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Musicology Seminar One – Professor Harry White

The following is a report on a seminar on the topic of opera in Ireland during the nineteenth century. Professor Harry White of the University College Dublin School of Music delivered the seminar, opening with a reference to the poetry of Derek Mahon, quoting his work Ghosts by way of illustrating the difficulties of summoning the ‘ghosts’ of nineteenth-century Irish opera. It seems that the real operas of nineteenth-century Ireland are more illusory than those that appear in the literature they inspired or influenced, such as that of James Joyce. Approximately two hundred and eighty operas were composed in Ireland during the nineteenth century, with around thirty of them being on Irish subjects. Yet, the genre in Ireland did not enjoy the organic status it received in Europe and rather remained on the periphery, with only sporadic reception of homegrown attempts in comparison to Italian and English opera; for most of the 1840s, commented White, Italian opera ‘overwhelmed the Irish spoken word on the stage’. The experience of opera in Ireland became the prelude to literature, not to indigenous opera.


Professor White continued to the next section of his presentation, entitled ‘The National Longing for Form’. The Victorian yearning for form was largely centered on opera, with tension between English opera and the German music-drama worsening the longing. This yearning remains in Irish critical discourse long after the nineteenth century.
White discussed the adulteration of culture, and the resulting emergence of Irish literature. Cultural purification by the Gaelic League and other Celtic revivalist associations and by Douglas Hyde aimed to exclude art music. This resulted in the static status of progression that characterised music in nineteenth-century Ireland, and explains the static reception of opera in the country. However, White observed that James Joyce’s use of opera in his early writing collectively functioned as an extension of operetta in Ireland.
Under the heading ‘The Pathos of Paddy’, White’s presentation note how the repetitive yearly performance of a limited number of operas (such as Balfe’s) in Dublin led to their characterisation as Irish, through their referential status in the work of Joyce and elsewhere. English operas were given repeatedly in Dublin, and therefore entered the Irish imagination. Professor White explored the ascendancy of genre over subject matter in Irish opera, indicated by the musical form of the works; fixed forms guaranteed the works international currency. Irish subject matter was authenticated by the forms, rather than the other way round.


Professor White contrasted Shaw and Stanford, who dominated English music as critic and composer respectively, against Douglas Hyde: the latter two were Dublin contemporaries, but they did not hesitate to adapt to English tastes; Hyde, on the other hand, remained strongly in support of a wholly Irish Ireland.