Music and the Irish Literary Imagination

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

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Music and the Irish Literary Imagination HARRY WH IT E

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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

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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.

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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).

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Contents

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

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1. The Auditory Imagination of Thomas Moore

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

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3. Why J. M. Synge Abandoned Music

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

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

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6. Words after Music: Samuel Beckett after Joyce

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

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

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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-

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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‘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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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’.

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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’.

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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

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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