Dies, sustains a degree of continuity and narrative answerability to the whole enterprise of writing about something which cannot be named. Godot, likewise, seems like a sovereign ease of fancy by contrast with the ‘dramaticules’ which eventually were to follow, so that Beckett’s disengagement from the ‘apotheosis of the word’ can be seen to have come by degrees, rather than at once. Its arrival in Act without Words I is temporarily eclipsed by Krapp’s Last Tape, and modiﬁed by a discovery in the plays which follow that words are necessary after all, if only to map the terrain of those silences which they promote. As early as Murphy (1938), Beckett’s characters speak of feeling ‘spattered by words that went dead as soon as they had sounded’, words which Celia in that novel describes as being ‘like difﬁcult music, heard for the ﬁrst time’.29 Such sentiments echo Beckett’s own sense of the oppression of language, but they give little indication of his strategic emancipation from it. This emancipation, as I have argued elsewhere, is so strongly reminiscent of Webern’s serial technique—and not only with regard to its dissolution of genre and its concentration of utterance—that we can situate Beckett’s later plays in relation to musical modernism speciﬁcally with regard to the integration of ﬁxed elements (as in language, lighting, posture, physical movement) which recontextualize the sovereignty of language itself. In this regard, Beckett’s disengagement from Joyce must be distinguished from Webern’s self-aware progression from Schoenberg, but in either case the results are strikingly similar. Schoenberg’s heroic idealism, in which his method of composition with twelve tones became a matter of historical inevitability, and in which, too, his determination to engage with the public genres of late romanticism produced the opera Moses und Aron, nevertheless stimulated in Webern a very different mode of musical utterance in which the extension of serialist principles produced a drastic reduction in scale and purpose by comparison with those of his teacher. A work such as the Variations for Orchestra, op. 30 (1940) represents not only the fulﬁlment of Webern’s engagement with the idea of total serialism, but also a corresponding disengagement from that narrative representation of the musical subject (operatic or otherwise) which remained endemic to Schoenberg 29

Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London, 1978), 27.

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

197

throughout his career. If only for this reason, it was Webern, and not Schoenberg, who provided an exemplary model for composers of serial music in the middle of the twentieth century.30 Beckett’s disengagement from the heroic modernism of Joyce entails an even more extreme trajectory. His radical diminutions in scale and correspondingly severe restrictions in expression proceed not from lifelong discipleship and adherence (as these do in Webern’s case), but from a lifelong struggle with the oppressiveness of words and a commensurate search for what might lie beneath them. Beckett’s journey from the extravagance of Joyce’s achievement (at the very end of his life he would call it ‘heroic’ and ‘epic’) to the lapidary precisions of What Where was undertaken against the tide of every narrative representation he might have been expected to cherish: in Joyce, in Proust, and in opera.31 As John Pilling has shown, he was even prepared to misread Schopenhauer in his indictment of opera as ‘a hideous corruption of that most immaterial of all the arts’, and to afﬁrm in its place ‘vaudeville, which at least inaugurates the comedy of an exhaustive enumeration’.32 ‘Immaterial’ in this context should probably be taken as a reaction against the ‘material’ condition of language, but in any case, as Pilling suggests, it seems reasonable to construe this hostility to opera in the light of Beckett’s own evolution of a ‘refractory music’ through the very medium he felt impelled to subvert.

30 Bailey, ‘Webern, Anton’, remarks that Webern ‘was seen by many as the originator of the hyperintellectualised serialism of the decades immediately following his death’ (189). 31 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, reports that on 27 October 1989, a few weeks before his death, Beckett told him that ‘When I ﬁrst met Joyce I didn’t intend to be a writer . . . But I do remember speaking about Joyce’s heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That’s what it was epic, heroic, what he achieved. But I realised that I couldn’t go down that road’ (105). 32 See John Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows’, in Bryden, Samuel Beckett and Music, 173–8, at 174. The famous indictment of opera is taken from the coda to Beckett’s essay on Proust (1931), in which, as Pilling remarks, his ‘only extended assessment of what music might mean occurs’ (173). Beckett’s corresponding endorsement of vaudeville and ‘the comedy of an exhaustive enumeration’ summons those episodes in his own ﬁction (such as the ‘sucking stones’ sequence in Molloy) which adumbrate the serial condition of his late works, even as they parody the technique of serialism itself. If we adopt the simplest deﬁnition of serialism as a compositional technique ‘in which the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are arranged in a ﬁxed order, the “series”. . . which normally remains binding for a whole work’ (Paul Grifﬁths, in The New Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford, 1983), ii. 1668), then it is not difﬁcult to see how such a technique provides a paradigm for Beckett’s structural procedures in the late plays.

198

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

Biography can also assist here, at least to an extent: the sea-change in Beckett’s approach to the drama which is graphically indicated by Act without Words I and by most (but not all) of the plays written from 1956 onwards can partly be explained by the regularity of his engagement with music during the same period: Listening to music was essential to him . . . During the ﬁfties we used to listen to music (mainly Beethoven chamber music, Schubert) during the day in my studio . . . Later with Anne, always after dinner, at home. It was a ritual: he used to come at 8pm, in later years a bit earlier, sometimes play the piano with Alba, chess with Noga . . . We had a period during which we listened to quite a bit of dodecaphonic music—Schoenberg, Berg, Webern (before 1959). But he always returned to romantic music—from Haydn to Brahms. He disliked Wagner and also Mahler—actually antithetical to his sense of ‘less is more’.33

When these reminiscences are added to Beckett’s close personal friendships with the composer Marcel Mihalovici (who set Krapp’s Last Tape as an opera in 1961)34 and the concert pianist Monique Haas, it is reasonable to argue that the musical environment in which he lived had a signiﬁcant impact on the evolution of his dramatic discourse, especially given that the idea of ‘play’ still obtained for Beckett as something of a relief from the ordeal of writing continuous prose.35 Beckett’s musical proclivities, however, can only take us so far, although it is tempting to discern in his apparent disregard for Mozart and Wagner something akin to his distance from Shaw. His recurring address on Schubert, likewise, points towards a tradition of German idealism which allows us to distinguish between his recourse to music as a pure mode of discourse, in which the subject–object dichotomy of the romantic imagination is resolved, in contrast to Joyce’s explicit reliance on music as a code of remembrance, in which the musical motif neighbours language at every turn. But Beckett’s awareness of Schoenberg and Webern is otherwise: it tends to fortify what the later plays independently disclose. The systematic disposition of linguistic, musical, physical, and visual 33

The artist Avigdor Arikha, cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 495–6. I have not pursued the inﬂuence of Beckett on contemporary composers here, but this matter is explored in detail in Bryden, Samuel Beckett and Music, by Everett Frost, Catherine Laws, Philippe Albèra, Peter Szendy, Edith Fournier, Brigitta Fortner, Edward Beckett, and Miron Grindea. This book also contains interviews with Luciano Berio and Philip Glass in connection with their settings of Beckett. 35 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 495 ff., which conﬁrms Beckett’s recourse to musically structured plays as an emancipation from this ordeal. 34

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

199

elements, and the corresponding withdrawal from those conventions of natural representation (upon which the earlier plays so skilfully depend) in works such as Words and Music, Play (1963), Not I, Ohio Impromptu, Quad (1981), Nacht und Träume, and What Where collectively attest a new grammar of dramatic discourse. To suggest that this grammar proﬁts from the precedent of serial composition is an argument which does not require any empirical awareness (still less any degree of deliberate emulation) of serial technique on Beckett’s part, but to disallow the intensity of his musical engagement (to say nothing of the strong presence of music in the Beckett genes which makes itself felt to the present day) also seems unwarranted.36 The striking remarks at the beginning of Film (written in 1963), from which language is wholly excluded, offer a context for the new grammar which I seek to identify here: Esse est percipi. All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in ﬂight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception. No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience.37

Beginning with the (Latin) tag from Bishop Berkeley (‘to exist is to be perceived’), Beckett here proposes an abstract expression of that culde-sac which language imposes, which language had imposed upon him almost from the outset, as the letter to Axel Kaun makes clear. He then repudiates the ‘truth value’ of this expression in favour of enlisting it as a ‘structural and dramatic’ convention. It is the famous imperative at the end of The Unnamable translated into a principle of dramatic exposition: there being no hope of resolving the subject–object dichotomy in language, one must nevertheless continue as if there were. 36 The Beckett family has made a distinguished contribution to musical life in Dublin: Walter Beckett (1914–96) and John Beckett (1927–2007) were prominent as composer and conductor respectively throughout the second half of the twentieth century (John Beckett’s earlier career as a composer, in which he collaborated with his cousin in the composition of Words and Music, was later eclipsed by his brilliance as a harpsichordist, conductor, and director of early-music ensembles in Dublin and London). Edward Beckett, the author’s nephew and executor of his literary estate, is a renowned ﬂautist, and Brian Beckett (b. 1950) has achieved prominence as a composer and teacher in Dublin. Such a marked concentration of musical ability in one family tends, simply and by itself, to support the argument that Beckett’s work is conditioned by music. 37 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (Film), 312–29, at 323.

200

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s response to this imperative is mediated by a recourse to total control which is so pervasive in the late plays as to be their principal stylistic conﬁguration. It is in this mode of absolute exactitude (as absolute as words will allow) that Beckett draws close to the serial grammar of modernism, and to Webern’s total serialism in particular. When dramatic characters are reduced to the status of an initial capital, when sounds (many of them explicitly musical) rival language in the compositional fabric of dramatic engagement, when the very notion of ‘character’ itself exists to deny the empirical transactions of dialogue except as the expression of a locally deﬁned system or sequence, then the abdication of the musical subject identiﬁed by Adorno in relation to Webern ﬁnds its dramatic correlative in the scrupulous reduction of Beckett’s late texts. If these collectively engage a mode of writing which comes in the aftermath of imagining the death of imagination, then the mode itself is a sequence of ‘elements’ in which the prospect of thematic development does not arise. As with Webern’s serialism, only the permutation of the series is possible, because the construction of the series entails the exclusion of temporal perspective (the representations of narrative), just as Webern’s serialism excludes the false consciousness of tonality. In either case, the only game in town is the work itself. In either case, too, resolution of the mind–object dichotomy comes at a high price. German idealism, when it encounters the sense of an ending (in music, in the theatre), promotes a ‘distillation of material to its very essence’ (Kathryn Bailey) that cannot transcend the integrity of the system in which it is embodied. This does not signify that meaning is eclipsed or that intelligibility is a matter of indifference (notwithstanding the coolness of ‘make sense who may’ in What Where or the comic exasperation of ‘D’ in Catastrophe (1982): ‘For God’s sake! This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death!’).38 But it does mean, almost self-evidently, that the presence of a Schubert song, as in Nacht und Träume, is reiﬁed by the system to which it belongs. Beckett nominates the elements of that system at the beginning of Nacht und Träume as follows: Evening Light. Dreamer (A). His dreamt self (B). Dreamt hands R (right) and L (left). Last 7 bars of Schubert’s Lied, Nacht und Träume.39 38 39

Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (Film), (Catastrophe), 455–562, at 459. Ibid. (Nacht und Träume), 465.

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

201

These elements are so conspicuously engaged in a series of thirty directions (indicated here in Arabic numerals) that it is possible to render the series itself in musical form: A (1–5) B (6–17), A’ (18–24), B’ (25–7) [Beckett notes that direction 27 is a reprise of directions 7–16], A’ (28–30).40 But the formula ABA’B’A’, expressive of a rounded binary design that would not surprise Schubert, is so closely aligned to the material (those hands, that song, the man and his Doppelgänger), that it discloses images without developing them. The man hums and then sings ‘Holde Träume, kehret wieder’ (‘sweet dreams, return’). We can see that he dreams of compassion. We can see that his sweet dreams return. And then we can see him as he was at the outset. What Beckett describes as ‘the beautiful convention of the Da Capo’ (in the essay on Proust) takes the place of development, insofar as exact repetition is preferred to any kind of dramatic transcendence. The repeat of directions 7–16, as with the even more extensive Da Capo deployed in Play, afﬁrms the preeminence of system over meaning, no matter how much ancillary information can be brought to bear on either text.41 When the Schubert song returns in Nacht und Träume, its place in the sequence takes precedence over any other consideration (such as what the song might signify).42 When the Schubert returns in All That Fall, it marks a development and ushers a resolution. This difference helps us to distinguish between Beckett’s allegiance to narrative development in his middle period and the new grammar of the later work. Blind and maimed though the persons who inhabit Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, and Krapp’s Last Tape may be, they are persons nevertheless: even Beckett is helpless before their anterior lives.43 It is very difﬁcult—it is unnecessary—to say the 40 The formal divisions identiﬁed here correspond (somewhat unnervingly) to the elements A (the man) and B (his ‘dreamt self ’), insofar as the directions achieve a sequence through the movement from A to B. 41 The repeat of the entire text in Play, together with the trio of voices in unison at the beginning of the work, and the systematic alternation between them thereafter (regulated by a spotlight), is an extreme adumbration of Beckett’s technique in What Where. In both plays, a central preoccupation (betrayal, torture) is ‘musicalized’ to the point where meaning is conditioned by formal structure. In Play, moreover, the extrastructural meaning of the ﬁrst performance of the text is erased by the second. In Nacht und Träume this ascendancy is more subtly achieved, insofar as the repeated material is accommodated within a larger formal design that articulates the binary division between the man and his dreamt self. 42 For a reading which explicitly depends on such ancillary information, see Grayley Herren, ‘Nacht und Träume as Beckett’s Agony in the Garden’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 11: 1 (Spring, 2001), 55–69, as retrieved from the website address http://www.xu.edu/ english/herren_beckett.pdf on 30 May 2007. 43 See Beckett’s letter to Kay Boyle about the endings of Happy Days and All That Fall in October 1961, cited in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 485: ‘I know creatures are

202

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

same of voices ‘as low as compatible with audibility’ (in Come and Go (1966) ) which speak only according to the prevailing sequence established from play to short play, or which feverishly participate in a ‘vehement refusal to relinquish third person’ (in Not I ).44 In such cases, the human form is diminished. The disappearance of laughter from Beckett’s late plays—no small matter in itself—is an express indication of this diminishment.

3 The chair looked disquietingly like an electric chair and, in late rehearsals, it seemed as if she was being prepared for some medieval torture. Her entire body was draped in black, so that it was not discernible in the darkness and only her mouth was illuminated by two spots from below, hidden by a screen from the audience; her body was strapped into the chair with a belt around her waist; her head was clamped ﬁrmly between two pieces of sponged rubber, so that her mouth could not move out of the spotlight, and the top part of her face was covered with black gauze with a black transparent strip for her eyes . . . . . . The problems, of course, remained: ‘for instance, there is no time to breathe’, said Billie Whitelaw . . . ‘I’ve been practising saying words at a tenth of a second . . . No one can possibly follow the text at that speed but Beckett insists that I speak it precisely. It’s like music, a piece of Schoenberg in his head’. (James Knowlson)45

Writing of John Cage’s position as an American composer dedicated to the ‘emancipation of noise’, the musicologist Richard Taruskin remarks that ‘the liberation of sound demanded the enslavement, indeed the humiliation, of all human beings concerned—composer, performer and listener alike—for it demanded the complete suppression of the ego’.46 Taruskin locates the origins of this condition in ‘the great strip down supposed to have no secrets for their authors, but I’m afraid mine for me have little else.’ In the case of the later plays considered here, no such disclaimer is pertinent. 44 This is Beckett’s own direction at the head of the play. 45 James Knowlson’s description of rehearsals (citing Billie Whitelaw) for the ﬁrst performance of Not I in Britain. See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 596–7. 46 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York, 2005), v. 62.

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

203

from . . . humanism to biologism’47 which he identiﬁes, albeit very differently, in the music of Igor Stravinsky and that of the Second Viennese School, both of which he condemns on the grounds that an idealized modernism took ascendancy over any narrative model of extra-musical engagement. The total serialism of Webern, Boulez, and Elliott Carter, in such a reading, explicitly depends on the radical autonomy of musical systems (and the works these produce) at the expense of a musical discourse which engages with ‘true human feeling’.48 Although there are many who would take issue with such a stringent indictment of musical modernism, there are few who would now deny the widening gap in twentieth-century ‘classical’ music between a musical discourse of social engagement (as in Puccini, Shostakovich, Bartók, Benjamin Britten) and a discourse of hermetic formalism (as in Webern, Boulez, the American serialists, and John Cage). But Taruskin’s magisterial deliberations on the history of western music as an expression of German idealism may be read not merely as a postmodern j’accuse directed against the elitism of much twentieth-century music: they may also legitimately be advanced (as here) as a signiﬁcant interrogation of ethical value in relation to the modernist aesthetic. In this respect, Taruskin’s rhetoric of ‘enslavement’ and ‘humiliation’ summons the disquiet of Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, in his account of the rehearsals for Not I which I have cited here. When Taruskin describes the symphonies of Shostakovich as ‘the secret diary of a nation’ in contrast to a work such as Carter’s Second String Quartet (1959), which ‘unfolds like a Samuel Beckett play, a colloquy of archetypal personalities who are basically oblivious of one another’, we can reasonably determine that Beckett’s late work has been enlisted as an exemplary instance of an aesthetic to be repudiated (as here) by postmodernism.49 When we consider such a reading in the light of Beckett’s scrupulous (if not obsessive) regard for the autonomy of his work, to the point where his own interventions as director frequently entailed a striking degree of subordination to the will of the author (the maestro in the rehearsal room), the question of Beckett’s musical dependencies achieves fresh signiﬁcance.50 47

Ibid. iv. 189 Ibid. iv. 511. Taruskin makes this point speciﬁcally with regard to the occurrence of a dominant seventh chord in an otherwise serial composition by Berg. 49 Ibid. v. 296. It is of some interest to note that Heinz Holliger’s musical setting of What Where (1988) is dedicated to Carter. 50 It seems only fair in this connection to juxtapose the (often) extreme demands made by Beckett on actors in productions which he directed (or advised upon) himself (as in the account by Billie Whitelaw cited above), and an observation from his biographer 48

204

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s ‘secret diary’ poses no difﬁculty here: his reputation as the chronicler of private anguish is secure, although this baleful posterity eclipses the humour in adversity which Godot and les autres promote (to say nothing of the man himself ). Of far greater account is the ‘long line of split personalities, psychotics or obsessional neurotics’ which elevate the ‘old crone’ in Not I to the status of an archetype, however well grounded the source of Beckett’s own remembrance.51 ‘Mouth’ in Not I is the young woman in Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung (1909) grown old: it is small wonder that Billie Whitelaw thought of Schoenberg when she was rehearsing the play.52 But the archetype has also grown old, so that the story of what happens to ‘Mouth’ is itself eclipsed by newer versions in which ﬁction recovers its narrative address on experience and on the experience of Not I in particular. Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries (1993) is sufﬁcient evidence of that.53 The fretful mimesis of Beckett’s text, for all the excruciating rigour of its structure and performance, and for all its tonal and literal allusions to The Unnamable and Rockaby, is a prisoner of its own expressionism. Beckett’s emancipation from this conﬁnement is not ‘the liberation of noise’, but rather the autonomy of a system in which words are repeated in long sequences (as in the Da Capo in Play), or become absorbed into a sequence of elements which invariably alter their signiﬁcance. The collapse of narrative structure, the disappearance of those ‘lazy ways’ from Beckett’s writing, are both deﬁned by an approach to language in which ‘words for music’ is a formula that gives way to words after music. Language is redeployed in the aftermath not only of Beckett’s own musical experience and receptivity, but in the shadow of Joyce’s assent to the imperium of sound. The promise of something ‘perfectly intelligible’ is no longer sound, but the that although Beckett was ‘often represented as a tyrannical ﬁgure, an arch-controller of his work [in the last few years of his life] . . . the truth of his position was more complex and certainly far more interesting than this caricature suggests’. See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 691 ff. 51 Beckett told his biographer that the woman in Not I was based on someone he had known in Ireland, and that, moreover he ‘actually heard’ her saying what he afterwards wrote in the play. Ibid. 590. 52 Erwartung (‘Expectation’) was not performed until 1924. Schoenberg set the libretto by Marie Pappenheim for soprano and orchestra. The work is exemplary of musical and dramatic expressionism: throughout the text the woman is in a state of acute neurosis, shading into traumatic shock and hysteria. 53 The novel recounts the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett from premature birth in 1905 to death somewhere in the early 1990s. Its rich recovery of dramatic verisimilitude does not eclipse its thematic afﬁnities with Beckett’s writing, and with Not I and Rockaby in particular.

Words and Music: Samuel Beckett

205

organization of sound. In that distinction, the imperium of language itself is exchanged for a new ascendancy of system. This ascendancy would in turn be exchanged for a new model of dramatic engagement by writers other than Beckett, in which the recovery of narrative, character, and plot would signify new contracts of intelligibility between signiﬁer and signiﬁed, notably in relation to Irish history and experience. In that recovery, the corresponding retrieval of European music and the expressive potential of its nineteenth-century paradigms would prove to be decisive. The hermetic formalism of the Beckettian sequence is succeeded by a striking revival of operatic and instrumental prototypes in the drama of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy. The elliptical presence of Schubert gives way to a formative engagement with Mendelssohn, Chopin, Verdi, and even Wagner. The grey systems on the periphery of silence, the rhetoric of expressionism at the edge of reason, acquire a relative modernism when regarded from the perspective of these recoveries, much as the total serialism of art music in the middle of the twentieth century is made relative by composers who maintain a more explicit allegiance to history, narrative, and tonality. When Pierre Boulez proclaimed that Schoenberg was dead and that every mode of composition other than total serialism was ‘useless’, he could not have foreseen the stylistic pluralism of a later generation of composers and musicians, still less his own movement from the radical periphery to the centre of the musical establishment as a conductor of Richard Wagner’s music dramas in Bayreuth. When Beckett wrote Imagination Dead Imagine (1966), a new encounter between music and the Irish dramatic imagination was already under way. It is this encounter to which we must now turn.

7 Operas of the Irish Mind: Brian Friel and Music

The main item in tonight’s concert is the First Movement of the Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64, by Jacob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn . . . the Orchestra is conducted by Gareth O’Donnell and the soloist is the Ballybeg half-back Gareth O’Donnell. (Philadelphia, Here I come! )1 I imagine you have poets in England of much greater accomplishment, Mr Richard. But Tom Moore is the ﬁnest singer we have, the voice of our nation. . . . he has our true measure, Mr Richard. He divines us accurately. He reproduces features of our history and our character. (The Home Place)2

Beethoven, Chopin, Janácˇek, Jerome Kern, Mendelssohn, Tom Moore, Cole Porter, Wagner: this is an inventory which might seem even more curious were we to attach to it a corresponding list of plays by Brian Friel in which music enters the Irish theatre as a constitutive agent of dramatic discourse: Wonderful Tennessee (Beethoven), Aristocrats (Chopin), Performances (Janácˇek), Faith Healer (Jerome Kern), Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Give Me Your Answer, Do! (Mendelssohn), The Home Place (Moore), Dancing at Lughnasa (Cole Porter), The Loves of Cass Maguire (Wagner). Neither of these lists (the musicians, the plays) is exhaus1 Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, in Selected Plays of Brian Friel (London, 1984), 36. 2 Brian Friel, The Home Place (Oldcastle, Co. Meath, 2005), 42.

Brian Friel and Music

207

tive, but both indicate the extent to which Friel mediates his response to Irish history through the discourse of music itself. It is a plural discourse, in which European masterpieces are juxtaposed with American popular music of the 1920s and 1930s, and also with Irish ballads and ceilidh music. On signiﬁcant occasion, these musical agents stand alone (as Chopin does in Aristocrats and Tom Moore in The Home Place), but throughout the Friel canon it is everywhere apparent that music can provide ‘another way of talking, a language without words . . . because it is wordless it can hit straight and unmediated into the vein of deep emotion’.3 This avowal of music might seem unexceptional, were it not for the verbally dominated cultural matrix in which it occurs. It is, moreover, an incomplete acknowledgement, because in Friel’s work, the symbolic and metaphorical properties of music can be distinguished from his recourse to music as the supreme intelligencer of feeling and aspiration. As a metalanguage (in apposition with the Irish language), and as a form of generic expression adapted to his own preoccupation with the claims of Irish history and the language question, music not only deﬁnes much of Friel’s theatrical discourse but conﬁrms a perspective on the Irish literary imagination (as here) which privileges the notion of words for music. Some of the great talkers and doomed storytellers of the Irish theatre most certainly take musical refuge in Friel, but that is not all: the plays approach the condition of music to the extreme extent that some of them can be read as operas of the Irish mind. The challenging irony of this reading is that when this operatic transcendence occurs, music itself recedes or is wholly absent. There are three principal models of musical engagement in Friel’s work which can be enlisted to advance this argument: an explicit importation of individual musical works in which the generic properties of these works condition the dramatic meaning and function they convey; an adaptation of generic models which remains independent of any speciﬁc musical work; and a dramatization of the tension between the artistic autonomy of musical works and their historical and biographical dependencies. Only one of these models—the second—affords an easy passage from Friel to his predecessors, but all three afﬁrm that music is an essential resource for Friel, and one moreover that allows him to reify fundamental concepts about Ireland in relation to Europe throughout his work. 3 Brian Friel, ‘Music’, in a programme note published in 1999 and cited in Helen Lojek, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa and the Unﬁnished Revolution’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge, 2006), 83.

208

Brian Friel and Music 1 I have spent my life attempting to do two things. I have attempted to hold together a harassed and a confused people by trying to keep them in touch with the life they knew before they were overrun. It wasn’t a life of material ease but it had its assurances and it had its dignity. And I have done that by acknowledging and indeed honouring the rituals and ceremonies and beliefs these people have practised since before history, long before the God of Christianity was ever heard of. And at the same time I have tried to open these people to the strange new ways of Europe . . . Two pursuits that can scarcely be followed simultaneously. Two tasks that are almost self-cancelling. But they have got to be attempted because the formation of nations and civilizations is a willed act, not a product of fate or accident. (Making History)4

Hugh O’Neill’s sense of Ireland in Making History is not to everyone’s liking, to judge by the reception Friel’s reading of Irish history has sometimes elicited.5 In the passage cited here, Friel identiﬁes a fundamental tension between a depleted Gaelic civilization and ‘the strange new ways of Europe’ which pervades his work. It is easy to recognize this tension as one which informs the postcolonial condition of the Irish literary imagination as a whole, but it is not so easy to overcome those explicit conﬁgurations of historical and linguistic crisis which dominate that imagination, especially given that Friel has so decisively explored these conﬁgurations himself. ‘History plays’, ‘language plays’: these subgeneric categories identify Friel’s own engagement with this tension (as in The Freedom of the City, Translations, Making History, The Home Place). In other plays, where these conﬁgurations are secondary, the consequences of history are never very far away: the great engagements with Russian theatre are plain evidence of this, but other masterpieces— (Aristocrats (1979), Faith Healer (1979), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)—

4

Brian Friel, Making History (London, 1989), 40. See in particular the response of literary and political historians such as Edna Longley and Sean Connolly to Translations, which was ﬁrst given in 1980. This response is discussed in Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London, 1995), 166–8. Andrews cites Connolly’s observation that there are no historical grounds for presenting the whole enterprise of map-making in Translations ‘as having been undertaken in the “Sanders of the River” spirit of colonial paternalism portrayed by Friel’. 5

Brian Friel and Music

209

also afﬁrm the impact of Irish social and political history on individual lives.6 Financial ruin, social collapse, suicide, violent death, poverty, and exile: each tragic terminus, however bravely (and brilliantly) resisted, is sooner or later dramatized as a consequence of displacement. In Friel’s plays, you don’t need to marry outside the tribe (Translations) or stumble into the Guildhall during a civil rights march (The Freedom of the City) to feel the weight of history on your back. The ‘controlled passion’ which animates Hugh O’Neill’s diagnosis of ‘two deeply opposed civilizations’ in Making History is representative of that general emancipation which Friel’s art proposes as a redemption from the various oppressions of social and political history encountered in his plays.7 It is not a proposal which Beckett would endorse, and it rests upon a premise which Beckett’s lifelong struggle against the dead weight of words axiomatically excluded. In Friel’s work, the possibility that language can impose order on experience is constantly realized. The oppression lies in the burden of history: words provide a means of escape. The sovereignty of invention is restored, and so too is the contract between individual artworks and the experience which they address. For want of a better phrase, and for all its complexity, this is the experience of being Irish. The recovery of these contracts in Friel, as between language and experience, Irish history and the individual work, Northern Irish identity and theatrical discourse (the Field Day contract, as it were), signiﬁes a continuity of purpose with Synge and Shaw, as well as a disengagement from the stark formalism of Beckett.8 One could argue that the dreaming of which Larry Doyle so bitterly complains in John Bull’s Other Island has become a principle of dramatic discourse (and a virtuoso one at that) in Friel, and that the ebullient ensembles of The Playboy of the Western World re-enter the Irish literary imagination in heroic verbal operas (Translations, Dancing at Lughnasa) which redeem Synge’s play from the limiting category of ‘peasant drama’. There is nothing naive in these recoveries: O’Neill in Making History knows who the winner is all along, and rejects the clichéd contrast between Gaelic impulsiveness and the ‘cold pragmatism’ of the Tudor mind on that account.9 He is a prince nourished in the bosom of the 6 Thus Frank Hardy dies at the hands of political extremists in Northern Ireland in Faith Healer; Agnes and Rose in Lughnasa die in impoverished exile in London. 7 Making History, 28. 8 The Field Day Theatre Company was established in 1980 by Friel, the actor Stephen Rea, and Seamus Deane. Its ﬁrst production was Translations. 9 See O’Neill’s speech in the ﬁrst act of Making History, 28.

210

Brian Friel and Music

enemy; his indictments proﬁt from the civilization he would oppose. In Making History, this awareness is vested in diction, in the contrast between O’Neill’s ‘upperclass English accent’ and the native Tyrone to which he reverts under emotional duress. But the polarized opposition between Gaelic and Tudor modes of civilization which plagues O’Neill throughout that play is a sharply politicized expression of a more general (and pervasive) distinction in Friel, in which diction is also a vital indicator of the difference between imaginative aspiration and the impoverishments of local culture. In several instances this is a musical diction, which is sometimes contrasted with other musical dictions, and sometimes not. Its primary manifestation in Philadelphia, The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Aristocrats, Wonderful Tennessee (1993), and Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) depends on the ﬁrst model of musical engagement which I have identiﬁed here, in which discrete musical works enter the fabric of the play in order to conﬁrm this opposition or to cohere its structural design. With the striking (and problematic) exception of Cass,10 the musical works in these plays are all diegetic: they originate from within the narrative and action which they modify. Notwithstanding the fragments of Beethoven and Schubert which Beckett introduces in his late dramatic sequences, this in itself is a new strategy (and a new presence) in the Irish theatre. The recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto to which Gar listens in Philadelphia, the piano music of Chopin which Claire plays throughout Aristocrats, the last movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata which George performs in Wonderful Tennessee, and the recordings of Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song’ which frame Give Me 10 Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, 99, remarks that: ‘The choice of Wagner [in Cass] is quite deliberate, for Wagner’s theories . . . have a relevance not only to this play (Cass) but to Friel’s whole dramatic development.’ Nevertheless, the excerpts from Tannhaüser, Tristan und Isolde, and Die Walküre nominated by Friel as ‘background music’ to accompany the three verbal rhapsodies in this play are not diegetically engaged in the action, despite the strong afﬁnities between the Tristan story in particular and the narratives recounted by Trilbe, Ingram, and Cass. In his author’s note to Cass, Friel afﬁrms that he considers the play to be ‘a concerto, in which Cass Maguire is the soloist’, but this afﬁrmation does not redeem the expressive imbalance between Friel’s language and Wagner’s music. The ‘Liebestod’ doesn’t function well in a subordinate role. See Friel, The Loves of Cass McGuire (Dublin, 1984), 7. I have discussed the problem of Wagner in Cass in greater detail in The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2005), ch. 6 (‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’), 87–97. If Cass is a concerto, the overwhelming presence of Wagner in that play (signiﬁcantly discarded in the original production) attests to Bernard Shaw’s concerns about the power of music in relation to the spoken drama. Both concerto and opera function much more successfully as expressive (and generic) paradigms elsewhere in Friel, as I have tried to argue here.

Brian Friel and Music

211

Your Answer, Do! are not incidental or simply evocative in their address. In each case, the music directly impinges on the action and formal shape of the play.11 In each case, too, these works apostrophize the promise of imagination against the burden of history: domestic history, social history, and political history. Mendelssohn in Ballybeg:12 it is always the intimacy between the European masterwork and Friel’s sense of place and experience that authenticates the presence of such music as an arbiter of imaginative redress. Gar knows what the Mendelssohn concerto means to him and says so, even if his desolate relatives can only construe it as ‘some sort of noise’. When he identiﬁes himself as soloist and conductor in the enterprise of listening to the work, and then repudiates its overwhelming condition of emotional clarity in favour of ‘something lively, something animal, a bit of aul thumpety-thump’, the ceilidh music that follows is an unmistakable coming-down to earth, an ebullient reminder of how things actually are. Musical ciphers are tightly organized (so that ‘California, Here I Come’ is the sound-world of American exile with all its brash promise of a fresh start, and ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ is an absently sung reminder of what might have been with Kate Doogan), but throughout the three episodes of which Philadelphia, Here I Come! is made, it is the concerto that prevails. Gar is indeed the soloist in a concerto of his own making, and the narrative paradigm of the musical genre itself underpins the succession of encounters (past and present) through which he scrutinizes his relationship with friends, lovers, family, and principally with his dead mother and moribund father. The virtuoso exchanges between his public and private selves (‘Gar Public’ and ‘Gar Private’)—in which the emotional signiﬁcance of the music is declared—carry forward into language the dialogic encounter between soloist and ensemble that is fundamental to the concerto paradigm. The music attains local meaning not only on account of its emotional currency, but through the instructive agency of its own formal organization. The slow movement becomes a remembrance of lost love (between father and son); the whole work incorporates the separate condition of the soloist as exile and the community as orchestra to which the soloist nevertheless belongs. In this process, the work itself acquires not only dramatic signiﬁcance but local, Irish meaning. The 11 For a discussion of the musical works in these plays, and how they impinge upon characterization and plot, see The Progress of Music in Ireland, 87–97. 12 The ﬁctional setting for many of Brian Friel’s plays.

212

Brian Friel and Music

play thereby offers an original reading of the concerto which is strikingly germane to European and Irish experience both. It makes sense of the work and houses it within the domain of Irish cultural history. It takes possession of the music.13 A similar degree of musical assimilation attaches to the sequence of Chopin works which map the mental geography of social decline, emotional arrest, and imaginative refuge in Aristocrats. There is the same explicit deliberation on what these works might signify in the text (to Claire, to her disturbed brother Casimir, and to their bewildered interlocutor Tom Hoffnung in particular), and there is also the same technique of dramatic absorption, in which the self-standing narratives of Chopin’s music acquire local and symbolic signiﬁcance in the crumbling world of illusion that is Ballybeg Hall. The music becomes more than a protective solace for Claire as she contemplates a life ruined by her father’s snobbery: in the third act of the play it reiﬁes the distance between fantastic levels of self-delusion induced by a family in the grip of emotional tyranny and social disintegration, and the narrative intelligence of romantic piano music, as in the sonata in B-ﬂat minor (op. 35) which Claire is playing a few days after her father’s funeral. The following extract graphically illustrates this difference. We can hear Claire’s performance offstage, and against it this exchange: casimir: The B ﬂat minor Sonata—that was Grandfather O’Donnell’s favourite. Probably because he actually heard Chopin play it. tom: Who heard Chopin? casimir: Grandfather. Haven’t I told you that story? tom: No. casimir: Oh, yes. At a party in Vienna—a birthday party for Balzac. Everybody was there: Liszt and George Sand and Turgenev and Mendelssohn and the young Wagner and Berlioz and Delacroix and Verdi—and of course Balzac. Everybody. It went on for days. God knows why Grandfather was there—probably gate-crashed. Anyhow, that’s what Chopin played. tom: Your grandfather, Casimir? casimir: Grandfather O’Donnell; a great traveller; Europe every year. tom: But he wouldn’t have been a contemporary of these people, would he? casimir: Would he not? 13 As in the following construal of the slow movement, in which Gar addresses his father: ‘Listen! Listen! Listen! D’you know what that music says? . . . It says that once upon a time a boy and his father sat in a blue boat on a lake on an afternoon in May, and on that afternoon a great beauty happened, a beauty that has haunted the boy ever since, because he wonders now did it really take place or did he imagine it’ (Philadelphia, Here I Come!, 89).

Brian Friel and Music

213

tom: You must mean your great-grandfather, don’t you? casimir: Do I? Great-grandfather O’Donnell then. Yes, you’re right: he lived in Europe for six months one time to escape the fever that followed the famine here. A party in Vienna. The expression became part of the family language: anything great and romantic and exciting that had happened in the past or might happen in the future, we called it ‘a party in Vienna’— yes. Very beautiful, isn’t it? And there was another detail about that party: Chopin was playing that sonata and Balzac began to sing it and Grandfather told Balzac to shut up and Chopin said, ‘Bravo, Irishman! Bravo!’ Grandfather, of course, was thrilled.14

In that passage we can recognize how helpless the aspiration to Europe has become, how foredoomed is the enterprise of joining together the fantasy world of an invented, European past, and the grim circumstances of things (Catholic, Irish, and class-ridden things) as they actually are. Every pretension to Europe is an improbable lie. The claim to musical ownership is in particular a lie, exposed not only by Casimir’s chronological impossibilities, but by the house of musical cards (Mendelssohn, Chopin, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi) which it brings tumbling down. But it is the musical work, Claire’s own performance, which allows us to witness this for ourselves. The tyranny of dreaming in B-ﬂat minor would not otherwise be dramatized. Nor would Claire’s own emancipation from this servitude (when she declares, late in the play, that she is ‘suddenly sick of Chopin’, and is unlikely ever to play him again).15 These are not general disavowals: work by individual work, Friel confers speciﬁc meaning on Chopin’s music and reads it into the fabric of crippling illusions which encumber the household in Aristocrats. Chopin and Ballybeg: this becomes no doubt a conjunction which is mnemonic of Europe and Ireland, but it also narrows that consideration to a dramatization of fantasy and decline in which the European masterwork is decisive. The music, in short, becomes interior to (and possessed by) an Irish history of ideas. 14

Brian Friel, Aristocrats, in Selected Plays, 306. Ibid. 325. Apropos the presence of Chopin in this play, it is interesting to compare the similar presence of John Field in Friel’s version of A Month in the Country (‘after Turgenev’), which followed in 1990. Field’s nocturnes are heard throughout that work (played offstage by Vera), and of the composer himself another character, Anna, remarks: ‘I met John Field in Moscow once… oh, thirty years ago. A very handsome man with that angular Irish face.’ As Anthony Roche has remarked, ‘the nocturnes recur throughout the play to express the emotions that the characters ﬁnd so difﬁcult to express’. See Anthony Roche, ‘Russian and Irish Afﬁnities’, published in the Shaw Festival Programme Booklet (2007) which accompanied the production of Friel’s play in Ontario, Canada. 15

214

Brian Friel and Music 2 . . . during rehearsals I discovered that two of the actors spoke their rhapsodies with such grace and dignity, invested their soliloquies with such cantabile magic, that any background music would have been a distraction. So Wagner was dropped. (Author’s note to The Loves of Cass Maguire)16

When we turn to the second mode of musical engagement in Friel, its most obvious feature is the recession of individual works in favour of structural paradigms that continue to afﬁrm words for music, as they do (however differently) in Shaw and Synge. The presence of actual musical works is drastically reduced in Faith Healer, Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa, and the European masterwork is wholly absent (notwithstanding Father Jack’s imperfect recollection and rendition of Handel in Lughnasa).17 Jerome Kern and Cole Porter loom large in Faith Healer and Lughnasa respectively, but they engender emotion and movement rather than structure and thematic argument. In these (latter) respects, the relevance of music lies elsewhere. In order to discover it, we need to acknowledge the dramatic inherences which these plays disclose. We need to revisit the concept of verbal opera in the Irish theatre. The essence of this concept, as I have tried to show in this book, is that it frames a theatrical discourse which is at once informed by and emancipated from the language of music. The self-conscious progressivism of Shaw’s dramaturgy in this respect (from opera to music drama to the drama of thought, and from Richard Wagner to G.B.S.), and the no-less striking development of Synge’s musical dependencies (through the agency of French symbolism to the evolution of a ‘Rabelaisian’ gusto which ‘must have its climax, no matter who may be shocked’), are both strongly relevant to Friel’s plays and to Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa in particular. In these works we can discern a mode of musical engagement which is not only at one remove from the explicitly dramatic function of Mendelssohn and Chopin in Philadelphia and Aristocrats (to look no further than that), but which summons the precedent of Shaw and Synge expressly in relation to dramatic discourse as verbal 16

Brian Friel, The Loves of Cass Maguire, 7. Jack sings Polyphemus’ aria ‘O Ruddier than the Cherry’ from Handel’s Acis and Galatea, but cannot recall the title or author of the work (‘It’s not Gilbert and Sullivan’, he helplessly remarks). 17

Brian Friel and Music

215

opera. We might even suggest—although this is not strictly necessary to the argument—that Friel emancipates his dramaturgy from a direct engagement with musical works in these plays to such an extent that we are reminded of the same emancipations in Synge and Shaw, however differently these are achieved. What cannot be doubted is that in Friel’s case this emancipation does not entail a repudiation of music per se, but it does entail a notably formal engagement with language which renders the European musical masterwork and its expressive capabilities superﬂuous. In its place is a new verbal counterpoint in which the ‘Gaelic’ and the ‘European’ are sharply recast and tragically juxtaposed. In the sounding form of this achievement, the plays become operas of the Irish mind. The ‘cantabile magic’ of words is ascendant. This ascendancy looms larger in the context of Irish cultural history than it would otherwise, given the general absence of opera as a tenable aesthetic presence in Ireland during the twentieth century, to say nothing of opera as an uncertain and neglected mode of expression in British cultural history long before then.18 It is perhaps sufﬁcient here to say that by the time Friel wrote Faith Healer, Translations, and Lughnasa, the precedent of musical beginnings and verbal endings was so strongly established in the Irish literary imagination that the absence of any corresponding body of musical works threw this verbal ascendancy into much sharper relief than would otherwise have been the case. The whole Field Day enterprise, with its explicitly nationalist resonance, also contributed to this pre-eminence of the art work as political statement, a pre-eminence which anyone familiar with the history of European opera would immediately recognize. However controversial its reception, Field Day reanimated the romantic idea of art as an explicit agent of history and social change. That is why Seamus Deane could describe the principal objective of Field Day as being ‘to put on plays outside the conﬁnes of the established theatre, and, through that, to begin to effect a change in the apathetic atmosphere of the North’. It is only fair to add that Deane offered this description in the context of introducing Friel’s Selected Plays in 1984.19 It is a description that would not have dismayed Yeats, Synge, or Shaw. 18 See my observations on The Freedom of the City in the Introduction to this book, and on the literary terminus of opera in Ireland in ‘Cultural Theory, Nostalgia and the Historical Record: Opera in Ireland and the Irishness of Opera during the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny (eds.), Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Irish Musical Studies, 9) (Dublin, 2007), 17–44. 19 See Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Selected Plays of Brian Friel, 20 ff.

216

Brian Friel and Music

In such a richly politicized context, a reading of Translations and Lughnasa as operas of the Irish mind can more easily be advanced when we acknowledge Friel’s own awareness of Synge and Shaw in ‘the discovery of a language appropriate to the theatre in this country’,20 especially in apposition with his own regard for the dramatic text as an ‘orchestral score’.21 Maurice Bourgeois’s judgement of Synge (‘He was one of the few Irish writers who europeanized Ireland without de-gaelicizing it’) can be retrieved here to good purpose, because it applies so effectively to Friel’s ambition in Translations, a play which brilliantly achieves this fragile synthesis partly by rereading The Playboy of the Western World and John Bull’s Other Island into a period of Irish history (1831) which pre-dates the setting of either play, and partly by emulating the technique of his predecessors speciﬁcally in regard to this concept of verbal opera. Translations is the great language play of the Irish literary imagination, but if only on that account it is also a great ‘music’ play, especially insofar as Friel’s projection of the Irish language, through the medium of his own virtuoso English, offers not only ‘a syntax opulent with tomorrows’ but a rival culture to the received ideas of deprivation and degeneracy which history otherwise affords. ‘It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to . . . inevitabilities’, observes the Master Hugh of the Irish language.22 The contrivance by which Friel allows us to hear English and Irish through the medium of English alone—with a singular, transcendent exception—is not only a technical tour de force, but a decisive reiﬁcation of language that supervenes considerations of verisimilitude (as when the Master, speaking in Irish, derives nouns and verbs from Latin roots) in favour of one supreme act of imagination.23 What is imagined turns colonial

20 From a conversation between Friel and the critic Richard Pine, cited in Anthony Roche, ‘Friel and Synge: Towards a Theatrical Language’, in Anthony Roche (editor) Irish University Review. Special Issue: Brian Friel, 29: 1 (Spring/Summer, 1999), 145–61, at 145. 21 Friel used this analogy in a BBC radio broadcast given in 1971 and cited by Patrick Burke, ‘Friel and Performance History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, 117. It is certainly germane to the present discussion to discover that Friel should have meditated so explicitly in this broadcast on the writer as composer (and on the director, correspondingly, as conductor). 22 Friel, Translations, in Selected Plays, 418. 23 Thus, in Act One, the Master observes (in ‘Irish’) that Captain Lancey seemed to him suitably ‘verecund’ on account of the latter’s ability to speak only English, and then solicits from his Irish-speaking interlocutor a Latin root (‘verecundus’) for this adjective.

Brian Friel and Music

217

reception history on its head: ‘Irish’ is not only the discourse of art and imagination in Translations, but the conduit of Mediterranean culture, of Greek and Latin poetry and myth. English, by contrast, is the cold pastoral of mapmaking, the erosion of fantasy, the instrument of military repression. For once, Ireland is ‘Europe’ and England is the island of the dispossessed. The two English personages in the play, Lieutenant Yolland and his ramrod superior, Captain Lancey, can only respond to this Eden in one of two ways, but in either case (love or reprisal) both of them are disadvantaged and disabled by language. They can redeem this loss by trying to become Irish (in which eventuality the tribe will exact revenge), or by imposing the iron will of the oppressor (in which case Irish will disappear). These historical imaginings are Friel’s own, but they borrow signiﬁcantly from Synge and Shaw. This borrowing occurs at two levels, the ﬁrst of which is not only easier to perceive, but is a necessary code to the second level, at which music re-enters as a fundamental consideration. In a play preoccupied with mapmaking as an activity which confers and eclipses identity, the second act of Translations discloses its unmistakable allegiance to Synge and Shaw not only in its concentration upon how differently languages frame experience, but also in the disposition of character which arises from this difference.24 Consider ﬁrst the suggestive afﬁnities of character between Maire, her would-be ﬁancé Manus, and her incipient lover Yolland in Translations, and the very similar triangle that exists between Pegeen Mike, her hapless suitor Shawn Keogh, 24 In this consideration (as between language and experience) Friel’s extensive recourse to the writings of George Steiner is particularly relevant to Translations. Richard Kearney has explored Friel’s use of Steiner in the context of identifying a crisis of the word in the Irish theatre in the early 1980s, when many of Friel’s language plays were ﬁrst given. Although Kearney persuasively documents this crisis (partly through comments by David McKenna, Olwen Fouere, and other prominent participants in Irish theatre of that time), it remains unclear as to how much this impatience with a verbally dominated drama transcended the local impact of visiting theatre companies to the Dublin Theatre Festival, whose principal energies were gestural and musical rather than verbal. What is perhaps of more lasting import is that Kearney’s reading of Faith Healer, Translations, and The Communication Cord acknowledges this impatience with the word, even if it does not set out to address the musical void in Irish cultural history by which verbal ﬂuency loomed all the larger. See Richard Kearney, ‘Language Play: Brian Friel and Ireland’s Verbal Theatre’, in William Kerwin (ed.), Brian Friel: A Casebook (New York and London, 1997), 77–117. Kearney provides an appendix (112–15) containing ‘key passages’ from Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London, 1975), ‘which served as a major critical and philosophical source for Friel’s language plays’ (112).

218

Brian Friel and Music

and her newly arrived lover Christy Mahon in Synge’s play. Collectively and individually, Synge’s grouping suggests a prototype for Friel’s. The echoes between Synge and Friel are notably strong in the ‘great love duets’ (to borrow Ann Saddlemyer’s description of The Playboy) from both plays, especially given their similar (if distinct) tragic outcomes. When Maire appears in the ﬁrst scene of the second act of Friel’s play, her vixen demeanour is tonally at one with Pegeen’s ﬁrst encounters with Christy in The Playboy. The harmony between Pegeen and Maire is itself counterpointed by the high comedy of linguistic farce in which this scene from Translations is played, and in which, too, the grandiloquence of the Master’s cultural deliberations on language earlier in the scene are deliberately offset. Consider next the relationship between the romantic Englishman and hard-headed native in Friel and Shaw: Broadbent in John Bull’s Other Island is not Yolland in Translations, and Larry Doyle is not Owen, but each pair exists in a very similar relation to the other, conﬁgured as these are as romantic Englishman and native cynic respectively, even if the cynicism is more pervasively justiﬁed in Shaw, and the romance (much) more subtly and deeply felt in Friel. The ﬁrst scene of Friel’s second act and almost the whole of Shaw’s play thereby resonate with each other, so that Owen’s remonstrations with Yolland on account of the latter’s romanticized recognition of an Irish Eden represent a cogent reprise of those massive debates about Ireland which Doyle and Broadbent undertake in John Bull’s Other Island. These reconﬁgurations of Shaw and Synge at the level of character and dramatic disposition attain their greatest signiﬁcance at the (second) level of expressive discourse. There is a striking modulation from the ﬁrst scene of Friel’s second act to the second scene (from Shavian debate to the passionate declarations of Synge), but there is also a strong continuity achieved between them. This continuity lies in the overture of place-names rehearsed by Yolland and Owen in the ﬁrst scene which is so crucially re-enacted by Yolland and Maire in the scene that follows. In this re-enactment, Friel’s explicit meditations on an imagined Irish (the eloquent refuge of the dispossessed, the vernacular homecoming of Greek and Latin civilization, the foredoomed language of the tribe) acquire a dramatic urgency which transcends the boundaries of language. The exchange of place-names between the two new lovers is an invitation to listen to the actual sound of Irish, rather than to its imaginative re-creation in English. Maire and Yolland remain linguistically unintelligible to each other, but the meaning of those Irish sounds is perfectly clear:

Brian Friel and Music

219

yolland: Maire Chatach. (She [still] moves away.) yolland: Bun na hAbhann? (He says the name softly, almost privately, very tentatively, as if he were searching for a sound she might respond to. He tries again.) Drum Dubh? (Maire stops. She is listening. YOLLAND is encouraged.) Poll na gCaorach. Lis Maol. (Maire turns towards him.) maire: Lis na Gradh. (They are now facing each other and begin moving—almost imperceptibly— towards one another.) maire: Carraig an Phoill. yolland: Carraig na Ri. Loch na nEan.25

If there is a love duet being performed here, it is achieved through the music of Irish, however delicately Friel has orchestrated this music in the wider context of English. The ordinary signiﬁcation of place-names recedes in favour of a new and private code achieved through this mutual apprehension of sound. Whatever intelligibility attaches to verbal opera attains its most imaginative realization in this exchange, in which the symbolic and phonetic properties of the Irish language fulﬁl the dramatic and expressive functions of music elsewhere in Friel’s work. The music of Irish place-names is not music. And the ordinary condition of Irish in the play (as a foredoomed eloquence in opposition to English) is quickly recovered (and tenderly enlisted) as the scene reaches its climax. But the use of these sounds to create a private, imagined space between Yolland and Maire not only recovers the heightened rhetoric that conditions feeling in the love duet between Christy and Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World,26 it also conﬁrms the whole play in its advocacy of Irish as ‘a dream music that is both heard and imagined’, an advocacy achieved, it need hardly be added, through the medium of language.27 Through this medium, the generic presence of music abides 25

Friel, Translations, in Selected Plays, 428–9. Compare Yolland’s avocation towards the close of this scene (‘Because if you could understand me I could tell you how I spend my days either thinking of you or gazing up at your house in the hope that you’ll appear even for a second’), and Christy’s assurances to Pegeen (‘If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they’d be the like of the holy prophets, I’m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl’). If Synge’s love poetry seems overwritten in its classical allusions and its cadential assonance by comparison with Friel’s brilliantly contrived simplicity of diction in this scene, we might proﬁtably recall Jimmy Jack’s fantastic delusions about ‘ﬂashing-eyed Athene’ at the beginning and end of Translations. 27 Michael uses this phrase in the second act of Dancing at Lughnasa (cited below). 26

220

Brian Friel and Music

in Translations, and speciﬁcally the generic paradigm of opera. This presence is all the more easily identiﬁed as soon as we acknowledge that the Irish language itself enjoys the same status within the play that European music does in Philadelphia and Aristocrats. In its ebullient otherness, its rhetorical brilliance, and its phonetic invitations to love, the representation of Irish in Translations is both heard and imagined as a discourse ordained to silence. This in itself promotes the afﬁnity between the European musical masterwork and the expressive power of a language destined for eclipse in Friel’s play. The cultivation of one and the communal presence of the other will both be overtaken, remaindered, and silenced by Irish history in the nineteenth century. By the time Translations draws to a close in the faulty remembrances of Latin through the agency of the Master’s ‘Irish’, the fate of this expressive resource, as with the fate of European music in Ireland, has been sealed. Although the second scene in Act Two of Translations allows us to glimpse for one moment the appearance of both ghosts in the Irish literary imagination as a single entity, Friel does not thereafter abandon his preoccupation with music as a primary mode of communication. This preoccupation ﬁnds perhaps its most memorable expression in the speech which brings Dancing at Lughnasa to a close, and in which Michael’s consideration of music and movement in relation to language summons Friel’s own achievement in Translations: In that memory, too, the air is nostalgic with the music of the thirties. It drifts in from somewhere far away—a mirage of sound—a dream music that is both heard and imagined; that seems to be both itself and its own echo; a sound so alluring and so mesmeric that the afternoon is bewitched, maybe haunted, by it. And what is so strange about that memory is that everybody seems to be ﬂoating on those sweet sounds, moving rhythmically, languorously, in complete isolation; responding more to the mood of the music than to its beat. When I remember it, I think of dancing. Dancing with eyes half closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement—as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary . . .28

If this whole passage also recalls the shattered dream of Translations, it does so speciﬁcally in regard to a vanished discourse, a private space, and 28

Dancing at Lughnasa (London, 1990), 71. This speech ends the play.

Brian Friel and Music

221

ultimately, a culture that has disappeared. In Translations, the music of Friel’s English recalls the imagined music of Irish; in Dancing at Lughnasa, the whole play points again towards music itself in a double movement which only achieves intelligibility through a dramatic subordination of language to the play of movement and dance. In this double movement, the symbolic properties of Gaelic frenzy (‘The Mason’s Apron’) and a Cole Porter foxtrot (‘Anything Goes’) represent a radical embodiment of the pagan–Christian, primitive–civilized, Gaelic–European oppositions which the play constantly (and characteristically) proposes. Michael’s speech will seem to afﬁrm the ‘music of the thirties’ which suffuses the second act in preference to the tribal vigour of the ceilidh. When the women in Lughnasa dance to an Irish reel, Friel is extremely pointed in his description of this ﬁrst movement: ‘With this too loud music, this pounding beat, this shouting—calling—singing, this parodic reel, there is a sense of order being consciously subverted, of the women consciously and crudely caricaturing themselves, indeed of near-hysteria being induced.’29 In contrast, Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’, to which Gerry and Agnes dance with style and easy elegance, is the remembered music which animates Michael’s sense of a private world lost to language and imagined against the tide of exile and death which engulfs it in history.30 But in both cases the movement from language to music is unmistakable. 3 The people who huckster in words merely report on feeling. We speak feeling. (Performances)31 But it can be done. To sing. The sound to clothe our emotion and aspiration. Thomas Murphy, The Gigli Concert 32 29

Ibid. 22. As the play moves inexorably towards its tragic disclosures of death and exile, the prominence of ‘Anything Goes’ in the second act, by contrast with the subversions of the ‘parodic reel’ in the ﬁrst, summons a similar contrast of musical dialects, as between the ceilidh music and the Mendelssohn concerto, in Philadelphia. It seems legitimate to raise this comparison here, especially given the Gaelic–European contrasts in Lughnasa which otherwise centre upon Father Jack’s enthusiasm for (and identiﬁcation with) tribal Africa in contradistinction to the rigidities of Catholic life in Ireland. 31 Brian Friel, Performances (Oldcastle, Co. Meath, 2003), 31. 32 Thomas Murphy, The Gigli Concert (Dublin, 1984), 72. 30

222

Brian Friel and Music

Operas of the Irish mind: this formulation achieves its most explicit signiﬁcance, as I have argued in the Introduction to this book, in Thomas Murphy’s The Gigli Concert (1983). In its uniquely concentrated address on the idea of drama as opera (the Wagnerian formula, as it were, reversed), Murphy’s play tests the afﬁnity between language and music to breaking-point. At the heart of that play is a massive encounter between an ‘Irish man’ whose background and present appearance strikingly resemble Benjamino Gigli, and an English ‘dynamatologist’ named J. P. W. King, whose efforts to assist in the Irish man’s Faustian attempt to sing like Gigli end in the transference of this ambition to himself. To this end, The Gigli Concert saturates the spoken word with the sound of Italian and French Grand Opera, so that whole arias dominate and emotionally govern the spoken dialogue. At the end of the play, Murphy effects a coup-de-theâtre which can scarcely be conveyed in the prosaic description which the author of necessity provides: He [King] cues in his imaginary orchestra and we get the orchestral introduction to ‘Tu Che a Dio Spiegasti L’Ali’ and he sings the aria to its conclusion (Gigli’s voice): triumphant, emotional ending. He is kneeling on one knee: glow of red light receding, as to its point of origin. and shaft of yellow light becoming less intense: lights back to normal, JPW [King] on the ﬂoor, on hands or knees or whatever, eyes haunted, pained, hurt, frightened. Off, the church clock chiming six a.m. jpw [King]: Mama! Mama! Don’t leave me in this dark Some resilience within pulling himself up . . . He lets up the blind . . . He puts a few things in an old leather bag and whatever vodka remains in his pocket. Is about to leave, gets an idea. He opens the lower half of his window, plugs in the record player, switches it on, presses repeat button, ‘invites’ the music towards the open window, Gigli’s ‘O Paradiso’. Do not mind the pig-sty, Benimillo . . . mankind still has a delicate ear . . . that’s it. that’s it . . . sing on forever. That’s it. He unlocks the door and goes out, a little unsteady on his feet.33

King imagines himself singing like Gigli: the illusion of reality is, in that respect, preserved. But the reality itself is stranger than magic, because the play so magisterially resigns itself to the compelling sound-world of Donizetti’s opera in its quest for an authentic discourse in the theatre.34 The play resigns itself to music. Gigli, meanwhile, sings on forever. 33 34

Thomas Murphy, The Gigli Concert (Dublin, 1984), 75 The aria which King ‘sings’ is from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

Brian Friel and Music

223

Twenty years after The Gigli Concert, Brian Friel effected a similar resignation in Performances (2003). That play also ends in music: a performance of the last two movements of Janácˇek’s Second String Quartet, entitled ‘Intimate Letters’. In this instance, the music is not imagined or recorded: it is given in live performance by four musicians, a string quartet which interacts throughout the play with Janácˇek and a PhD student in musicology, Anezka, who is writing a dissertation on the composer’s late works. The play is set in Janácˇek’s work-room in Brno in 1928, a few months before he died, but the time is ‘the present’. The afﬁnities with The Gigli Concert are compelling: in both plays music is the sovereign intelligencer of feeling, of authentic discourse, of complex expression (‘Thank God my ﬁrst language was music’, Janácˇek observes. ‘And a much more demanding language it is too.’)35 The Gigli Concert exposes the spoken drama to the rival claims of opera (and all the more so on account of its Faustian allusions).36 Performances afﬁrms the greater powers of music through the medium of a string quartet, in which the distance between biography and art is decisively widened. Anezka and Janácˇek debate the signiﬁcance of the composer’s 700 letters written to the woman who undoubtedly inspired the quartet, Kamila Stösslová (hence the work’s title, Intimate Letters). Anezka would afﬁrm this correspondence as something which ‘enriches our intimacy’ with the ‘great amplitude’ of the music itself. Janácˇek disavows this necessity: ‘But ﬁnally, Anezka, ﬁnally—all this petty agitation aside—the work’s the thing. That must be insisted on. Everything has got to be ancillary to the work. And for all her naïveté in these matters even Kamila acknowledged the primacy of the work. She understood that from the very beginning: the work came ﬁrst.’37 In dramatizing this tension between the claims of the autonomous artwork and the claims of biography as a combattimento between language and music, Friel ends as Murphy ends, with spoken drama made silent in the presence of music. But on this occasion language itself—and with it, the whole enterprise of framing and understanding experience—is unmistakably absorbed by 35

Performances, 31. For an exploration of these allusions, see the chapters by Fintan O’Toole and Patrick Mason in Christopher Murray (ed.), Irish University Review, Thomas Murphy Special Issue, 17: 1 (Spring, 1987), 90–114. See also Fintan O’Toole’s study of Murphy’s plays, The Politics of Magic (London, 1992), and Harry White, ‘Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy and the Use of Music in Contemporary Irish Drama’, in Modern Drama, 33: 4 (1990), 553–62. Murphy cites from Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus in the play, but does not appear to exploit any direct reference to operatic treatments of the Faust myth. 37 Performances, 38. 36

224

Brian Friel and Music

the musical language of the quartet, so that ‘perfection of the work’ (the Yeatsian phrase which Janácˇek uses) implies perfection of discourse. It is impossible to suppress the romanticism of this process, in which Friel’s case for the sovereignty of the artwork extends beyond the immediate passion of his preference for music over words. But it is likewise impossible to ignore that aspect of Performances which makes it a classically tempered epilogue to the operatic astonishments of The Gigli Concert. Both plays promote the recognition of music (and dramatize the ache for its presence) in a theatrical tradition which notably seeks to repair its absence. These traces of longing and recognition in respect of music are also plainly evident in The Home Place (2005). This is a work which is framed by the experience of music, in this case a setting of Moore’s ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, which is performed offstage by a school choir in ‘opulent three-part harmony’38 at the beginning and end of the play. Much as Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song’ frames Give Me Your Answer, Do!, this arrangement of one of Moore’s Melodies attains the signiﬁcance of a ‘real presence’ in The Home Place.39 It signiﬁes the musical work as a mode of identity and refuge, it signiﬁes the autonomy of musical (hence 38 The Home Place, 11. Given the importance of this song in The Home Place—or more properly the importance of Tom Moore which it apostrophizes—it is poignant to recall that the same work inspired Beckett in What Where (see Ch. 6 above). It is also germane to contrast its explicit dramatic function here with its much more ambiguous function as an ‘inspiration’ in What Where. In that contrast, perhaps, lies something of the difference between Beckett’s (musical) modernism and the neo-romanticism of Friel’s engagement with music. 39 In Give Me Your Answer, Do! Friel appears to borrow the structure of a German art song to contain the design of the play and the passage of time therein. The monologues which open and close the work—Tom Connolly in conversation with his ever-silent daughter—correspond closely to the prelude and postlude which respectively preface and conclude songs in the Lied tradition. The substance of the work—the song, or in this case, the play—comes between. Friel appears to signal this structure explicitly in the two versions of Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song’ which he uses: an arrangement for piano alone in the opening and closing sequences, and the original song (performed by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf ) in the body of the play. When the words of the song are recited in German late in the second act, the spoken text stands in ironic isolation from the music, but by then the very matter of Heine’s poem has been completely absorbed into the strange pairings of which the play is constructed. Given these afﬁnities, it is hard not to read Give Me Your Answer Do! as a play whose shape is governed by the structural conventions of the German art song in general, and by Mendelssohn’s song in particular. I have developed this argument in greater detail in ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, 95–7. I borrow the term ‘real presence’ with regard to the function of music in these works (Mendelssohn, Moore) from George Steiner, whose ‘observation on composition and string quartets’ is acknowledged by Friel in his preliminaries to The Home Place, 9, as having been ‘invaluable’ to him.

Brian Friel and Music

225

artistic) experience in the face of social collapse, and it nominates Tom Moore as ‘the voice of our nation’. In its setting, disposition of character, and dramatic situation, The Home Place is strongly reminiscent of Translations: the action occurs during the summer of 1878 at ‘The Lodge’, which is home to a landowning family named Gore. A cousin, Richard Gore, is visiting The Lodge for the purposes of ‘measuring people’s heads’ in order to determine ‘that every race has its own distinctive physical characteristics: distinctive height; colour of eyes; shape of skull; their nigrescence’.40 Gore is naturally not measuring the heads of his own people, but rather the heads of the ‘Celtic’ tribe which lives on his cousin’s land. The whole absurd exercise immediately recalls the mapmaking in Translations, as does the murder of a neighbouring landlord reported at the outset of the play. Among much else, The Home Place is a compassionate indictment of colonial servitude: however close relations have become between planter (the Gore household) and dispossessed native (the O’Donnell household), they are the inheritors of an inherently ﬂawed social polity which has its origins in the cartography and military governance of the previous half-century represented by Friel in Translations. Now (1878), as then (1831), the doomed enterprise of colonial rule is exposed. The Home Place is Translations revisited. This retrospective quality is especially marked in the character of Clement O’Donnell, the local schoolteacher whose ancestor in Translations is the Master, Hugh O’Donnell. But now, in place of the Mediterranean refuge of classical antiquity, Clement ﬁnds conviction in music, and in the music of Thomas Moore in particular. When he is seen through the lenses of Richard Gore, the distortions that accrue to his character nevertheless betray something of Friel’s own perspective on music as a protective against the brutal misunderstanding of colonial stupidity. Clement’s own sense of Moore (‘the music liberates them brieﬂy from their poverty, Mr Richard’)41 is a close recovery of Hugh’s explanation of the signiﬁcance of Irish to Yolland in Translations (‘it is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of responding to . . . inevitabilities’), but it is also an afﬁrmation of art as an authentic mode of identity: ‘He [Moore] divines us accurately. 40 The Home Place, 20. As if to conﬁrm the historical foundation for his dramatization of this exercise, Friel reproduces a photograph of ‘anthropometry in Aran’ and an extract from Studies in Irish Craniology: The Aran Islands, Co. Galway by Professor A. C. Haddon, read before the Royal Irish Academy on 12 December 1892 (ibid. 76–9). 41 Ibid. 40.

226

Brian Friel and Music

He reproduces features of our history and our character. And he is an astute poet who knows that certain kinds of songs are necessary for his people.’42 Here is Richard Gore’s reaction to Clement’s interpretation of Moore which follows immediately on Clement’s departure: richard: A buffoon! ‘The voice of our nation’—good God! christopher: As he says himself, a man of some nicety. . . . . . . . . . . . . richard: And notice the close-set eyes and the short arms. Certainly not native of this area, is he? christopher: The O’Donnells have been here for close on two millennia. richard: Deformed by in-breeding, then. christopher: Clement is a friend of ours, Richard, and a friend of this house. richard: Alcohol—or indeed ether—would account for the distended nostrils but not the protruding forehead. And you tell me he is a man of music? . . . Because very often when a specimen deviates from the physical norms of his tribe, some psychological peculiarity manifests itself, too. So a skill in music wouldn’t be all that unusual. Can’t have had any formal music training, our dominie, did he? Couldn’t have. Must be instinctive.43

The crassness of Victorian anthropometry cannot entirely occlude the signiﬁcance of music in this passage, and all the more so because the offstage performance of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ itself belies Richard’s understanding of Clement’s musicianship as a psychological aberration. If ‘the formation of nations and civilizations is a willed act’ (Making History), it follows that the formations of art engender civilization, nationhood, coherent identity. The presence of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ is more than a rebuke to Richard’s colonial silliness: it is an aural image of Irishness, achieved through music, and notably through this ‘opulent’ harmonization of ‘the voice of our nation’. In his recovery of Moore in The Home Place, Friel also retrieves Moore’s own insistence on the intimacy between music and Irish politics which he sought to express in poetry. In Moore’s case, this was a poetry which deﬁned itself in relation to the expressive condition of music, to the extent that his own verse made the music intelligible. In Friel’s case, the creation of plays which enlist musical works as a conduit of meaning, or which in their generic and expressive intimacy with musical drama produce operas of the Irish mind, or which prefer the claims of music over language (and of art over narrative history), brings the relationship between music and the Irish 42

The Home Place, 20.

43

Ibid. 42–3.

Brian Friel and Music

227

literary imagination to its keenest pitch in the theatre. In that enterprise, the musical instincts of Shaw, Synge, and Beckett attain perhaps their most memorable and sustained development. ‘Listen to the music. Pay attention to the music’: these soft imperatives which bring The Home Place to a close summarize not only a lifetime’s engagement with one art through the medium of another; they also prompt the conclusion that Friel’s own plays ﬁll the void created by the long absence of comparable musical works from the Irish mind. The quest for music ends in words, but the words themselves are perpetually engaged with the formative condition of music. In this engagement, the general absence of art music from Irish cultural history is signiﬁcantly redeemed.

8 Words Alone: Seamus Heaney, Music, and the Jurisdiction of Literary Forms

‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write Something for us?’ (‘The Flight Path’)1 Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a latetwentieth-century context of politically approved themes, postcolonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to so much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the ﬁrst sense—as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices—is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means . . . (The Redress of Poetry)2 Over and over the tenor shrieks, ‘Schweig nur, schweig!’ leaping now a sixth, now a seventh, now an octave . . . Meanwhile, the 1

Published in Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London, 1996), 22–6, at 23. Republished in Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London, 2002), 257–61, at 259–60. 2

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

229

accompanying orchestra, Reason’s surrogate, reels and lurches violently. The effect is nothing short of terrifying—perhaps even more now than in Bach’s own time, since we who remember the twentieth century have greater reason than Bach’s contemporaries ever had to wince at the sound of a high-pitched German voice stridently shouting reason down. (Richard Taruskin on an aria from Bach’s cantata BWV 178)3

1 The chief intelligence of postmodernism, it sometimes seems, is to ‘pack up the moon and dismantle the sun’: its ferocious appetite for indictment is equalled only by the moral authority it derives from the manifest failure of the humanities to humanize, which is the unassailable legacy of post-war Europe. This is a legacy in which, as Seamus Heaney remarks, any attempt to defend the value of art has been ‘disastrously weakened in the last century . . . by the historical fact of the Holocaust’.4 The pure good of poetry has all but been voided by our own history, and to take possession of that inheritance is to call into question the legitimacy of art (music, poetry, the preoccupations of a study such as this one), except by way of further indictment. When Heaney asks what good ‘a devotion to and appreciation of the beautiful’ can be in the aftermath of those who ‘could authorise mass killings and attend a Mozart concert on the same evening’, his only answer is that it is ‘a danger and a delusion to expect music and poetry to do too much, it is a diminishment of them and a derogation to ignore what they can do’.5 There is a particular delicacy about this apposition of music and poetry in the context of Irish cultural history, given especially the correlative function of Irish poetry in relation to art music, a function which Heaney’s verse both conﬁrms and queries, not least when it encounters music as an equal partner in the enterprise of art, which is itself a rare 3 This passage is from The Oxford History of Music (New York, 2005), ii. 369. See Harry White, ‘The Rules of Engagement: Richard Taruskin and the History of Western Music’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 2 (2006–7), 21–49. The German phrase ‘schweig nur’ might be rendered as ‘be quiet’ (although it is provocatively translated by Taruskin as ‘shut up’). 4 Seamus Heaney, ‘On Poetry and Professing’, in Finders Keepers, 69. 5 Ibid.

230

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

occurrence.6 But the ‘danger and delusion’ of postmodernism which he identiﬁes in his 1991 lecture ‘On Poetry and Professing’ remains to be addressed, because the prestige and authority of this diminishment can (and often does) eclipse the ‘eminence’ and ‘fundamentally selfdelighting inventiveness’ of artistic technique advanced as its own justiﬁcation in The Redress of Poetry. A (very) late romanticism, in which, as I have tried to argue throughout this study, poetry ﬁlls the void created by the absence of art music, will seem all the more tenuous in a critical environment which not only encourages the radical historicization of this music (as in Richard Taruskin’s reading of Bach in relation to German National Socialism), but which undermines, as a fundamental expression of its own raison d’être, the legitimacy of art itself. The autonomy of the individual subject—at least insofar as art is concerned—is in question as never before. The relations between subject and object (as between poetry and history, music and society, narrative and meaning), are now interrogated (a favourite verb) with a stringency that allows the domain of high culture to feature as an obstruction to history. In this representation, the claims of poetry, musical and otherwise, acquire a new and vulnerable signiﬁcance. Heaney’s juxtaposition of the ‘eminence’ of poetry as a self-standing preoccupation and the ‘post-colonial backlash’ of critical commentary in The Redress of Poetry invites a strategic consideration of that fundamental tension between the autonomous condition of art and the claims of history which postmodernism emphatically resolves in favour of its own interrogatory discourse. This is a resolution not easily contradicted, if only because the empirical and moral authority which this discourse enjoys (as when it identiﬁes the uselessness and collusion of ‘high culture’) combines with an exhaustive apparatus of engagement by which the autonomy of individual artworks is systematically deconstructed. It is this combination which—as an example—licenses the convictions of Richard Taruskin when he reads the history of western music as a tradition in terminal decline. His particular identiﬁcation and indictment of German idealism—itself a cardinal expression of that romantic autonomy to which a poet such as Heaney self-evidently subscribes—underwrites those deconstructions of individual musical works (as in the analysis of Bach cited here) which afﬁrm a theory of musical production as an expression of political philosophy in general, and of power relations in particular. The illusion of autonomy is fatally weak6 See the discussion of Heaney’s ‘In Memoriam Sean O’Riada’, in the Introduction to the present study.

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

231

ened by the revealed discourse of collusion, privilege, and sovereignty which the music carries forward. The loss of this illusion does not eclipse the individuating power of musical expression and organization, but it does entail a reading of music (and of European art music in particular) which subordinates, once and for all, the aesthetic independence (the autonomy) of musical works to the historical agenda of which they are an expression. This is a subordination, as I have argued elsewhere, which is fortiﬁed by the crisis of expression apostrophized in the very idea of ‘classical music’, described by Taruskin as ‘the literate tradition’.7 Such a crisis in contemporary music throws the currency of contemporary poetry—its dissemination, its canonic ascriptions, its evident powers of engagement—into particularly sharp relief. In the Introduction to this book I have already posited a likening as between the hegemony of the Irish literary imagination in the twentieth century (in poetry, in ﬁction, in drama) and the corresponding ascendancy of the German musical imagination in the nineteenth century. In either case, this hegemony will entail not only a history of inﬂuence, but a history of dissent, but in both cases it is a modest conclusion to propose that the national longing for form drives this imaginative enterprise.8 In Yeats, as in Wagner, this drive is explicitly engaged, but as a general motivation, the term itself (‘the national longing for form’) helps us to understand those relations between political growth and imaginative expression which link the Irish writer and the German composer together. For better or worse, questions of identity, responsibility, and nationhood surface in the bid to satisfy this longing, in music no less than in literature. With these questions in mind, the postcolonial indictment of Seamus Heaney’s work as ‘the elevation of a minor Irish poet’ in whose work cultural nationalism is merged ‘with the imperial ideology which frames it,’ can be enlisted to conﬁrm the romanticism of Heaney’s own perception of the relations between the Irish writer and the language he commands.9 In this perception, whether it is negatively construed as a collusion or not, the question of language as a correlative for music can be more closely addressed. 7 For an extended assessment of this subordination of individual works to the relative concepts of intellectual history in Taruskin’s work, see White, ‘The Rules of Engagement’, passim. 8 Declan Kiberd uses this phrase, which originated as a general usage in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, as a chapter heading in his Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). As Kiberd demonstrates, ‘the national longing for form’ is both addressed and satisﬁed in Irish writing, and notably by Joyce’s Ulysses. 9 These phrases are from an essay by David Lloyd, cited in full below.

232

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney 2 The following for the record, in the light Of everything before and since: One bright May morning, nineteen-seventy-nine, Just off the red-eye special from New York, I’m on the train for Belfast. Plain, simple Exhilaration at being back: the sea At Skerries, the nuptial hawthorn bloom, The trip north taking sweet hold like a chain On every bodily sprocket. Enter then— As if he were some ﬁlm noir border guard— Enter this one I’d last met in a dream, More grimfaced now than in the dream itself . . . . . So he enters and sits down Opposite and goes for me head on. ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write Something for us?’ ‘If I do write something, Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’ And that was that. Or words to that effect. The gaol walls all those months were smeared with shite. Out of Long Kesh after his dirty protest The red eyes were the eyes of Ciaran Nugent Like something out of Dante’s scurfy hell, Drilling their way through the rhymes and images Where I too walked behind the righteous Virgil, As safe as houses and translating freely: When he had said all this, his eyes rolled And his teeth, like a dog’s teeth, clamping round a bone, Bit into the skull and again took hold. (‘The Flight Path’)10

David Lloyd’s ‘Pap For the Dispossessed’ ﬁrst appeared in 1985 and was republished in Lloyd’s 1993 volume entitled Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment.11 It was then, and perhaps remains now, the most severe j’accuse directed against Heaney’s com10 11

From Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London, 1996), 22–6. (Dublin, 1993), 13–40.

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

233

plicity as a writer to have entered the public domain, all the more so because of its acute and strategic intelligence. Directed against the grain of Heaney’s (increasingly) secure position as the successor to Yeats, the essay insisted upon the circulation and lustre of Heaney’s poetry as an exemplary expression of cultural commodiﬁcation, in which the poet’s complacent preoccupation with the ‘well-made poem’ and his corresponding ‘subjugation’ of ethical concerns in favour of aesthetic considerations had been eclipsed by a meretricious reception history which all but ignored these disturbing compromises.12 The principal strategy of Lloyd’s indictment was to locate Heaney’s (apparently) narcissistic engagement with poetry within the broader context of Irish cultural nationalism, in which the poet had wilfully ignored ‘the real basis of the present struggle’ in Northern Ireland (identiﬁed by Lloyd as ‘the economic and social conditions of a post-colonial state’).13 Instead, Heaney would invent new mythologies which could prop up the colonial dialectics of Irish literature that originated in the early nineteenth century. In the perpetuation of this state of affairs (England versus Ireland, Catholic versus Protestant, Coloniser versus Colonized), Heaney assented to a romanticism which sought ‘to bypass on several fronts the problematic relation of writing to identity’.14 In this enterprise, his recourse to ﬁxed forms conﬁrmed an idealized communion with English romanticism in particular that contradicted any real claim to a proper engagement with things as they actually are: the speciﬁc relation of an ‘Irish identity’ to the English literary—and political— establishment provides not only the language, but the very terms within which the question of identity is posed and resolved, the terms for which it is the question to be posed and resolved. For it is not simply the verse form, the melody, or what-not, that the poet takes over; it is the aesthetic, and the ethical and political formulations it subsumes, that the Romantic and imperial tradition supplies.15

I can see clearly enough how such a reading would provoke and perhaps even incense anyone conversant with Heaney’s own sustained 12 See ibid. 36: ‘In this period where the illusion of a free-market economy is disintegrating in crisis, it is appropriate that, within the increasingly marginalised domain of high culture, a pedagogy locating the autonomy of the individual subject in the private arbitration of value should become increasingly retrenched and all the more earnestly defended. It is perhaps only a small irony that the product of this pedagogy turns out to be such an unprecedented homogeneity of “taste” that a reviewer can state, “Everyone knows by now that Heaney is a major poet”, and be conﬁrmed not only by the accord of his peers, but by the remarkably high sales of the volumes concerned.’ 13 14 15 Ibid. 18–19. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23.

234

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

interrogation of this quandary, but what is perhaps less apparent is the debt which Lloyd rather brusquely acknowledges (‘the verse form, the melody, or what-not’) in Heaney’s continued absorption of ﬁxed forms,16 even if the point of this acknowledgement is to afﬁrm the underlying romanticism and imperialism which these forms entail. Lloyd does not suppress Heaney’s own originality of diction which arises from this inheritance, but rather insists upon its ethical irresponsibility in the priority which Heaney accords to it. When this imperialism is combined with a proposed ‘psychic continuity between the sacriﬁcial practices of an Iron Age people and “the psychology of the Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing” ’, the result, in Heaney’s ‘Bog’ poems, is, according to Lloyd, ‘effectively to reduce history to myth’.17 In that indictment lies a more general arraignment of the entire project of romanticism, which is to say the entire model of consciousness which legitimates music, poetry, ﬁction, and drama in any European construction worthy of the name. To criticize ‘the subordination of human agency to aesthetic form’ in Heaney’s poetry18 is akin to condemning Beethoven’s idealism on the grounds that his late string quartets are immensely difﬁcult to play, require decades of physical and mental preparation, and remain indifferent to the economic and political absolutism which allowed them to arise in the ﬁrst place. One can condemn Beethoven in this way, but the political advantages of doing so (whatever they may be) are nugatory by comparison with the grand indulgence of writing about music or poetry or any other form of artistic enterprise which deviates from an engagement with social history or the state of the health service. And in an intellectual climate such as our own, when a history of western music published by Oxford University Press can represent the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach in direct relation to the strident brutalities of Nazi rhetoric, the perceived responsibilities of music and poetry and their concomitant failures in relation to the human condition will enjoy a regulating (and moral) authority that the unacknowledged legislators could scarcely have dreamed of. Postcolonialism comes at a high price, especially when it identiﬁes concepts such as ‘the aestheticization of violence’ as an underlying motivation for Heaney’s poetry. This reading is another version of Bach as a pre-Enlightenment Nazi: ‘The 16 I mean ‘continued’ in the sense that Heaney sustains a tradition of borrowing such ﬁxed forms from English romanticism inaugurated by Yeats. 17 Lloyd, ‘Pap For the Dispossessed’, 27. 18 Ibid. 28.

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

235

unpleasantness of such poetry lies in the manner in which the contradictions between the ethical and aesthetic elements in the writing are easily resolved by the subjugation of the former to the latter in order to produce the “well-made” poem.’19 If the principal goal of this criticism is to condemn the artiﬁce of poetry as an end in itself (which is a volition that is immediately and permanently vulnerable to censure, as Heaney explicitly recognizes), then one can declare a conﬂict of interest and leave this postcolonial perspective to one side. But Lloyd’s indictment not only forces the issue of the ‘well-made’ poem (or the well-made sonata, for that matter) as a neo-romantic affront to the ideology of postmodernism, but also the less polemicized issue of public responsibility in relation to writing poetry in the ﬁrst place. Both of these issues are engaged by Heaney in ‘The Flight Path’, a poem which might well be regarded as a response to David Lloyd. ‘The Flight Path’ is in six sections, of which I have cited most of the fourth above. The whole poem surveys a life lived in private and public spaces through the agency of its central metaphor, the ﬂight of a plane and where its arrival might lie. But the fourth section represents a tense confrontation between public and private in terms which Heaney has negotiated almost from the outset of his career, except that in this instance the problem is voiced in extremis as a reportage which transcends the visionary nightmares that periodically afﬂict the poet’s imagination and conscience.20 The obscene colloquialism (‘When, for fuck’s sake’) indicates the borderland between poetry and exasperated direct speech: when it occurs, Heaney signiﬁes in turn the apparent recovery of his composure in the steady iambic pulse of ‘And that was that. Or words to that effect.’ Nothing prepares for the grafﬁto of the line which follows, perfect in its iambic equilibrium, the measured tread deliberating the violence of the sentiment, the verse ending in a cauterised scrawl of excrement: ‘The gaol walls all those months were smeared with shite.’ Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Not on this occasion, thanks all the same. The metre is Elizabethan, as trim and regular as a court dance, but the sentiment is ﬂung in the reader’s face nevertheless. ‘Gaol’

19

Ibid. 31. An earlier example of this kind of vision occurs in the poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, which Heaney published in its entirety in North (1975), having previously published the closing stanza of the poem as an epigraph to Wintering Out (1972). 20

236

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

is an archaic seduction. What follows that line is a faltering allegiance to form, as the metre stumbles and the red eyes of the prisoner penetrate the free verse of righteousness, of Virgil, of Dante, and of Heaney himself.21 The self-indictment, all the more persuasively achieved because of this canonic alignment, terminates in a self-quotation from ‘Ugolino’, Heaney’s version of cantos XXII and XXIII from the Inferno, now made unambiguous in their helpless account of torture, starvation, and death, by this report from the Maze Prison in 1979. One might even suggest that ‘The Flight Path’ answers the charge of ‘Pap For the Dispossessed’ by its recovery of the earlier poem (‘Ugolino’), if only because David Lloyd’s principal energies are directed against the volume in which it ﬁrst appeared, Field Work (1979). What cannot be in doubt is that ‘The Flight Path’ glosses ‘Ugolino’, and announces its intentions of doing so through the agency of that ‘well-made’ music which Lloyd so conspicuously disdains.

3 Heaney’s extensive translations of Virgil and Dante have, among much else, conﬁrmed the synonymous condition of poetry and music in his own verse, as when Virgil addresses him in ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ (2001): Here are my words you’ll have to ﬁnd a place for: Carmen, ordo, nascitur, saeculum, gens. Their gist in your tongue and province should be clear Even at this stage. Poetry, order, the times, The nation . . .22

The gist with respect to song is especially clear: song is poetry, and poetry is song (that is all ye know on earth), an indispensable intelligencer of all those other resources necessary to that contract between language and experience which Heaney discovered in Wordsworth and Yeats. In a sequence published in North, the collection which immediately precedes 21 The echo between the red-eye ﬂight from New York and the red eyes of Ciaran Nugent is a characteristically adroit deployment of technique of the kind which Lloyd either disparages or disallows in his reading of earlier poems by Heaney, but it would be interesting to know whether he might modify his general conclusions (which held good from the ﬁrst appearance of his essay in 1985 until its collection in 1993) in the light of poems such as ‘The Flight Path’. 22 Seamus Heaney, ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, in Electric Light (London, 2001), 11–12.

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

237

Field Work, Heaney situates his poetic as an outgrowth ﬁrst of English romanticism (in a quotation from The Prelude). He follows this with a quotation from Yeats’s Autobiographies which conﬁrms this lineage by drawing attention to Yeats’s own early cognizance of politics and poetry, in which ‘the pleasure of rhyme’ gave way to an early aspiration ‘to die ﬁghting for the Fenians’.23 Heaney’s own ‘singing school’ (the title of the sequence) acknowledges this dualism from the outset: ‘Ulster was British, but with no rights on | The English lyric’, the ‘muzzle of a sten-gun’ a rival presence to the ‘ﬁne lawns of elocution’ which led to poetry.24 If this education, this ‘growth of a poet’s mind’,25 entailed a ﬁrst brush with ‘the ministry of fear’, it also reminds us that Heaney’s ‘relief at being harboured in a poetic which allows him the shelter of the English tradition and voice’ was no less a relief from the violence of Belfast in the early 1970s, a relief which Lloyd appears to discount.26 The idea of ‘shelter,’ of refuge in an established tradition, appears as a failing in Lloyd’s account. I would argue, by contrast, that Heaney’s reliance on the ﬁxed forms of English romanticism, and on the sonnet in particular, represents a strategic concession to the prior availability of forms which is characteristic of (perhaps even essential to) a writer in his position. It is, at any rate, a concession which obtains so frequently in European art music as a procedural principle that I draw attention to it here, given especially Heaney’s own strong sense of having attached himself to one tradition in order to give expression to another one.27 Sonnet 23

Cited by Heaney in ‘Singing School’, from North (London, 1975), 62. Heaney, ‘The Ministry of Fear’ (‘Singing School’), in ibid. 64–5. 25 William Wordsworth’s subtitle for The Prelude. 26 Lloyd, ‘Pap For the Dispossessed’, 34. Given Lloyd’s insistence on the poet’s failure to confront the reality of Ireland in favour of resuscitating old myths of identity and difference, it is odd that Lloyd does not press home the material context of Heaney’s ‘relief ’ and ‘safe harbour’ which he found in Wicklow. 27 There are so many precedents for this kind of technical reliance and absorption of a ‘central’ tradition from the perceived ‘periphery’ in nineteenth-century European music that they are in danger of clouding the issue under discussion, but one particularly luminous example is the Czech composer Bedrˇich Smetana’s creation of a national tradition of opera in his homeland by way of German and Austrian models (Mozart above all), which entailed a corresponding rejection of indigenous folk song as a valid or viable source for Bohemian art music. See John Clapham, ‘Smetana, Bedrˇich’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xvii. 391–408; Clapham remarks that Smetana ‘understood the need to create a Czech musical style, but unlike most other nationalists he refused to rely on indigenous folksong for the purpose. Consequently his style largely comprises elements and characteristics that are personal rather than national, but it is signiﬁcant that these came to be almost universally accepted as Czech by his countrymen’ (403). 24

238

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

sequences, including ‘The Glanmore Sonnets’ (Field Work), ‘Clearances’ (The Haw Lantern, 1987), and ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ (Electric Light), allow the responsibility of the form to govern the originality of Heaney’s diction, which is the verbal music it accommodates. The persistence of this formal reliance allows us to identify a conservative reinsurance on the individual talent which is guaranteed by tradition, a strategy which not only summons Yeats (notably with regard to his use of ottava rima), but which also answers Heaney’s own delicate insistence on the autonomy and responsibility of poetry at one and the same time. In this insistence, the governance of an original verbal music by traditional forms speaks to Heaney’s lifelong assent to three principles in particular: the principle of English romanticism, in which music does not function except as a verbal analogue;28 the principle of Yeats as an example, in which Irish poetry in English is animated by the symbolism of music in relation to the poetic imagination and also by the invention of a distinctive verbal music to fortify this association; and, ﬁnally, by the synthesis of Gaelic convention (poetry as song) with Heaney’s own discovery of the same convention in the poetry of classical antiquity, a synthesis which his translations from Brian Merriman and Ovid make abundantly clear.29 This adherence to the responsibility of forms is (perhaps self-evidently) not limited in Heaney to his cultivation of the sonnet, but the form itself bestows a relative condition, a containment which controls the poem, at least insofar as formal expectations are concerned. Although it would be tempting to relate these formal expectations (in the sonnet) to corresponding conventions in music, I feel impelled to resist such analogies.30 An observation from Seamus Deane in respect of Yeats’s stanzas (in relation to Heaney) does encourage a musical enlightenment nevertheless, albeit a modest one: Yeats’s tower is transposed into the poems; for Heaney these themselves become buildings, stanzas return to their origin by becoming rooms, and the verbal actuality of place queries the insubstantiality of space; but space is what 28 It is salutary in the present context to retrieve the rather simple, but vital, condition of English romanticism by comparison with its European counterparts, namely, that it did not extend to musical composition until long after the romantic movement had passed in Europe. 29 See especially Heaney’s The Midnight Verdict (Meath, 1993), which juxtaposes translations from the classical Irish of Brian Merriman (c.1745–1805) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 30 As in an analogy between sonnet and sonata, not on account of the semantic correspondence, but because of the strong predictive presence of formal design in either genre.

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

239

place becomes in vision. This afﬁrmation and denial are an operatic affair in Yeats. The music is Wagnerian, the libretto Nietzschean. Heaney loves the Götterdämmerung atmosphere, but his admiration is more pronounced than his affection.31

Perhaps, too, the stanza in Heaney (in the case of this argument, the sonnet) becomes ‘a room’ as chamber music becomes a room,32 in which the auditory impact of the imagination—the verbal music—is contained by the concentration and prior existence of the form. The ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ give evidence of this containment, so that the ‘portentous rhetoric’ of which Lloyd complains is not derived from ‘highly-strung aestheticism’, but rather from an exact accord between the intelligibility of the form itself and the verbal music it controls.33 A later work, ‘The Augean Stables’ (the fourth sonnet ‘From Hellas’), exempliﬁes this accord: My favourite bas-relief: Athene showing Heracles where to broach the river bank With a nod of her high helmet, her staff sunk In the exact spot, the Alpheus ﬂowing Out of its course into the deep dung strata Of King Augeas’ reeking yard and stables. Sweet dissolutions from the water tables, Blocked doors and packed ﬂoors deluging like gutters . . . And it was there in Olympia, down among green willows, The lustral wash and run of river shallows, That we heard of Sean Brown’s murder in the grounds Of Bellaghy GAA Club. And imagined Hose-water smashing hard back off the asphalt In the car park where his athlete’s blood ran cold.34

31 Seamus Deane, ‘Powers of Earth and Visions of Air’, in Catherine Molloy and Phyllis Carey (eds.), Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit (London, 1996), 27–34, at 33. 32 I am conscious of the double meaning in this phrase: chamber music does ‘become’ a room—that is (partly) what it is for. 33 In passing, the adjective ‘portentous’ seems to be a spectacularly wrong-headed qualiﬁcation for the mesmeric cantabile of Heaney’s technique in the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’, if only because it is a technique which often depends on the perfect pitch that allows him to transform a commonplace perception into a vivid poeticism without damage to the perception itself. Thus, the scansion of place-names in the ﬁrst line of the seventh sonnet (‘Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea’) at once satisﬁes the musical expectations of the form, summons the ordinary experience of a weather forecast, and converts this auditory impression into an accord between the verbal music (which intensiﬁes and deepens through the sonnet) and the passage from night into day which the poem mimetically apprehends. See Lloyd, ‘Pap For the Dispossessed’, 34. 34 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Augean Stables’, in Electric Light, 41.

240

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

This is the form at breaking-point: the poem is drenched in water, but even a ﬁrst reading would establish the difference between the octet, with its greedy, sensual appetite for description, and the fading promise of this deliberate excess in the sestet, which begins in the same key and then modulates abruptly into bad news from Ireland. The liquescent ﬂood of the ﬁrst ten lines, a riverrun which blurs the difference between image, imagination, and place (as between the bas-relief, Heaney’s elaboration of it and the continuity between this and the poet’s own appearance in Greece), drains away before the drab, blunt telegram of violent death ‘in the grounds of Bellaghy GAA Club’. That last phrase is calculated to dry up the luscious ﬂood of imagery that precedes it. Then water interrupts this sober bulletin with its fresh assault on the consolations of mythology and warm refuge. The ‘lustral wash’ is only as real as that which is ‘imagined’: the closing couplet keeps the pulse, but not much else (the traditional end-rhymes are internally transposed and displaced),35 except the water. This couplet brings things to a head (as the form dictates), and voids in one compact image the impressionism and redeeming rhetoric of all that aquatic music. In its place: asphalt, a car park, and staccato intimations of mortal fear.36 In such a complete symbiosis of form and content, of design (the public contract of intelligibility, and lyric technique (the neo-romantic virtuosity of poetic expression), the mental journey from ‘words for music’ to ‘words alone’ is not only complete (as it is in Yeats), but unmistakably expressive of that desire for meaning which the sonnet attempts to satisfy.37 This process is deﬁned by Heaney in his essay The Government of the Tongue (1986) in the following formula: ‘As readers, we submit to the jurisdiction of achieved form.’38 It is a jurisdiction whose dedication to the sovereignty of verbal music is all the more striking ‘in a late-twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and “silence-breaking” writing of all

35

As in ‘hard back’ and ‘car park’. This reading doesn’t inspect the vein of allusion worked in the poem, still less exhaust it. In this regard, echoes of Moore (‘Sweet dissolutions’), Shakespeare (‘down among green willows’), and ‘John Brown’s Body’ (‘Sean Brown’s murder’) afﬁrm the orphic, performative rhetoric of the sonnet, of the sonnet as song. 37 I have used this phrase throughout in the sense of ‘words alone are certain good’ (Yeats). 38 Cited by Derek Mahon in his review of The Government of the Tongue, entitled ‘The Need to Sing’ and published in Mahon’s Journalism (Meath, 1996), 112–14, at 113. 36

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

241

kinds’. ‘Achieved form’ is likewise made prominent by a cultural history in which this process contributes decisively to the ascendancy of language over music. 4 [The] vitality and insouciance of lyric poetry, the relish of its own inventiveness, its pleasuring strain . . . comes under threat when poetry remembers that its self-gratiﬁcation must be perceived as a kind of affront to a world preoccupied with its own imperfections, pains and catastrophes. What right has poetry to its quarantine? . . . Should it, as Austin Clarke said in another context, take the clapper from the bell of rhyme? . . . Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efﬁcacy of poetry is nil—no lyric ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed. (Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue)39 Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is the secret diary of a nation. (Richard Taruskin)40

The appearance of Athene in the ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ (‘ﬂashing-eyed Athene’, as she is described in Translations), is emblematic of an engagement between contemporary Irish poetry and the literature of classical antiquity which has deepened over two decades to the extent that it might be described as a secondary tradition in relation to the received history of ideas about Irish writing. This tradition or corpus of translations belongs principally (but by no means exclusively) to Heaney and Derek Mahon, so that Virgil, Ovid, Sophocles, Juvenal, and Lucretius (among others) appear and reappear as part of a poetic continuum 39 Republished in part in Finders Keepers, 180–90, at 181 and 189. In the ﬁnal sentence Heaney is referring to the parable of Christ and the woman caught in adultery, when Christ answered her accusers by writing in the sand. 40 Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, iv. 479.

242

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

which absorbs (and often bypasses) the Celtic mythologies of the Literary Renaissance.41 Although this accumulation has attracted extensive commentary (particularly with regard to Mahon), it is still fair comment to suggest that the prominence of these translations, especially when taken together with Mahon’s increased preoccupation with the idea of translation as ‘adaptation’, has not yet been wholly received into the critical discourse devoted to Irish poetry in English.42 In the meantime, my purpose in adverting to these translations here is to suggest that they derive, at least in part, from a fundamentally English romanticism: Heaney’s ‘favourite bas-relief ’ is not Keats’s Grecian urn, but the two are connected in their preference for those unheard melodies which symbolize the poetic imagination in early nineteenth-century English poetry no less than they do in Yeats’s recovery of bardic culture. When Heaney translates Virgil’s ninth eclogue in Electric Light, the dialogue between Lycidas and Moeris seems in its Irish diction to afﬁrm this continuity between language as music in the ancient world and Heaney’s practised understanding of poetry as a right to be defended: moeris The things we have lived to see… The last thing You could’ve imagined happening has happened. An outsider lands and says he has the rights To our bit of ground. ‘Out, old hands,’ he says, ‘This place is mine.’ And these kid-goats in the creel— Bad cess to him—these kids are his. All’s changed. lycidas The story I heard was about Menalcas, How your song-man’s singing saved the place… moeris That’s what you would have heard. But songs and tunes Can no more hold out against brute force than doves When eagles swoop.43 41 I think there is a difference between these explicit translations and the presence of Greek mythology in Yeats (as in ‘Leda and the Swan’). 42 See Hugh Haughton, ‘ “The Importance of Elsewhere”: Mahon and Translation’, in Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Gerrards Cross, 2002), 145–84. The likening as between Mahon’s translations of classical and modern European poetry and the German art song which I brieﬂy proposed in the Introduction to this book is to some extent fortiﬁed by the appearance of Mahon’s recent volume, Adaptations (2006), which consists entirely of such translations, including the text of a song-cycle written for his daughter. 43 Seamus Heaney, ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’, in Electric Light, 31– 4, at 31.

Words Alone: Seamus Heaney

243

The tiny Yeatsian motif (‘All’s changed’) may encourage a conjunction between the dispossessed singer in Virgil’s original and his representation here, but in any case the redress of poetry remains the same. In Arcadia or Belfast, no lyric ever stopped a tank, and no tank can obliterate the imperative to sing. These assertions will not assuage the counter-claims of postmodernism, especially not when these latter depend on a radical critique of the subject’s claim to autonomy. But they do modify any reading of poetry (such as this one) which identiﬁes (or simply assents to) the correlative condition of poetry and music as an enduring and formative feature of the Irish literary imagination. When Richard Taruskin concedes that Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony can be construed as ‘the secret diary of a nation’, we realize that the news is not all bad, that the contract between writer and reader (or composer and listener) which tonality guarantees can be locally acknowledged, even if these very categories (writer, composer, reader, listener) are elsewhere condemned for the ideological constructions they so evidently have become.44 ‘The secret diary of a nation’: it’s a phrase which sounds very like the kind of thing Yeats said about (and in) his own poetry. Although such a formulation might embarrass Seamus Heaney, the cultural matrix from which his poetry issues, when taken in apposition with his own ﬁrm regard for the integrity of art in general and poetry in particular, lends strong support to his reading of poetry and music as fundamentally synonymous in their enterprise of staking out ‘the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life’. It is a reading which draws upon the expressivity of his own verbal music, to be sure, but it is also one which at the last is authorized by the pervasively verbal conception of music from which his poetic has so strikingly evolved. When Heaney addresses the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert in praise of Herbert’s hard-won, politically dangerous adherence to poetry, he likens him to the herald of Apollo: ‘You learnt the lyre from him and kept it tuned.’45 That line is a metaphor as old as the music which gives it meaning. It is also the idea of music made good by words alone.

44 As in Taruskin’s condemnation of Stravinsky as a composer (to name but one of these categories) in the Oxford History of Western Music, iv. 189 ff., 471 ff. 45 Seamus Heaney, ‘To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert’, in Electric Light, 67.

Select Bibliography

Ackerley, Chris, ‘ “Tutto è sciolto”: An Operatic Crux in the “Sirens” Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38: 1 and 2 (Fall, 2000) [special issue on Joyce and Opera, ed. Timothy Martin], 197–204. Anderson, Robert, ‘Shaw, (George) Bernard’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xvii. 232–3. Andrews, Elmer, The Art of Brian Friel (London, 1995). Bailey, Kathryn, ‘Webern, Anton (Friedrich Wilhelm von)’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. edn. (London, 2001), xxvii. 178–95. Bauerle, Ruth, ‘James Joyce and Opera: A Bibliography’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38: 1 and 2 (Fall, 2000) [special issue on Joyce and Opera, ed. Timothy Martin], 157–82. Bourgeois, Maurice, John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (London, 1913). Bowen, Zack, Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music (Gainesville, Fla., 1995). —— Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce (Albany, NY, 1974). Boyd, James, Goethe’s Knowledge of English Literature (Oxford, 1932). Bryden, Mary (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998). Bucknell, Brad, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2001). Burke, Patrick, ‘Friel and Performance History’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge, 2006), 117–28. Campbell, Matthew, ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song: The 1821 Irish Melodies’, Bullán, 4: 2 (Winter 1999/Spring 2000), 83–103. Cheng, Vincent and Martin, Timothy (eds.), Joyce in Context (Cambridge, 1992). Clapham, John, ‘Smetana, Bedrˇich’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xvii. 391–408. Cooper, Barry, ‘Beethoven’s Folksong Settings as Sources of Irish Music’, in Patrick F. Devine and Harry White (eds.), The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995. Selected Proceedings: Part Two [Irish Musical Studies, 5] (Dublin, 1996), 65–81. Daverio, John, Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (New York, 1997).

Select Bibliography

245

Davis, Leith, Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724–1874 (Indiana, 2006). Deane, Seamus, ‘Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge, 2000), 21–37. —— Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford, 1997). —— ‘Powers of Earth and Visions of Air’, in Catherine Molloy and Phyllis Carey (eds.), Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit (London, 1996), 27–34. —— Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London, 1985). —— (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry, 1991). Dibble, Jeremy, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford, 2002). Donoghue, Denis, We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986). Dowden, Wilfrid S. (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Moore (Oxford, 1964). Dunne, Tom, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing, 1800–1850’ in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), Romanticism in National Context (London, 1988), 68–91. Eagleton, Terry, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork, 1998). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce (Oxford, 1959; repr. 1977). —— Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London, 1949; repr. 1965). Finneran, Richard J. (ed.), The Yeats Reader (London, 2002). Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats: A Life. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford, 2003). —— W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1997). Fox, Charlotte Milligan, Annals of the Irish Harpers (London, 1911). Godley, A. D. (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London, 1910). Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford, 1992). Gula, Marianna, ‘ “As good as any play in the Queen’s Royal Theatre”: Performing the Nation in the “Cyclops” Episode in Ulysses’, Irish University Review, 36: 2 (2006), 257–79. Hart, William E., Synge’s First Symphony: The Aran Islands (New Britain, Conn., 1993). Haughton, Hugh, ‘ “The Importance of Elsewhere”: Mahon and Translation’, in Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Gerrards Cross, 2002), 145–84. Heaney, Seamus, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 (London, 2002). —— Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (London, 1980). Herman, David, ‘ “Sirens” after Schönberg’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31: 4 (Summer 1994), 473–94. Herren, Grayley, ‘Nacht und Träume as Beckett’s Agony in the Garden’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 11: 1 (Spring, 2001), 55–69.

246

Select Bibliography

Hodgart, Matthew and Bauerle, Ruth, Joyce’s Grand Operaroar: Opera in Finnegans Wake (Champaign, Ill., 1996). Holroyd, Michael, Bernard Shaw, Vol. 3, 1918–1950, The Lure of Fantasy (London, 1991). —— Bernard Shaw, Vol. 2, 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power (London, 1989). —— Bernard Shaw, Vol. 1, 1856–1898, The Search for Love (London, 1988). Horovitz, Joseph, The Post-Classical Predicament (Boston, 1995). Jacobs, Arthur, Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Oxford, 1984). Jeffares, A. Norman and Van der Kamp, Peter (eds.), Irish Literature in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Anthology (Dublin, 2005). Johnson, Julian, Who Needs Classical Music? (Oxford, 2002). Johnston, Colton (ed.), W. B. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews, Uncollected Articles, Reviews and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900 (New York, 2000). Jordan, Hoover H., Bolt Upright: The Life of Thomas Moore (Salzburg, 1975). Kearney, Richard, ‘Language Play: Brian Friel and Ireland’s Verbal Theatre’, in William Kerwin (ed.), Brian Friel: A Casebook (New York and London, 1997), 77–117. Kiberd, Declan, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge, 2005). —— Irish Classics (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). —— Inventing Ireland (London, 1997). —— Synge and the Irish Language (Dublin, 1993). Kiely, David M., John Millington Synge: A Biography (Dublin, 1994). Killeen, Terence, Ulysses Unbound (Bray, 2005). Klein, Axel, ‘Stage-Irish, or the National in Irish Opera, 1780–1925’, Opera Quarterly, 20: 1 (2005), 27–67. Knowles, Sebastian (ed.), Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce (London, 1999). Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996). Kristeva, Julia, ‘Joyce “The Gracehoper” or the Return of Orpheus’, in Bernard Benstock (ed.), James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Proceedings of the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium. Frankfurt 1984 (New York, 1988), 167–80. Laurence, Dan H. (ed.), Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes (London, 1981). Lloyd, David, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin, 1993). —— Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, 1987). Lojek, Helen, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa and the Unﬁnished Revolution’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge, 2006).

Select Bibliography

247

McCormack, W. J., Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (London, 2000). McCourt, John, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin, 2000). McGuinness, Patrick, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2000). MacWhite, Eoin, ‘Thomas Moore and Poland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 72, sec. C, pp. 49–62. Mahon, Derek, ‘The Need to Sing’, in Derek Mahon, Journalism (Oldcastle, Co. Meath, 1996), 112–14. Malins, Edward, ‘Yeats and Music’, Yeats Centenary Papers, 12 (Dublin, 1965), 483–508. Martin, Paul, ‘Mr Bloom and the Cyclops: Joyce and Antheil’s Unﬁnished “Opéra Mécanique” ’, in Sebastian Knowles (ed.), Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce (London, 1999), 91–105. Martin, Timothy, ‘ “Cyclops” as Opera’, James Joyce Quarterly, 38: 1 and 2 (Fall, 2000), [special issue on Joyce and Opera, ed. Timothy Martin], 227–30. —— Joyce and Wagner (Cambridge, 1991). Meisel, Martin, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton, 1963; repr. 1976). Moloney, Collette, The Irish Music Manuscripts of Edward Bunting (1773– 1843): An Introduction and Catalogue (Dublin, 2000). Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2000). Murray, Christopher (ed.), Irish University Review (Thomas Murphy Special Issue), 17: 1 (Spring, 1987). Ní Chinnéide, Veronica, ‘The Sources of Moore’s Melodies’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland, 89: 2 (1959), 109–34. Nichols, Roger, ‘Debussy, Claude’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), v. 292–314. Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London, 1995). O’Daly, John (ed.), The Poets and Poetry of Munster: A Selection of Irish Songs by the Poets of the Last Century, with Poetical Translations by the Late James Clarence Mangan, now for the ﬁrst time published, with the Original Music, and biographical sketches of the Authors (Dublin, 1849). O’Donnell, Brendan, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio, 1995). O’Donnell, William H. (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Later Essays (New York, 1994). O’Donoghue, D. J. (ed.), Essays Literary and Historical by Thomas Davis (Dundalk, 1914). Ó Riada, Seán, Our Musical Heritage, ed. Thomas Kinsella (Portlaoise, 1982). O’Toole, Fintan, The Politics of Magic (London, 1992). Paulin, Tom, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1984).

248

Select Bibliography

Pilling, John, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), 173–8. Roche, Anthony, ‘Russian and Irish Afﬁnities’, in Brian Friel (after Turgenev): A Month in the Country, Shaw Festival Programme Booklet (Ontario, 2007) [n.p.]. —— ‘Friel and Synge: Towards a Theatrical Language’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), Irish University Review. Special Issue: Brian Friel, 29: 1 (Spring/Summer, 1999), 145–61. —— (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge, 2006). Rushton, Julian, ‘Berlioz and Irlande: From Romance to Mélodie’, in Patrick F. Devine and Harry White (eds.), The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995, Selected Proceedings: Part Two (Irish Musical Studies, 5) (Dublin, 1996), 224–40. Ryan, Joseph, ‘Nationalism and Music in Ireland’, PhD dissertation, NUI Maynooth (1991). Saddlemeyer, Ann, ‘Synge’s Soundscape’, Irish University Review, 22: 1 (1992), 55–68. —— The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. 2, 1907–1909 (Oxford, 1984). —— The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, vol. 1, 1871–1907 (Oxford, 1983). —— J. M. Synge, Collected Works, vol. 4, Plays Book II (Gerrards Cross, 1983). —— J. M. Synge, Collected Works, vol. 3, Plays Book I (Gerrards Cross, 1983). —— Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge (Gerrards Cross, 1982). Shaw, [George] Bernard, John Bull’s Other Island (1904), ed. Dan H. Laurence (Harmondsworth, 1984). —— Sixteen Self Sketches (London, 1949). Steiner, George, Real Presences (London, 1991). —— George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondsworth, 1984). Synge, J. M., Poems and Translations (Dublin, 1911). Taruskin, Richard, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York, 2005). Taylor, Susan B., ‘Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh’, retrieved from the internet on 11 September 2005 at http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/containment/taylor/taylor.html. Tessier, Thérèse, La Poésie lyrique de Thomas Moore (1779–1852) (Paris, 1976). Thuente, Mary Helen, The Harp Re-strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (New York, 1994). Van den Toorn, Pieter, Music, Politics and the Academy (Bekeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1996). Welch, Robert, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish, 1797–1897 (Gerrards Cross, 1988).

Select Bibliography

249

White, Harry, ‘Cultural Theory, Nostalgia and the Historical Record: Opera in Ireland and the Irishness of Opera during the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny (eds.), Music in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Irish Musical Studies, 9) (Dublin, 2007), 17–44. —— ‘The Rules of Engagement: Richard Taruskin and the History of Western Music’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 2 (2006–7), 21–49. —— The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2005). —— ‘ “Paltry, scented things from Italy”: Ireland and the Discourse of Nationalism in 19th-Century European Musical Culture’, Musica e Storia, 12: 3 (Venice, 2005), 649–62. —— ‘Nationalism, Colonialism and the Cultural Stasis of Music in Ireland’, in Harry White and Michael Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800– 1945 (Cork, 2001), 257–71. —— The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork, 1998). —— ‘The Preservation of Music and Irish Cultural History’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 27: 2 (1996), 123–38. —— ‘Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy and the Use of Music in Contemporary Irish Drama’, Modern Drama, 33: 4 (1990), 553–62. Worth, Katharine, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London, 1978). Yeats, W. B., Essays and Introductions (London, 1961).

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Note: In this index of names, individual works are listed under their respective authors/composers. Abbey Players 118, 124, 128 Abbey Theatre 103, 110, 118, 123, 125, 128, 130 Ackerley, Chris 166 n. 33 Adorno [Theodore] 189, 200 Anderson, Robert 140 Antheil, George 102–4, 154 n. 3, 171 Fighting the Waves 103–4 Unﬁnished setting of ‘Cyclops’ episode from Ulysses 171 Anti-Jacobin Review 45 n. 19, 49 Arikha, Avigdor 198 n. 33 Bach [Johann Sebastian] 171 n. 49, 174, 229–30, 234 Cantata BWV 178 228–9 Bailey, Kathryn 195, 200 Bakhtin, Mikhail 184 Balfe, [Michael William] 35, 41, 51, 158 The Bohemian Girl 155 The Rose of Castille 172 Bartók, Béla 29, 125, 203 Baudelaire [Charles] 24, 126 Bauerle, Ruth 183 n. 87 Bax, Arnold 52 Bayreuth 136, 205 Beckett, John 199 n. 36 Beckett, Samuel 17–19, 20, 23, 34, 116, 132, 182, 185, 187–205 passim, 209, 210, 224 n. 38, 227

Act without Words I 190–1, 196, 198 Act without Words II 190 All That Fall 191–2, 201 Catastrophe 200 Come and Go 200 Endgame/Fin de Partie 18, 19, 188, 192, 196, 201 Film 199–200 Ghost Trio 190 Happy Days 188, 191 n. 16, 201 Imagination Dead Imagine 205 Krapp’s Last Tape 190–1, 196, 198, 201 Malone Dies 196 Molloy 19, 196 Murphy 196 Nacht und Träume 190, 199, 200–1 Not I 19, 188, 193, 199, 202, 203, 204 Ohio Impromptu 190, 199 Play 199, 201, 204 Quad 199 Rockaby 188, 204 The Unnamable 191 n. 14, 193, 196, 199, 204 Waiting for Godot/En attendant Godot 18, 19, 124, 187–8, 192, 196, 201, 204 What Where 194–5, 197, 199, 200, 201 n. 41, 224 n. 38 Words and Music 190, 199

252

Index

Beckett, Walter 199 n. 36 Beerbohm, Max 150 Beethoven [Ludwig Van] 13, 28, 41, 46–8, 58, 83, 97, 113, 134, 137, 139, 145, 172, 173, 189–90, 193–4, 198, 206, 210, 234 Fidelio 144 Moonlight Sonata [Sonata quasi una fantasia, op. 27, no. 2] 210 Piano Trio in D major, op. 70 [‘Ghost’ Trio] 190 n. 12 Late string quartets 234 Symphony no. 7 189 Belfast Harp Festival (1792) 5 Bellini [Vincenzo] 157, 159, 163, 164 ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’ 157 Benedict, Julius 145 The Lily of Killarney 145, 155, 172 Berkeley, Bishop [George] 199 Berlioz, Hector 41, 53–4, 67, 212, 213 Irlande, op. 1 53–4 Bizet [Georges] 138 Carmen 138 Blunt, Wilfrid 102 Boland, Eavan 9 ‘Night Feed’ 9 Borges [Jorge Luis] 61 Boucicault, Dion 145, 173 The Colleen Bawn 145–6, 172 Boulez, Pierre 119, 187, 203, 205 Bourgeois, Maurice 110, 117, 122, 130, 131, 216 John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre 110, 117 Boyd, Ernest 39, 43 Ireland’s Literary Renaissance 43 Bowen, Zack 154 n. 3, 168 Brahms, Johannes 135, 140, 198 Britten, Benjamin 203 Bucknell, Brad 166 n. 33

Bunting, Edward 5, 38, 47–9, 69, 72–3, 76, 99, 100 Ancient Irish Music (1797) 48–9 ‘Molly, My Dear’ 69–70 Brown, Sean 239 Byron [George Gordon, Lord] 37, 40, 55, 56, 60, 61, 94 Cage, John 32, 175 n. 59, 202, 203 ‘California, Here I Come’ 211 Campbell, Matthew 68–70 Carter, Elliott 203 String Quartet no. 2 203 Ceoltóirí Cualann 53 The Chieftains 30 Chopin [Fryderyk] 20, 41, 67, 205, 206, 207, 210, 212–13, 214 Sonata in B-ﬂat minor, op. 35 212–13 Clarke, Austin 241 Coleridge [Samuel Taylor] 55, 84–5, 108 Kubla Khan 55, 84–5 Congreve (William) 9 Connolly, Seán 208 n. 5 Cooper, Barry 46–8 ‘Corno di Bassetto’ [Shaw] 140 ‘The Croppy Boy’ 164, 165, 167 Dante 32, 232, 236 Inferno 236 Daverio, John 58–60 Davis, Thomas 5, 6, 39, 45, 49, 50, 76, 77, 91 ‘A Nation Once Again’ 177 The Spirit of the Nation 45 Deane, Seamus 23, 40, 42, 51, 52, 71, 76, 77, 115, 122, 124, 156, 215, 238 Debussy [Claude] 105, 119, 120–1 Pelléas et Mélisande 120 Prélude a l’Apres midi d’un faune 119

Index De Hooch, Pieter 24 De Valois, Ninette 103 Dibble, Jeremy 51–2, 141 n. 21 Donizetti [Gaetano] 58 n. 47, 172, 222 Lucia di Lammermoor/The Bride of Lammermoor 172, 222 ‘Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’Ali’ 222 Donoghue, Denis 15, 29, 81, 100, 180 Doyle, Roddy 9 Dowden, Edward 85 D’Oyly Carte, Richard 146 Dublin University Magazine 8 Dublin Review 49 Duffy, Gavan 49–50, 65 Dujardin, Édouard 184 Dulac, Edmund 102, 104–8 Dunn, Douglas 31 Dunne, Tom 40 n. 6 Duparc [Henri] 54 Eagleton, Terry 40, 42 Elgar, Edward 13, 86, 111, 134, 137, 139, 142, 173 The Dream of Gerontius 86 n. 17 First Symphony 86 n. 17 Enigma Variations 111 Eliot, T. S. 43, 88, 108 Ellmann, Richard 4, 15, 92, 96 n. 43, 97 n. 45, 160, 165 n. 32, 171 Emmett, Robert 45, 71, 99, 165 ‘Speech from the Dock’ (1811) 45, 165 Esposito, Michele 15, 173 Farr, Florence 102, 104 Fay, W. G. 114 Feis Ceoil 178 Ferguson, Samuel 5, 6, 7–8, 31, 42, 49, 50, 76–7, 91 Lays of the Western Gael (1865) 76 Ferriter, Diarmuid 30 n. 52

253

Field, John 213 n. 15 Field Day (Theatre Company) 12, 209, 215 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) 9 The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing (2002) 10 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward 37, 44, 57, 71 Flechsig, Emil 59 Flotow [Friedrich von] 41, 167 Martha 41, 155, 167 Foster, Roy [R. F.] 39, 82, 97, 104, 105 n. 69, 107 n. 3 Fox, Charlotte Milligan 78 n. 79 Friel, Brian 12, 20–2, 27, 34, 123, 131, 132, 205, 206–27 passim Aristocrats 20, 206, 207, 208, 210, 212–13, 214, 220 Dancing at Lughnasa 20, 21, 206, 208, 209, 214, 220–1 Faith Healer 20, 21, 22, 32, 34, 206, 208, 214, 215 The Freedom of the City 20, 208, 209 Give Me Your Answer, Do! 20, 206, 210, 224 The Home Place 206, 207, 208, 224–7 The Loves of Cass McGuire 21, 206, 210, 214 Making History 208–10, 226 Performances 20, 21, 206, 221, 223–4 Philadelphia, Here I Come! 20, 34, 206, 210–11, 214, 220 Translations 20, 21, 22, 27, 124, 208–9, 214–20, 221, 225, 241 Wonderful Tennessee 20, 206, 210 Der Freischütz (Weber) 144

254

Index

Gallagher, Rory 30 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 162, 239, 240 Gaelic League (1893) 5, 50, 123, 158, 162, 177 Gigli, Benjamino 222 Gilbert [W. S.] and Sullivan [Arthur] 62, see also under Sullivan, Arthur Gilbert, Stuart 165 n. 29, 172 Goehr, Lydia 3 n. 5 Goethe [Johann Wolfgang von] 25, 40, 54, 56, 57–8, 60, 66, 68, 77, 83, 97, 113 Faust 57–8, 60 Gounet, Thomas 20 Gounod [Charles] 138, 150 Faust 58 n. 46, 138, 150 Gregory, (Lady) Augusta 98, 100, 111–12, 115, 126, 143 Gula, Marianna 162 n. 24 Haas, Monique 198 Hackett, Francis 97, 99 Handel [George Frideric] 74, 136–7, 139, 170, 175, 214 Messiah 170 n. 45, 175–6, 180 Harbison, Janet 69 Hardiman, Richard 8, 76, Irish Minstrelsy (1831), 8, 76 Hart, William E. 118, 119 Hartnett, Michael 26, 27 ‘A Visit to Castletown House’ 26 Haydn, Joseph 46–7, 194, 198 Heaney, Seamus 1, 7 n. 12, 11, 24–5, 28–34, 37, 82–4, 91–2, 228–43 passim Electric Light 238, 242 ‘The Augean Stables’ 239–40 ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ 236 ‘Clearances’ 33, 238 ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ 238, 241 ‘To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert’ 243

‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ 242–3 Field Work 32, 236, 237, 238 ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ 32, 238, 239 ‘In Memoriam Sean O’Riada’ 30 ‘Toome Road’ 33 ‘Ugolino’ [Inferno, cantos XXII and XXII] 236 The Government of the Tongue 240, 241 The Haw Lantern 33, 238 The Midnight Verdict 238 n. 29 ‘Mossbawn’ (Preoccupations) 1 North 235 n. 20, 236–7 ‘Singing School’ 237 ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ 235 n. 20 ‘On Poetry and Professing’ (Finders Keepers) 230 The Redress of Poetry 228, 230 The Spirit Level 228, 232 ‘The Flight Path’ 228, 232, 235–6 Wintering Out 235 n. 20 Herbert, Zbigniew 243 Henebry, Richard 5 n. 9 Herman, David 166 n. 33, 182 n. 82 Herren, Grayley 201 n. 42 Holroyd, Michael 14, 135, 143 Homer 88 Horniman, Miss [Annie] 143 Horovitz, Joseph 29 n. 49 Hugo, Victor 40 Husymans [Joris Karl] 126 Hyde, Douglas 76, 126 Love Songs of Connacht 126 Ibsen [Henrik] 13, 14, 114, 120, 126, 140 Janáˇcek, Leos 20, 206, 223–4 String Quartet no. 2 (‘Intimate Letters’) 223–4

Index Johnson, Julian 29 n. 49 Jordan, Helen Hoover 49, 55 Joyce, James 4, 9, 15–19, 26, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 51, 53, 86, 98, 100, 121, 153–86 passim, 187, 189–90, 193, 196, 197, 198, 204 Dubliners 154, 156, 183, 184 ‘The Dead’ 15–17, 35, 156–60, 164, 166–7, 174, 186 Exiles 183 Finnegans Wake 17, 18, 51, 154–6, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 175, 180–6, 190 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 16, 51, 160, 162, 183 Ulysses 16–17, 35–6, 51, 154, 155, 157,158, 160–80 passim, 181, 183–5 ‘Cyclops’ 166–80 passim ‘Sirens’ 164–8 Joyce, Stanislaus 153, 159, 166, 174 Triestine Book of Days 153 Juvenal 24, 179, 241 Kafka [Franz] 19 Kaun, Axel 187 n. 1, 199 Kearney, Richard 217 n. 24 Keats, John 57 n. 44, 83, 85, 242 Kern, Jerome 20, 206, 214 Kiberd, Declan 4, 9, 14, 15, 19, 23, 38 n. 6, 51, 112 n. 6, 118, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 155 n. 6, 162 n. 23 Kiely, David 116 ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ (see also Joyce, ‘The Dead’), 16, 157, 159, 164 Killeen, Terence 173 Klein, Axel 156 Knowles, Sebastian 154 n. 3 Knowlson, James 202–3 Kristeva, Julia 185 n. 92

255

Lawrence, Karen 181 Leinster Journal 49 Lloyd, David 38 n. 6, 161, 169, 232–6, 237, 239 ‘Pap for the Dispossessed’ 231–6, 237, 239 Longley, Edna 208 n. 5 ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ 163 Lucretius 241 MacHale [Archbishop] John 50 MacPherson [James] 61 McCabe, Colin 182 McCormack, W. J. 67, 113, 116, 119 McCourt, John 164 McGuinness, Patrick 116 Maeterlinck, Maurice 116–21, 193 Pelléas et Mélisande 117, 120 The Sightless 121 Mahler [Gustav] 198 Mahon, Derek 22–5, 34, 240 n. 38, 241, 242 ‘Brighton Beach’ 24 ‘Courtyards in Delft’ 24, 25 ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ 24 ‘I am Raftery’ 23, 24, 34 ‘St Patrick’s Day’ 24 ‘Smoke’ 25 Maitland, J. A. Fuller 146 Malins, Edward 102 n. 54, 103–5 Mallarmé [Stéphane] 116, 119–20, 126 L’Apres midi d’un faune 119 Mangan, James Clarence 5–8, 30, 31, 42, 49, 50, 75–7, 91,173 ‘[My] Dark Rosaleen’ 7, 30, 172 Mann, Thomas 58, n. 46 Doktor Faustus 58, n. 46 Martin, Paul 171 n. 49 Martin, Timothy 153 n. 2, 155, 161, 163, 167, 171, 180–3 Mason, Patrick 223 n. 36 ‘The Mason’s Apron’ 221 May, Karl 61 Mays, J. C. C. 18

256

Index

Maze Prison (Belfast) 236 Meisel, Martin 143–5 Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater 143–4, 149–50 Mendelssohn, Felix 20, 60, 79–80, 137, 139, 168, 175, 205, 206, 210–11, 212, 213, 214, 224 ‘On Wings of Song’ [‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’] 210, 224 Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64 206, 210–12 Mercadante [Saverio] 165, 168 The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross 168, 173 Merriman, Brian 238 Metastasio [Pietro] 24 Meyerbeer [Giacomo] 137, 141, 165, 168 Meyerfeld, Max 110 Mickiewicz, Adam 41, 67 Mihalovici, Marcel 198 Milton [John] 88, 91 Paradise Lost 88 Molière 126 Moloney, Collette 76 n. 83 Moore, Thomas 5–7, 10, 16, 31, 33, 34, 35–78 passim, 91, 99–101, 148, 160, 164, 206, 207, 224–6 Corruption 45, 99 Intolerance 43–4, 45–6, 99 Irish Melodies, 5–7, 10, 36–7, 39, 40–78, 100, 101,160, 224 ‘At the Mid Hour of Night’ 69–70 ‘Dear Harp of My Country!’ 73–5, 77 ‘Let Erin Remember’ 148 ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ 195 n. 26, 224, 226 ‘Oh Blame Not the Bard’ 45

‘Oh, Breathe Not His Name’ 71, 100 ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ 41 ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ 36, 100 ‘New Langolee’ 74–5 ‘Paddy Whack’ 72 ‘She is Far From the Land’ 100 ‘While History’s Muse’ 72 ‘When We Dead Awaken’ 160 Lalla Rookh 37, 41, 55–67 passim ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ 62–3 ‘Paradise and the Peri’ 62–6 ‘The Fire Worshippers’ 62 ‘The Light of the Haram’ 62 Melologue upon National Music 54 National Airs 40 Mozart, [Wolfgang Amadeus] 13, 15, 136, 139, 149, 150, 164, 194, 198, 229 Don Giovanni 15, 136, 149–50, 163 The Magic Flute 164 Murphy, Tom 19, 21–2, 34, 205, 221–3 Bailegangaire 22 The Gigli Concert 21, 22, 34, 58 n. 46, 221–4 The Morning after Optimism 19 Musorgsky [Modest] 111 Pictures at an Exhibition 111 The Nation 67, 178 Nichols, Roger 120 Nietzsche [Friedrich] 151 Nolan, Emer 162 n. 24, 175 n. 60 Nugent, Ciaran 232, 236 n. 21 O’Casey, Sean 12, 193 Juno and the Paycock 191 The Shadow of a Gunman 124 O’Connell, Daniel 49

Index O’Donnell, Brendan 64 n. 5 O’Daly, John 75 n. 82 Offenbach [Jacques] 148 Whittington 148 O’Leary, John 42, 87 O’Loughlin, Michael 26–7 ‘On Hearing Michael Hartnett Read His Poetry in Irish’ 26–7 Ó Riada, Seán 26, 29, 30, 51, 53 O’Toole, Fintan 223 n. 36 Ovid 238, 241 Oxford University Press 234 Parnell [Charles Stewart] 99 Parry [Sir Charles Hubert] 173 Paulin, Tom 41 Pearse [Padraic] 99, 106 Petrarch, 126 Petrie, George 5, 6 n. 10, 51 Pilling, John 197 Pinter, Harold 19, 188 The Birthday Party 19 The Caretaker 19, 187 Mountain Language 188 n. 4 One for the Road 188 n. 4 Pound [Ezra] 103, 108, 115 Porter, Cole 206, 214, 221, ‘Anything Goes’ 221 Power, James and William 41, 46, 55 Proust [Marcel] 197, 201 Puccini [Giacomo] 203 Purcell [Henry] 142 Quinn, John 129 Rabelais [François] 126, 130, 132, 214 Racine [Jean] 117 Ravel [Maurice] 121 Rossini [Gioachino] 137 Ruddock, Margot 80, 106, 108 Runciman, J. F. 151 Rummell, Walter 105

257

Rushton, Julian 54 Ryder, Sean 37 n. 5 Saddlemyer, Ann 11, 114, 115, 118, 129, 218 Scahill, Adrian 72 n. 78 Schiller [Friedrich] 83 Schoenberg, Arnold 17–18, 120, 182, 187, 189, 194–8, 202, 204, 205 Moses und Aron 182, 196 Erwartung 204 Piano Pieces, op. 23 17 Piano Suite, op. 25 17 Schopenhauer [Arthur] 197 Schubert, Franz 25, 57–8, 68, 128 n. 51, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200–1, 205 ‘Nacht und Träume’, D. 827 190 n. 12, 200–1 String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 (‘Death and the Maiden’) 192 Schumann, Robert 41, 58–61, 65–7, 70 Das Paradies und die Peri, op. 50 41, 58, 61, 65–6 Genoveva 60 Requiem für Mignon 57 n. 43 Szenen aus Goethes Faust 57 n. 43, 60 Scott, Walter 56 Shakespear, Olivia 99 Shakespeare [William] 54, 60, 134, 139 Shaw, [George] Bernard 9, 11, 12–15, 33, 52, 83, 86, 102, 103, 104, 132, 133–52 passim, 154, 155, 158, 162, 170, 186, 187, 191, 193, 198, 209, 214–18, 227 Arms and the Man 137, 148 Back to Methuselah 152

258

Index

Shaw, [George] Bernard (cont.) Candida 137, 141 The Dark Lady of the Sonnets 144 The Devil’s Disciple 137, 141 Heartbreak House 144 John Bull’s Other Island 14–15, 133, 135, 136, 141, 142, 145–8, 191, 209, 216, 218 Major Barbara 144 Man and Superman 15, 136, 142, 148–52 Mrs Warren’s Profession 137–8, 149 The Perfect Wagnerite 135, 137, 138–9, 149 The Philanderer 137 Pygmalion 136 Widowers’ Houses 14, 137, 140 Sheehan, Canon 115 Shelley [Percy Bysshe] 55, 61, 94 ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ 211 Sheridan (Richard Brinsley) 9 Shields, Carol 204 The Stone Diaries 204 Sibelius [Jean] 137 Shostakovich [Dmitri] 29, 203, 241, 243 Fifth Symphony 243 Smetana, Bedrich 237 n. 27 Sophocles 241 Stanford, Charles Villiers 14–15, 21, 41, 51–2, 58, 61 n. 58, 135–6, 140–1, 142, 145–6, 158, 173 The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore, the Original Airs Restored (1894) 51–2 ‘Irish’ Symphony 140 Shamus O’Brien 141, 145, 158 Songs of Old Ireland (1887) 51 Petrie collection of Irish Music (1902–5) 51 The Star 140

Steiner, George 87 n. 23, 119, 217 n. 24, 224, n. 39 Stendhal, 40 Stevens, Wallace 3 Stevenson, [Sir] John 41, 44, 46–7, 70 Stoker, Bram 61 n. 59 Stösslová, Kamila 223 Stoppard, Tom 188 Arcadia 188 n. 4 The Coast of Utopia 188 n. 4 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 187 Stravinsky, Igor 29, 203 Sullivan, John L. 172 Sullivan [Arthur] 62 n. 60, 146–7 Haddon Hall 147 Ivanhoe 146–7 Symons, Arthur 102, 117, 161 Synge, John Millington 4–6, 9, 11–13, 15, 21, 27, 33, 38, 42, 53, 98, 100, 109, 110–32 passim, 135, 138, 143, 145, 147–8, 170, 186, 193, 209, 214–19, 227 The Aran Islands 112, 118, 119, 121, 127 Deirdre of the Sorrows 115, 117, 122, 127 Étude Morbide 115 Flowers and Footsteps 128 n. 50, n. 51 In the Shadow of the Glen 112, 114, 128, 143 Riders to the Sea 12, 112, 114–15, 118–19, 121, 127, 130, 143 The Playboy of the Western World 12, 21, 115, 118–19, 122, 124–6, 129–31, 135, 148, 209, 216, 218, 219 The Tinker’s Wedding 110 The Well of the Saints 115, 117–18, 121, 126, 127–8, 191, 193 n. 21

Index When the Moon Has Set 112–16, 125, 130, 131, 148 Taruskin, Richard 29 n. 49, 202–3, 229–31, 241, 243 Taylor, Susan B. 62–3, n. 63 Tennyson [Alfred, Lord] 85, 139 Thomson, George 41, 46–9, 74 Thuente, Mary-Helen 39 n. 7 U2 30 United Irishmen 38, 42, 44 Van den Toorn, Pieter 29 n. 49 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 119, 137 Verdi [Giuseppe] 58 n. 47, 137, 144, 146, 148, 158, 205, 212, 213 Virgil 232, 236, 241, 242–3 Ninth Eclogue 242–3 (see also under ‘Heaney, Seamus’) Wagner, Richard 3, 12–15, 17, 20, 28, 58, 59, 77, 80, 81–2, 113, 134–45, 148, 149, 150–1, 154–5, 158, 160–1, 163–4, 167, 173, 180–1, 182–6, 193, 198, 205, 206, 210 n. 10, 212, 213, 214, 231, 289 Der ﬂiegende Holländer/The Flying Dutchman 167 n. 35, 183 Götterdämmerung 151, 239 Lohengrin 144 Die Meistersinger 64 Parsifal 59 Das Rheingold 164–5, 167 The Ring [Der Ring des Nibelungen] 135, 138, 142, 144, 151, 152, 155, 163, 180–1, 183, 184 Siegfried 151, 160, 167, 183 Tannhäuser 210 n. 10

259

Tristan und Isolde 138, 172, 183, 210 n. 10 Die Walküre 17, 210 n. 10 Wallace, William Vincent 41 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 169 Webern, Anton 18, 34, 182, 189, 194–8, 200, 203 Variations for Orchestra, op. 30 196 Welch, Robert 40, 68–9 Wellington, Duke of 71–2 Whitelaw, Billie 202, 204 Wilde [Oscar] 147, 191 Wolf, Hugo 25, 57–8 Wordsworth, William 8, 28, 55, 56, 57 n. 44, 66, 82, 83, 84–5, 108, 236 ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ 84 Lyrical Ballads (1798), 56, 66, 84 The Prelude (1850), 66, 237 ‘The Solitary Reaper’ 84 Tintern Abbey (1798) 66, 82 The World 140 Worth, Katharine 12, 116–18, 121, 127 The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett 12, 116 Yeats, W. B. 3–14, 22, 24, 26–8, 30–1, 33–4, 38, 39, 42, 50, 51, 52, 53, 71, 77–8, 79–109 passim, 111–16, 117, 119, 121, 122–3, 125–6, 128, 130, 135, 142, 143, 152, 176, 185, 186, 193, 215, 231, 233, 236–9, 240, 242, 243 ‘All Things Can Tempt Me’ 87 ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ 107 At the Hawk’s Well 102, 104, 191, 193 n. 21 Autobiographies 42, 89 n. 30, 237 ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’ 89

260 Yeats, W. B. (cont.) ‘Byzantium’ 97–8 Cathleen Ni Houlihan 115, 122 The Countess Cathleen 80, 102 Crossways 84, 86, 89 The Death of Cuchulain 104 ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ 89 ‘Easter, 1916’ 100 ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ 89 Fighting the Waves (Antheil) 103–4 The Green Helmet and Other Poems 87, 88 ‘The Happy Shepherd’ 86 ‘The King’s Threshold’ 79, 152 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 89, 100 ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ 102 ‘Leda and the Swan’ 92, 109 Michael Robartes and the Dancer 106 ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ 98–9, 111

Index ‘No Second Troy’ 92 On Baile’s Strand 102 The Only Jealousy of Emer 102 The Rose 84, 89 ‘The Rose Tree’ 106–7 ‘Running to Paradise’ 107 ‘The Sad Shepherd’ 86 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 6, 92–7, 99, 106, 109 ‘September 1913’ 100 ‘[Speech] After Long Silence’ 10, 98–9 ‘The Stolen Child’ 89 The Tower 94 n. 41 ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ 5, 50, 89–91 ‘Vacillation’ 97 The Wanderings of Oisín 85 Words for Music Perhaps 30 98 Young Ireland 7, 42–3, 87, 88, 90, 91, 177 Zola, Émile 120, 126