CB IRISH MUSIC
Intro Track: Padraig The Fiddler
This is Classical Break on Somer
Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.
Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is in
celebration of Irish music, in time for St Patrick’s Day. We’ve just heard the song, Padraig The
Fiddler, by Gregory and Larchet, performed by John MacCormack, the violinist,
Fritz Kreisler, and pianist, Ludwig Schwab.
Music has always been important to the Irish, as a demonstration of national
identity. There are now, as for many
centuries two Irish music-traditions; loyalist Protestant, sponsored by English
and Anglo-Irish rulers of a conquered Ireland, and separatist catholic,
actuated by a far older sense of nationhood.
Both sides have their patriotic songs, and their champions in the world
of music at large. For many centuries,
Irish composing-talent found that the mountain would not come to Mahomet: to find fame, artists emigrated for recognition. For the catholic it was a harder longer road
to success than for a Protestant; in London, the nearest nerve-centre for
international Art-music, it was a matter of incredulity that Irish people wrote
music fully as accomplished as the music of the international models, and to
hold position in Ireland or be successful in England, one had either to be of
the Protestant Ascendency or find liberal patrons.
At the turn of the 19th Century,
the poet Tom Moore was an example of an Irishman with liberal patrons - he
numbered Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt among his friends. His various books of national airs played
fast and loose with the modal nature of folk-tunes, as did all educated
editions for the rest of the century.
Moreover, the words that the tunes were made to fit set the tone of
‘Irish’ songs and ballads for even longer, wistful, sentimental, nostalgic, or
infectiously cheerful, in some sense articulating a distinct national
character. To the English of the day,
there were two possible Irish characters, the truculent maudlin drunkard or the
charming, rumbustious but childishly sentimental rascal, the ‘spalpeen’ when he
has drink taken - both feckless idlers.
In some quarters, this view has perhaps never changed, and Tom Moore did
nothing to counteract it; yet nationalism itself took him up. Here is The Last Rose of Summer, from The
Groves of Blarney, arranged by Sir John Stevenson, an older contemporary of the
poet.
Track Two: The Last Rose of Summer
The two real Irish stars in
international music in the first half of the 19th Century were the pianist-composer
John Field and singer and composer Michael William Balfe. Both did well in London and went further
abroad; Field settled in St Petersburg; after much time spent in Rome, Milan
and Paris, Balfe returned to conquer London where he had begun as a
professional musician, his operas being performed in the very same theatre in
which he had worked as a violinist in the pit. Any distinctive, let alone Irish
qualities in their music was smothered by a pallid Italian lyricism and polish,
whose models included Clementi, Rossini and Bellini, all fashionable
names. Field was famous for his legato
singing-tone and invented the ternary-form Nocturne taken over by Chopin. Balfe is remembered for a song from his
greatest hit, The Bohemian Girl - I dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls (mentioned
in Joyce’s Dubliners). Of his many
songs, some recall Come Into The Garden Maud and Excelsior. Irishry, thanks to the fictitious works of
Ossian, had become a metropolitan phenomenon in the mid-to-late 18th and early
19th Centuries, composers of international reputation, such as Joseph Haydn and
Beethoven arranged ‘Irish’ melodies as a favour or in acknowledgement of
lucrative temporary demand. For
Beethoven, ‘picturesqueness’ was meat and drink to a Romantic, but if Irishry
seemed ‘picturesque’, wild and exotic, his indifferent ‘Irish’ arrangements
were done for money. To remind
ourselves of the Irishness of this programme, one must go back or forward in
time. Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738)
was an itinerant harpist and poet, and has been considered Ireland’s greatest
bard. Blinded by smallpox in his teens, he learned the harp, and set out with
it, horse and guide, to make his fortune - or living. An Irish Catholic who could read and write,
he spoke Irish, but could also speak English.
He found patrons among the Protestant Anglo--Irish and his own people,
and sang and played attractively for both communities. He wrote in song- and dance-forms from France
and Italy, with what would now be taken to be an Irish accent. His style was modal and founded on incomplete
scales, faults that 19th Century professors would have pronounced bad and cured
with a few strokes of the ink-pen. Let’s
hear two of his pieces: Jigg - To Mr
James Betagh, and Carolan’s Devotion. Devotion typically admires a girl on the
way to church.
Track Three and
Four: Jigg - To Mr James Betagh, and
Carolan’s Devotion, Carolan
There is little trace of the
history of 19th Century Ireland in Irish music, save perhaps references to
crossed love, homesickness for the countryside or town, a departed Irish glory,
bereavement, emigration, potatoes and drink.
But it is a fact that during this period, poverty, famine, evictions,
cholera, emigration and transportation for felony halved the population, as
Punch, The London Charivari, delighted in the wonderfully ignorant, illogical
‘Paddy’. Paddy was a tricky,
hot-tempered and drunkenly self--pitying character, known by his apish figure,
prognathous jaw and dark nose, his garb of moleskins and gaiters, collapsed
soft hat and shillelagh or club. His
wife was more fearsome. English visitors
were made fools of at horse-fairs but could read and write and didn’t believe
in the little people. Behind the facade
of Paddy’s quaint outlook and rhetoric - and, indeed, of publication of
editions of Ireland’s ancient folk-music - a holocaust occurred. During the Great Famine of 1848, Poor Law
Commissioners were advized that a rising tide of theft and poaching - and
social unrest - in country districts, was due to the peasant’s urge to
survive. Paddy loved his potatoes; - the
potatoes had rotted from blight; Paddy had to poach game and loot food-stores. Few of the ordinary Irish owned land. Their hereditary landlords, Irish and
English, and the Viceroy in Dublin enforced export of saleable food even as
refugees from the country to the towns dropped in the streets from hunger, and
cholera broke out owing to lack of adequate sanitation. England, utilitarian,
corrupt and hopelessly disorganized, needed much of what remained of Ireland’s
food-yield to feed its own urban poor.
Widespread murder of officials and landlords and cannibalism among
tenants were rumoured. In England, it
was an imprisonable crime to roam without visible means and not to be in work,
of course. As English magazines carried
etchings of skeletal famine-victims and their living-conditions, repression
went on. To support dirt-poor refugees
without work or homes was an idle expense.
All told, in the first half of the century, the hell came mostly
Ireland’s way; in the second, Paddy organized, England and Anglo-Irish
landlords came to fear not only the mob, but also the ‘Fenians’, a league of
protest and violence, led by educated professionals and seeking independence
from London. Landlords had much to fear; there’s an old joke that runs: “I hear Himself is to be buried on Tuesday.”
– “Buried is it? Didn’t I hear they’re
after sending him to be smelted?” It
must have seemed that if St Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland, at
least Ireland was spared some poison.
But St Patrick’s Day came to be celebrated over an increasing extent of
the globe because of a diaspora of a nation - unskilled labour, respectability
and brilliance alike, all proudly Irish.
Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, gained a grim reputation that it was not to
lose until after the Civil War confirmed the Irish Free State in 1922.
Howard Ferguson, born in Belfast
in 1908, wrote a Partita for two pianos or orchestra in 1935-6, that seems to
breathe this dangerous atmosphere. Here
is the initially Brahmsian courante, Allegro un poco agitato second movement,
restless, clouded, eerie.
Track Five: Partita, 2nd Movt, Ferguson
At the turn of the 19th Century
and into the early 2Oth, many names resounded in Irish literature, none more so
than those of William Butler Yeats, esoteric poet, playwright and essayist and
aristocrat-loving nationalist. Here is a
setting of his early symbolist poem, The Withering of The Boughs, the third
number in the cycle The Curlew, for tenor, flute, cor anglais and string
quartet, by the English composer, Philip Heseltine, alias Peter Warlock. The myth and magic of the old Ireland is
invoked with breathtaking intensity in an improvisatory-seeming aria of
bird-calls, Winter wind and the dark imaginings of a broken heart. The work dates from the time leading up to
the formation of the Irish Republic - 1920-2. Song runs out during the last, ghostly refrain
- the singer speaks the last line.
Track Six: The
Withering Of The Boughs, The Curlew, Warlock
In 1855 appeared a tune that is
often taken to be a folksong, but may not be, after all. Londonderry Air. It may have been written for a competition by
an anonymous lady. Described by one
irreverent author as “a song with capital bottom”, it has a claim to be the best--known
theme in all Irish music. Its melancholy
has suited various sets of verses, usually of renunciation. It has been arranged by many composers,
including Stanford, Harty and Percy Grainger.
The great tenor, John MacCormack, a nationalist, but, like Carolan,
capable of appealing to Irish and Anglo--Irish alike, was one of Ireland’s and
Eire’s greater musical ambassadors of the 20th Century. He set down his own account of the origins of
‘the most lovely folksong in the world’, as a preface to a broadcast
performance in Edwin Schneider’s arrangement.
Londonderry Air.
Track Seven: Londonderry Air, Anon
In 1866, the first Irish Symphony
was performed. It was written by a young
man, twenty-three years old, part-Irish and part-Italian, the son of a
bandsman, a former chorister at the Chapel Royal and Mendelssohn Scholar at the
Royal Academy, and the possessor of both exquisite manners and a dashing,
emotive style. It was the non-partisan
product of a holiday in Northern Ireland made a couple of years before. Here is the Scherzo - as captivating in its
first subject’s hopping from major to minor, and in its earnest but idealistic
trio now as then. After a little bardic
tuning-up, what a sprightly foreground and what a landscape in perspective in
the alternating Allegretto oboe tune and deep-breathed moderato scalic theme;
everywhere, cheeky or heartfelt harmonies!
The young composer? Arthur, later
Sir Arthur, Sullivan.
Track Eight: Irish Symphony, Sullivan
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was
a middle-class Ulsterman. His Irish
brogue was strong, but he was a typical artistic product of the Ascendancy,
erudite, clear-minded and hard-working; music took over his life. He loved folksong, Loyalist or Nationalist,
and became both a talented composer and superbly negative teacher, one,
furthermore, who drew foremost European composers to Cambridge for
doctorates. He was proof against Brahms’
sarcasm and got on well with Dvorak, Verdi and Boito, who actually turned up;
coped with Tchaikovsky; knew how to handle Saint-Saens, Bruch or Grieg. He wrote voluminously; symphonic works,
chamber-music, songs, large-scale choral pieces. His Irish Symphony (at least once conducted
by Mahler) and six Irish Rhapsodies were influenced by the example of Dvorak,
rather than Liszt. Much that he composed
for the concert-hall went unpublished and achieved only one or a few
performances. In spite of his caustic
self-confidence, the coming of Elgar embittered him. All the same, he could write something like
this - the Andante con moto, ma piu tranquillo of his Clarinet Concerto. Not one of his more self-conscious ‘Irish’
pieces, it owes something to Brahms’ late clarinet chamber works, but Brahms’
melodic style is not far removed from that of Irish Art--music’s idea of Irish
folk-music, anyway.
Track Nine: Clarinet Concerto, Slow Movement, Stanford
A Catholic Irishman, Sir Herbert
Hamilton Harty wrote a number of works based on folksongs or given folksong
character. Born in the 1870s, he made
his name as a pianist-accompanist in Ireland and England, His Irish Symphony is a beautiful piece. Back in the 1970s, a critic, writing in The
Listener, opined that in it, “Poor Paddy thinks he's Mahler...”, thus
demonstrating how far England had come in overcoming its prejudices about Irish
culture seventy years on from when the Symphony was performed to acclamation at
the Feis Ceoil Festival, having carried off first prize in the category of a
Symphony built Dvorakishly on Irish airs.
“The place of honour in the prize compositions must go to Mr Hamilton
Harty’s symphony - a work of very great ability and one that displays a very
remarkable knowledge of orchestration,” wrote the London-based Musical Times,
in 1904. Using tunes such as The Croppy
Boy; Avenging And Bright;The Blackberry Blossom; Jimin Mho Mhile Stor; The Girl
I Left Behind Me and Boyne Water, this is Home Rule music. In the finale, The Boyne Water of Ulster
collides with and falls away from an awe-inspiring reprise vision of Jimin Mho
Mhile Stor. For the sake of the wearing
of the green, and the sake of St Patrick, it’s tempting to play The Twelfth of
July, but here is a treat of an Irish fife band playing in traditional parallel
fifths, fiddlers, a good reel and some lovely touches of humour (and
xylophone), the Symphony’s second movement:
The Fair Day (a time of horse-trading, games and customary public order
offences of many kinds). Moreover, the
composer conducts in this recording of 1929.
Here, Manchester’s Halle Orchestra play out of their skins, not only
faster but also more vibrantly and characterfully than anyone has done
since!
This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert
Kirkham. Today’s programme of Irish
music was written and researched by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again
soon.
Here’s to Ireland, herself!
Track Ten: Irish Symphony, The Fair Day, Harty
Sadly, we were forced to omit
Jigg - To Mr James Betagh and The Star of The County Down, owing to
length. A second programme on Irish
music has been recorded, including The Star of The County Down! The bulk of the line-up of this second
programme is of Irish folk-music, Stanford's 1st Irish Rhapsody, and the finale
of Moeran's Violin Concerto; all culminates in Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty's
vividly heroic and beautiful tone-poem based on the poetry of the nationalist
poet, Emily Lawless, With The Wild Geese.
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