Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration

Poetry, Music, and Politics

Sarah McCleave, Brian G. Caraher

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138281479
• eBook ISBN: 9781351984157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore's music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore's importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing— as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.

Part I

Moore’s Literary and Musical Inspirations

1 The Imagined Unities of Thomas Moore¹

Harry White

The current renaissance in Moore studies – to which this volume unmistakably belongs – seems to me to involve nothing less than an astonishing recovery of Thomas Moore’s reputation in the long aftermath of a no less astonishing neglect. Moore the historian, Moore the satirist, Moore the lyric and romantic poet, Moore the novelist, Moore the biographer and of course Moore the musician are now the focus of a reappraisal that could scarcely have been envisaged even twenty years ago, notwithstanding a continuous (if subdued) stream of scholarship that only recently has come into its own. Moore is back in town.²

I

In my own work as a cultural historian of music in Ireland, I have tried to identify the Irish Melodies as the key text (so to speak) in the development of Irish art music since 1800, and more recently still, I have argued Moore’s fundamental importance in the formative (if long neglected) role music played in the growth of the Irish literary imagination from Moore himself to the present day.³ In such circumstances, our best hope might be that Moore can no longer credibly be dismissed or silently eclipsed as he once was. Moore has come into his own as an essential force in Irish literary and musical history alike. He will doubtless remain a problematic figure but not, I think, a risible one. It is at least certain that his striking absence from the narrative of Irish literary discourse (beyond certain Yeatsian condescensions) is no longer tenable. Having been restored to that narrative, Moore also claims our attention in a host of other contexts. We can indeed recognize him as a vital source in the development of European Musical Romanticism, as in the astonishing influence which his poetry exerted on Hector Berlioz (so that the entire tradition of French art song is now recuperated under the term Mélodie, a designation that stems from Moore’s own Irish Melodies and their impact on Hector Berlioz himself). We can acknowledge the enthusiasm with which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe greeted Moore’s narrative poem, Lalla Rookh (1817), which appeared when the Irish Melodies were still in the course of publication.⁴ Lalla Rookh not only gained from the German appetite for orientalism in the early nineteenth century; it directly inspired the musical thought of Robert Schumann, whose setting of the second part of the poem, “Paradise and the Peri” represents Schumann’s first breakthrough as a composer of dramatic music (see Rushton).⁵ Moore’s influence on Polish literature and on the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz is no less a part of his European patrimony, just as Mickiewicz in turn would influence the narrative structure of Frédéric Chopin’s pianistic imagination.⁶ In this essay, however, it is not the European musical afterlife of Moore that concerns me, but rather what I will seek to characterise as the ‘imagined unities’ of Moore’s approach to Irish music through the agency of his own verse.⁷

I have used this term because I’d like to bring to the surface two conjunctions that were to remain fundamental to Moore’s understanding of his work, insofar as he envisaged a relationship between music and politics and also between music and poetry, both of which animated the creation, and indeed the reception of his Irish Melodies almost from the outset. The semantics of these imagined unities (as in music as an expression of political sentiment, and poetry as a transliteration of musical intelligence and feeling) would endure in Irish cultural history for decades (indeed, there is some merit in supposing that they yet apply with notable force). But Moore still awaits a reception adequate to his achievement which has not perhaps been developed as rapidly as we might hope. We lack, for example, a scholarly edition of his works equal to the supremely successful biographical attention he has received from Ronan Kelly, notwithstanding the ambitious programme of current research through which his vast estate is now (at least partially) surveyed.⁸ One of the advantages of this research is that Moore now appears as a vital agent of British and Irish Romanticism, in which music per se was an otherwise muted presence for much of the nineteenth century. Those unities between music, poetry and politics, which Moore imagined and realized in the Irish Melodies, are all the more important on that account.

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.

Wilfrid S. Dowden, the editor of Moore’s letters, published an extract from Mary Shelley’s reply, in which she credibly contradicted 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” (ML 2: 838–39).

That’s not a bad summing-up of Moore’s immediate reception history as an English romantic (so to speak), except of course, that Byron for one immensely preferred his friend’s lyric poetry (and his explicit address upon Ireland) to anything Wordsworth or Shelley had written. But as Moore entered his sixties, he must have known that Mary Shelley was being kind after all, at least insofar as his fantastic popularity as the author of the Irish Melodies and Lalla Rookh far eclipsed his waning reputation as a ‘legitimate’ poet. The author of Lalla Rookh found himself acclaimed in 1817 as “the most ingenious, brilliant and fanciful poet of the age.”⁹ But twenty years later, there were few British critics who would have endorsed that opinion, even if Moore’s popular appeal as a lyric poet survived.

As we now know, much worse was to follow. Moore’s steep decline throughout the nineteenth century is itself indicative of a sea change in English Romanticism, which left Moore’s orientalist fantasies and his lyricism both far behind in favour of Wordsworth’s discovery of “the still sad music of humanity” and the growth of the self. Indeed, the verbal music of Wordsworth’s own poetry, even from a technical point of view, had almost nothing to do with Moore’s conjunctions of music and verse, and as Hoover Harding Jordan (Moore’s biographer) once remarked,

critics observed of his Melodies and Lalla Rookh that they would not produce a School of Moore, as the School of Wordsworth or of Byron had arisen, for no other poet could work in the two media of music and poetry.

(Jordan 1: 273)

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 redeemed his ambiguous standing as an Irish proto-nationalist. To “work in the two media of music and poetry” was to fall between two stools.

In a famous letter to his musical collaborator on the Irish Melodies, Sir John Stevenson, Moore remarked that

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 in 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.

(ML 1: 116–17)¹⁰

This letter was written in 1808 and partly reproduced as an advertisement to the first volume of the Melodies, which appeared that year. If ever a unity was imagined in Irish cultural history, it was precisely this conjunction between music and politics which Moore identified as a primary expression of the relationship between art and life. Moore’s (professional) engagement with Irish music was almost by chance: he had been approached by the Dublin publishers William and James Power with a view to arranging Irish melodies to his own verse in 1807, along with other poets, and two years before that, in 1805, the Scottish publisher George Thomson likewise invited him to contribute to a volume of Irish airs in succession to the volumes which Thomson had previously published, which featured arrangements by Joseph Haydn. In the event, Moore turned Thomson down because of other commitments, but the idea obviously appealed (to say nothing of the prospect of appearing in succession to the great Haydn).¹¹ But when he (soon afterwards) accepted the invitation from William and James Power, he enterprised something quite different from those well-tried commissions which Thomson had envisaged, and which formed part of a wider tradition in which arrangements of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh airs by well-known continental composers were set to words selected by publishers such as Thomson himself. Moore’s project was otherwise: he would be engaged with Sir John Stevenson to collaborate in the provision of symphonies and accompaniments to the airs, but crucially he would also adapt the airs to accommodate a sequence of verses intended to promote precisely this imagined unity as between music and politics. Moore’s avowed intention in the Melodies was that of “interpreting in verse the touching language of my country’s music” (Moore, “Preface,” Irish Melodies). And it was this unity, as between words and music, that distinguished Moore’s collection from every other cosmopolitan arrangement of folksong.

If I identify here these two imagined unities, first as between music and politics, and second as between music and verse, it is because both of them would prove vital to Moore’s purpose and vital, indeed, to the success and controversy which the Melodies stimulated from their earliest appearance. “[They are] the melancholy ravings of the disappointed rebel,” exclaimed the Anti-Jacobin Review of the first two volumes, a condemnation that incisively carries forward the political tenor of Moore’s enterprise at a time when the merest hint of Irish political autonomy or oppression entailed the risk of reprisal.¹² When Moore sat down to write these songs, the Penal Laws had been recently repealed, and his memory was still fresh with the “time of terror and torture” that dominated his days as a student in Trinity College Dublin, a period in which his friends and colleagues, including Robert Emmet, were interrogated and (in Emmet’s case) executed on foot of their involvement in the disastrous rebellion of United Irishmen in 1798 (Moore, “Preface,” Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald). Small wonder, perhaps, that Moore should have insisted upon the intimacy between music and politics in Ireland. This was not an intimacy that was easily conceded elsewhere: in his attempt to translate Irish music into English verse, Moore excited the vehement opposition not only of the Tory press but also of those antiquarian scholars from whose collections he selected the melodies in the first place. In particular, Edward Bunting, whose General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, published in 1796–1797, was to prove a fertile source for Moore, deeply resented what he took to be the misrepresentation of this volume in Moore’s hands. Bunting was an antiquarian and a scholar: his dramatic introduction to Irish music took place at the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792, when he took down many of the melodies he later published from an assembly of blind and elderly harpers whom Bunting regarded, not unjustifiably, as the last representatives of an almost completely defunct Gaelic musical culture (Moloney). But Moore saw matters differently: he understood these melodies to be of comparatively recent provenance (which is to say from the early part of the eighteenth century), and he disputed Bunting’s claim that the General Collection preserved in any material sense the actual music of an ancient civilization.¹³ This difference between Bunting and Moore is crucial, but it does not entirely supervene the shared affinity between them, at least insofar as both men took refuge in an idealized (and largely mythologized) vision of Gaelic culture intended to redeem, by contrast, the “sad degrading truths” (in Moore’s phrase) of recent Irish history (“Appendix” Intolerance, MCP 3: 57). Nevertheless, the profound difference between Bunting’s published collections of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration Reassessed: Enlightened Tolerance and Interdisciplinary Poetics
• PART I: Moore’s Literary and Musical Inspirations
• PART II: Moore’s Melodies, Airs, and Songs in Performative Contexts
• PART III: Moore’s Political Inspirations and Moore’s Poetry in Political Contexts
• Appendix 1 Compiled by Axel Klein
• Appendix 2 Compiled by Mary Louise O’Donnell
• List of Major Works
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index