Music and Irish Identity

Celtic Tiger Blues

Gerry Smyth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317092438
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music and Irish Identity represents the latest stage in a life-long project for Gerry Smyth, focusing here on the ways in which music engages with particular aspects of Irish identity. The nature of popular music and the Irish identity it supposedly articulates have both undergone profound change in recent years: the first as a result of technological and wider industrial changes in the organisation and dissemination of music as seen, for example, with digital platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. A second factor has been Ireland's spectacular fall from economic grace after the demise of the "Celtic Tiger", and the ensuing crisis of national identity. Smyth argues that if, as the stereotypical association would have it, the Irish have always been a musical race, then that association needs re-examination in the light of developments in relation to both cultural practice and political identity. This book contributes to that process through a series of related case studies that are both scholarly and accessible. Some of the principal ideas broached in the text include the (re-)establishment of music as a key object of Irish cultural studies; the theoretical limitations of traditional musicology; the development of new methodologies specifically designed to address the demands of Irish music in all its aspects; and the impact of economic austerity on musical negotiations of Irish identity. The book will be of seminal importance to all those interested in popular music, cultural studies and the wider fate of Ireland in the twenty-first century.

1 Nationalism and gender in the music of Augusta Holmès

Notes from an unwritten biography

I

I first encountered the name Augusta Patricia Mary-Anne Holmès in 2004 in Richard Pine’s introductory essay to his edited book Music in Ireland 1848–1998 (1998: 24), in which she’s listed as one of a number of forgotten Irish classical composers. An internet search produced a modicum of information, but it was clear even then that here was an intriguing figure deserving of more attention that she had hitherto received. When I began to search in earnest I discovered:

• two unpublished American theses – one at Masters level (Rockwood 2002), one doctoral (Theeman 1983);

• four French biographies – two written shortly after her death (Barillon-Bauché 1912; Pichard du Page 1921), two (after decades of neglect) towards the end of the twentieth century (Friang 1998; Gefen 1988);

• one short essay on her life and career by the English composer Ethel Smyth (1928: 126–36);

• two journal articles dealing with various aspects of her experience (Myers 1967; Pasler 1998);

• one chapter detailing her contribution to the centenary celebrations for the French Revolution at the Paris World’s Fair in 1889 (Fauser 2005: 103–38);

• two archives of her writings and possessions – one held in the National Library in Versailles where Augusta Holmès (or Holmes as she was then) grew up, one at the National Library in Paris where she lived for most of her life and where she died in 1903;

• one recording of selections of her orchestral music (1994) and various recordings of a few of her many songs (Various Artists 1996, 2005);

• a sizeable number of song scores in the Music Room of the British Library;

• one biographical novel focusing on her relationship with the composer César Franck (Harwood 1978);

• numerous obscure references to her (much of the time in footnotes) in the biographies of various ‘Great Men’ from the late nineteenth century, including Franck himself, Camille Saint-Saëns, Stéphane Mallarmé, Richard Wagner and George Moore.

Two areas of potential interest struck me as I began to trawl through this material: firstly, the extent to which her profile as a woman working in a field overwhelmingly dominated by men engaged with some of the concerns explored by later generations of feminist critics; and secondly, the extent to which the life and career of Augusta Holmès channels some of the issues explored by Harry White in his extended study of Irish musical culture since the nineteenth century (1998, 2008) – in particular the attempt to develop an indigenous art music.

The critical biography that I wanted to write about the life, times and music of Augusta Holmès would have been structured in terms of these two principal issues. Unfortunately, life and the apathy of publishers intervened; other interests, other projects, emerged and Augusta got pushed, as is her wont, further and further down the ‘Things to Do’ list until she almost disappeared altogether. Hers remains an extraordinary story, however, one that should be much better known in Irish cultural and feminist history. With the opportunity having fled, the close detail of a major intervention will have to give way to the broad brush strokes of the following portrait.

II

Augusta Holmes (without the accent grave that would render her Ohlmaize) was born in Paris in 1847, the only child of an exiled Irish father and an Anglo-Scottish mother. The family of her father, Charles William Scott Dalkieth Holmes, came from south-east Ireland where they held land near Youghal, on the Cork side of the border with Waterford.¹ Holmes had been a cavalry officer in Wellington’s army at Waterloo, but had decided (for what reason no-one seems sure) to make his home in France after the defeat of Napoleon. Perhaps he came to think, as many Irishmen have done over the centuries, that he might have been fighting on the wrong side. In any event, after a number of extended sojourns in the country he settled permanently and in 1827 married the sixteen-year-old Tryphina Shearer – a renowned beauty who, besides her interests in art, poetry and horses, brought a substantial fortune with her.

Holmes was ‘a man of imposing presence, a scholar, a polyglot, an art lover and a devotee of Shakespeare’.² Perhaps these many interests diverted him from the business of starting a family; in any event it was not until 1847, twenty years after the marriage itself, that the couple’s only child was born. Soon after, the family moved to Versailles where they had friends and where they rented rooms in the centre of the town. Augusta was educated at home by her parents and by her godfather, the renowned poet and man-of-letters, Alfred de Vigny. The Holmes family were close friends with the latter’s English wife, Lydia Bunbury, and there has been much speculation – at the time and since – as to the nature of the relationship between de Vigny and Augusta’s mother. More than one person pointed to the twenty childless years shared by Captain and Mrs Holmes before the appearance of Augusta; more than one discerned a physical resemblance between the growing girl and the godfather, and suggested that de Vigny’s intense interest in Augusta’s education and career was occasioned by more than just the responsibilities of a godfather.³

Whatever the truth of the matter, a number of consequences arose from the Versailles ménage. Firstly, Augusta had a brilliant education at the hands of de Vigny and her parents: by the age of twelve she spoke French, English, German and Italian; she was well read in classical and modern literature, and she had developed an interest in art and culture that, although not unique, was unusual for a female of the period. Secondly: the rumour of scandal that attached to her name at this early age was to cling to Augusta throughout her life, constituting part of her attraction for late nineteenth-century French society, but also part of the means whereby she could always be ‘managed’ by that society.

Despite the literary and artistic proclivities of her circle, and despite the disapproval of her mother (who died in 1858) and her godfather, Augusta began to develop a special interest in music. She quickly became an adept on the piano, and learned extensive parts of the classical canon by heart. Although as a woman the Paris Conservatoire was unavailable, the accommodating Captain Holmes paid for lessons in composition, orchestration and performance with various teachers in Versailles. His precocious daughter began composing aged twelve, publishing her first song when she was fourteen.⁴ During her adolescence she continued to live in Versailles with her father, where their home became a beacon for many people (especially men) who were already starting to gather around Augusta like moths drawn towards a powerful, fascinating light: men like the poets Emile Deschamps, the politician (and future Prime Minister) Emile Ollivier, the novelist André Theuriet, the composer Charles Gounod and the artist Frederic Mistral.

By the late 1860s Holmès had outgrown Versailles (and no doubt her father’s overly solicitous attention). She began to spend more time in nearby Paris where she could pursue the life of a modern composer in earnest. Already incredibly well connected, she extended her list of acquaintances amongst the extensive salon culture to be found in the capital where, regardless of her artistic ambitions, her (relative) wealth, (uncommon) beauty and (undoubted) talent were ready passports to acceptance. It was there that she met Catulle Mendés: philanderer, jailbird and a leading voice of the Parnassian group which emerged during the 1860s as, amongst other things, an artistic rejoinder to what its adherents regarded as the bureaucratic banalities of the Second Empire.⁵ Mendés was married to Judith Gautier, daughter of fellow Parnassian Théophile Gautier (who strongly disapproved of the union), but that didn’t curb his enthusiasm for this new face – ‘more a goddess than a woman’, according to the painter Georges Clairin (quoted in Richardson 1986: 35) – about whom so many were raving.

In keeping with his profile as a controversialist, Mendés was a devotee of the music of Richard Wagner, who was a deeply unpopular figure in Parisian cultural circles since the abortive staging of his opera Tannhaüser in March 1861. In the summer of 1869 Mendés organised a trip to visit the divisive German composer at his home in Tribschen on the banks of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, where the great man was in temporary exile following the scandal of his liaison with a married woman. (The excursion was also to include a performance of Das Rheingold in Munich.) In the party were Judith, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle Adam (a writer as outlandish and almost as handsome as Mendés himself), as well as Captain and Mlle Holmes.

The trip was fraught from the outset. Wagner’s partner Cosima (daughter of Franz Liszt) was overwhelmed by the sexual tension infusing the party, and disgusted at her father’s apparent infatuation with the youngest of the visiting French beauties. Wagner himself, meanwhile, struggled to overcome his prejudice against these representatives of a race whose cultural values seemed so at odds with his own (or at least with the ones he was attempting to establish in his own art). He was nevertheless taken, as all men seemed to be, by Augusta; a call on the visitors’ apartment in Munich during rehearsals for the opera occasioned rumours of a proposal. Back in Tribschen Holmès played and sang for the master one evening before the party returned to France, after which Wagner advised her to avoid emulating his example and to follow her own inclinations.

This was a rather disingenuous suggestion given the extent to which Wagner and his music would come to dominate the European musical imagination during the following decades. Despite her patriotism and her dedication to the ideal of French art, in essence Holmès remained, in some aspects at least, a Wagnerian throughout her life.⁶ Of course, ‘Wagnerian’ meant many things to many people in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, whereas the associated cult of ‘Tristanism’ meant something else again (Davies 1970: 161). A lasting influence is apparent, for example, in her dedication to the ideal of the composer as auteur: ‘In her method of compositing both poetry and music’, Theeman writes, ‘she emulated Wagner completely’ (1983: 94). What she really took from the German, however, was a conviction as to the nobility of the composer’s calling – the idea that art music represented, even more than the literary or plastic arts, the apogee of European civilisation, and that to compose was in some senses to articulate God’s will in human terms.

Holmès came into independent financial means after the death of her father late in 1869 (the rigours of the recent trip, perhaps), a condition that was to facilitate her unconventional life; she could now at least afford, in the words of a future feminist artist, ‘a room of her own’. The following years witnessed the commencement of the Franco-Prussian War (in which she served briefly as a nurse), the fall of the Second Empire and the Paris Commune, and the first of a series of pregnancies in which Holmès would give birth to four illegitimate children for Mendés. Although she valued her role as a mother, the children did not form part of Augusta’s plans and had to be kept off the scene. The regular absences for purposes of confinement no doubt contributed to the air of scandal that continued to attend her in the years after the war.

Holmès chose the fraught period after the fall of the Commune to make a permanent move to Paris. Like many of her contemporaries, she felt the defeat of France very keenly, especially as one of her closest friends – the artist Henri Régnault – was amongst those killed.⁷ The experience fostered a political sensibility which expressed itself in terms of a strident patriotism (she assumed French nationality immediately after the war) and an equally strong conviction as to the outraged rights of the underdog. Much of her musical output testifies to these convictions: in many of her songs and arias young men – French, Irish, Polish, Montenegrin – are getting ready to march away to a war in which they will happily give their lives, and are saying goodbye to beautiful young women whom they must leave behind. Born out of defeat and bitter resentment, it was a perspective which resonated throughout the Third Republic – one which would manifest itself in some of the more unsavoury aspects of French political culture in the decades leading up to the First World War.⁸

Back in the 1870s, well into her twenties and in the uncertain aftermath of national military defeat, Holmès set about the task of becoming a serious composer. The courage and ambition of such a decision remain difficult for contemporary observers to appreciate: for reasons that we shall encounter at greater length in a later section, the role of women in art music was problematic from first to last, but especially in terms of the most specialised (and the most masculinised) role within the entire discourse: composer. Augusta was by all accounts a good singer and a good pianist, and she might have looked (as many women did) to develop a career based on those talents. Instead she chose to assume a role that had been accumulating heavy ideological baggage for nigh on two centuries, one that was itself over-determined by a cluster of powerful discourses, including – most challengingly for her – gender.

Holmès had received some formal training during her Versailles days, but she had never actually studied composition; and this, as she began to produce properly orchestral music (as opposed to mélodie – a specialised French take on the art song which she appeared to be able to rattle off at will), was a deficiency that needed to be addressed. To do so, she turned to one of the most prominent figures of contemporary French musical life: César Franck.

Franck functions as a kind of bridge between the isolated voice of Hector Berlioz and the golden age of French music embodied in the operatic composers of the Third Republic and the new departure initiated by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Born in Liège in Belgium in 1822, Franck had been living and working in Paris since 1844 where he was a Professor of Organ at the Conservatoire and directed the music at one of the city’s major churches, Sainte-Clothilde. After the Franco-Prussian war, he was instrumental in forming the Société Nationale de Musique – a group (which included important figures such as Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré) concerned to re-establish French orchestral music in response to Wagner’s growing domination and the increasing prominence of opera. Franck was joined in this project by his sometime friend Camille Saint-Saëns; he counted among his students and adherents Vincent D’Indy, Ernest Chausson and Henri Duparc – each of whom would go on to become influential in the subsequent fate of French art music. Franck’s life was one of routine and contemplation, of responsibility and duty, and of dedication to his work in the Conservatoire and the Church. He was in many ways a typical Victorian patriarch, from the sideburns and the black clothes to the air of dourness and seriousness that he deliberately cultivated.

Her career stalling, her ambitions unmet, Augusta Holmès applied to study with Franck in 1875: he was fifty-three and she was twenty-eight. No longer in the first flush of her arresting beauty, and already a mother (although a secret mother who saw her children irregularly), she could still dominate rooms with the sheer vibrancy of her personality. Against the advice of his wife, (most of) his friends and (most of) the students he already had, Franck accepted her; almost immediately, it appears, her presence began to unsettle him. One can only imagine what it must have been like for this serious, unworldly middle-aged man, meeting this beautiful, thrilling, talented woman of the world; one can only speculate (and many have) about the manner in which shock developed into excitement, desire and perhaps infatuation.

Augusta liked César; she liked his music, his diligence with regard to composition, his endearing seriousness; she admired his acknowledgement of Wagner’s genius at a time when the latter’s music was extremely unpopular in France. Under his tutelage she wrote some of her most compelling work, including two dramatic symphonies: Lutèce – which won second prize in the City of Paris competition for original compositions in 1879 – and Les Argonautes – which received an honourable mention in the same competition the following year (even though most of the musically competent members of the committee, including Franck himself, had voted for her work). She also wrote a symphonic poem, Irlande (1882), which formally (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reflections on music and Irish identity
• Prolegomena: A musical day
• 1. Nationalism and gender in the music of Augusta Holmès: Notes from an unwritten biography
• 2. ‘I have left my book’: Setting Joyce’s Chamber Music lyrics to music
• 3. Thinking in circles: Music and cyclical form in Joyce’s Chamber Music
• 4. The representation of Dublin in story and song
• 5. Musical stereotyping and Irish identity: The case of the Pogues
• 6. ‘The orchestra of memory’: Music, sound and silence in Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song
• 7. ‘Join us’: Musical style and identity in Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘My Dear Palestrina’
• 8. Singing the fisherman’s blues: Mike Scott and the grain of the Irish voice
• 9. ‘About nothing, about everything’: Listening in / to Tim Robinson
• 10. Celtic Tiger blues: Sing when you’re winning
• References
• Index