Bronze by Gold

The Music of Joyce

Sebastian D.G. Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135656539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

The contributors to this volume investigate several themes about music's relationship to the literary compositions of James Joyce: music as a condition to which Joyce aspired; music theory as a useful way of reading his works; and musical compositions inspired by or connected with him.

Part I

Bronze: Music

Section 1: Joyce’s Musical Background

Chapter 1

James Joyce and Dublin Opera, 1888–1904

Seamus Reilly

This essay combines two separate approaches to the question of James Joyce and Dublin music. First, I provide a complete catalogue of the operas produced in Dublin from 1888 to 1904, along with the names of the traveling companies that performed them. Second, I stress the importance of this musical context for an understanding of Joyce’s texts. Recent studies have attempted, as Thomas Rice has pointed out, “to place James Joyce as a product of his contemporary culture” (Rice, xiii). Since music remained for Joyce a central part of his life and his fictions, it seems doubly important to “reground Joyce in his historical context” (Rice, xiv). Joyce remained a great fan of the opera and a champion of John Sullivan, the Franco-Irish tenor. As this essay demonstrates, that love for opera was learned not only at his father’s knee (Bauerle and Hodgart, 3), but more than likely at the many opera performances available to Dublin audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Here is provided concrete evidence of the musical culture in which Joyce lived and in which he participated as a performer, placing his texts in their historical-musical context.

Opera in Dublin was performed by a number of traveling operatic groups. The Carl Rosa and Rousbey companies, in particular, brought new operas to Dublin and maintained the operatic tradition. However, there were other groups that had brief tenures in the theaters of Dublin. The Moody-Manners Company was prominent toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the Neilson, Walsham, Valentine Smith, Grand English, F. S. Gilbert, and Royal Italian Opera (Covent Garden) companies all visited Dublin. In addition, the National Opera Company of Robert Cunningham had short-lived success. Sometimes these visits lasted three weeks, sometimes only a week. The seasons do not appear to have been rigidly fixed. The Rousbey Company usually performed starting St. Stephen’s Day through the third week of January. Carl Rosa performed in August and September. Occasionally there were seasons around Easter time or brief seasons in October or November. The companies performed a mixture of popular operas but also introduced newer works. Carl Rosa seems to have been the main source of newer continental operas, but Rousbey quickly adapted whatever the more famous company was showing. Certain operas were perennial; Faust, Il Trovatore, Maritana, The Bohemian Girl, and Carmen were produced by every company that visited Dublin whether they were regularly engaged or not. The companies were also sensitive to the reaction of the audience. When the first performance of La Bohème was less than favorably received it was withdrawn the following week, presumably to give the cast time to refine the parts. Companies were quick to repeat operas that had been well received. Certain singers, especially Barton M’Guckin and Joseph O’Mara, were highlighted by the different companies. M’Guckin, for example, was specially engaged to sing with Carl Rosa and was renowned in the role of Don José in Carmen. Joseph O’Mara, who sang with the Royal Italian Opera, was advertised as the returning Irishman. The principal singers, moreover, were assigned to certain roles and operas to prevent the stress on the voice, and therefore audiences not only identified singers with roles but were assured of hearing relatively fresh voices for each performance.¹ Another singer, E. C. Hedmondt, replaced O’Mara as Don José, and was also famous for his Wagnerian roles.

Carl Rosa remained a prominent part of the Dublin musical season and was connected with the Gaiety Theatre, where it first performed in 1875. As Eric White remarks in A History of English Opera, the “London seasons were no longer regarded as the apex of the company’s work” (370), and the company also moved away from the commissioning of new English operas and toward the production of new foreign operas in English. One such opera, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, was first produced in Dublin in 1893. Irish audiences, therefore, were guaranteed a high quality of performance from professional touring companies.

The catalogue that follows not only fills in the gaps as far as the general musical scene is concerned, but also corrects earlier assumptions about operas more central to Joyce’s writings. While Stephen and Nona Watt, in Bauerle and Hodgart (319–22), include a brief listing of the operas performed in Dublin at the turn of the century, that list is incomplete. This catalogue provides for the first time a comprehensive list of all the operas performed in Dublin from 1888 to 1904, and includes information about the composers and performers. Such a list allows us to correct a number of misconceptions about opera in Dublin of the period. It has been assumed, for example, that Wagner’s operas with a few exceptions were not produced in Dublin while Joyce was still living there.² Wagner had been produced in Dublin in the 1870s, but the opera annals showed no performances in the later years of the century.³ This catalogue demonstrates that a greater number of Wagner’s works than hitherto known were indeed produced in Dublin. Joyce, we know, was an early champion of Wagner, although his enthusiasm later cooled. The expanded list of Wagner operas produced while he lived in Dublin helps to explain both his interest and why he should have owned the libretti to Wagner’s operas, which he had Stanislaus send to Paris in 1903: “send me at once (so that I may have it by Thursday night) my copy of Wagner’s operas” (L, II, 25). It also explains the somewhat curious reference in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Siegfried: “They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking. The birdcall from Siegfried whistled softly followed them from the steps of the porch” (P, 237). Selections from Wagner were regularly performed in concerts in Dublin, but such a specific section from the opera would have been difficult to excerpt out of context. Normal practice has been to assume that Joyce would have heard it in concert or played the score, or else had silently and anachronistically inserted his knowledge of the opera from continental performances. A simpler solution to the puzzle is that the Carl Rosa Company produced the work for the first time in 1901, as part of a season that also included a first performance of Tristan und Isolde. In addition, works by Verdi, Donizetti, Puccini, and Mascagni were staged soon after their first performances on the continent and in London. In some cases, as I have indicated, Dublin premiered the opera.

The Gaiety Theatre, Leinster Hall, the Theatre Royal, and the Queen’s Royal Theatre all had opera seasons. The Carl Rosa Company played exclusively in the Gaiety Theatre, while the Rousbey Company and the other traveling companies played at the Theatre Royal, Queen’s Royal, or Leinster Hall. These theaters attracted large numbers to the various seasons and maintained a consistent ticket price through 1904, when it was still possible to attend the opera for sixpence. Dubliners were attracted by the operas themselves, but also by the number of international stars who came to the city as part of these companies. It would be impossible here to mention the many concerts and recitals held in Dublin in the sixteen years covered by this catalogue, but there is ample evidence that the Dublin audiences saw operas performed by quality, professional singers. There is proof, too, of the curious link between amateur and professional singers. Talented amateurs did appear in professional theaters in Dublin both in concerts and recitals, and also, in the case of O’Brien Butler’s Muirgheis, as part of an opera company. Such opportunity for amateurs may well explain the opinion that has persisted about Joyce that he could easily have performed as a professional singer.

Immediately obvious from the catalogue is the number of different operas that were performed in Dublin in the period when Joyce was a boy and young man. It is known that operas with Irish themes, the so-called Irish Ring of The Bohemian Girl, The Lily of Killarney, and Maritana, were frequently produced in Dublin. The popularity and frequent repetition of these works have perhaps tarnished their image, but their popularity ensured the performance of these operas not only by Rousbey but by all the major operatic companies that visited the city. It is less well known that the operas produced in Dublin included the latest works from the continent. La Bohème, for example, was produced in Dublin before it was produced in New York. And Dublin audiences retained a love for the older operas such as La Sonnambula, which were part of the Joyce family mythology, and were produced often enough to allow one to understand how Joyce’s father could refer to their aunt as “La Somnambula” [sic] without the reference seeming in the least esoteric or affected (S. Joyce, The Dublin Diary, 20). The opera, rarely performed today, was a perennial favorite of the Dublin houses. The famous scene recounted in Ellmann (276) when James and his father had a musical reconciliation in a village inn, where the elder Joyce played and sang from La Traviata, seems less remarkable when we consider the number of times the opera was produced in the city. Joyce’s own selective operatic taste was refined and sharpened by his experience on the continent, especially in Trieste, but it was most surely molded and shaped by his experience of opera in Dublin.

The operas most commonly alluded to in Joyce’s fictions are also the operas that were most frequently produced while he lived there. But for Joyce the experience of opera was more than theatergoing, and more even than the music: Joyce is also conscious of the way in which opera is centered on individual singers. The idea of the star, divo or diva, is extremely powerful as a way of enticing audiences or even creating a desire to simulate the appearance of the leading male or female singer. Joyce’s fascination with singers and the ability of the voice to seduce an audience is prominent in varying degrees in “The Dead” and in “Sirens.” Wayne Koestenbaum analyzes this relationship of audience and singer in erotic terms, since the audience member relates to the specific qualities of the singer’s voice: “a timbre against which others would seem too full, too old, too ripe, too controlled” (20). Joyce depicts such individual vocal qualities in “Sirens” when Simon Dedalus’s voice becomes separated from the actual performer. This separation enables the aficionado to be attracted to the singer in a manner that Koestenbaum describes as erotic, allowing the listener to delight in the sound of the voice without having a declared affection for the singer. It explains how Richie Goulding can be affected by Dedalus’s voice even though they do not communicate. Molly Bloom likewise distinguishes between Simon’s voice and his character, describing the voice in sensual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Editorial Conventions
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Bronze: Music
• Part II Gold: Text
• List of Contributors
• Index