A song for Nora Barnacle: ‘James Joyce wouldn’t have been the writer he was without her’

Patrick Kavanagh extolled the virtues of a world where "life pours ordinary plenty". Such mundane routines were alien to the life of Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's muse, lover and eventual wife. Theirs was a stormy relationship, characterised – at least in the early years – by an intense eroticism, chronicled so majestically in Ulysses through the character of Molly Bloom. Now, more than six decades after her death, Barnacle's story will be recounted through a sweeping song cycle called simply Nora Barnacle, composed by Shaun Davey and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and sung by Rita Connolly.

It was the intriguing portrait of Barnacle on the cover of Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, that first intrigued Davey. "I've always been interested in songs of a biographical nature," he says. "I like the idea of songs that are photographs of other people's lives. Then, there's always the opportunity for overlap between one's own experience and the experience of the person you're doing a portrait of. So songs for me are much more interesting when they're musical portraits."

At the heart of this collaboration between Davey, the composer; Ní Dhomhnaill, the poet; and Connolly, the interpreter, is a fascination with Barnacle’s life and her influence on Joyce’s writing. The fact that the infamous couple’s lives intersected with two world wars, exile in Europe and a family dynamic that featured alcoholism (Joyce and his son, Giorgio), mental illness (daughter Lucia) and passions riding high added fuel to the creative fire.

Innate musicality

Despite Davey’s fascination with Barnacle, he was anxious about his ability to do justice to these historical figures. It was Ní Dhomhnaill’s words that set the project on its ultimate trajectory. At the heart of her writing is what Davey characterises as Ní Dhomhnaill’s “innate musicality”.

She has her own view on what makes this musical partnership work.“I’m not precious about the words,” she says. An unlikely pronouncement from a poet, surely? “Shaun can do whatever he likes with them. If I were writing a poem, it would be much more my personal fiefdom: don’t change a word or I’ll kill you. But this is a completely different kind of writing and you have to leave lots of space for the music. I grew up singing sean-nós songs, so I understand that.”

Davey is quick to demystify the compositional process too. “Writing music is a bit like catch of the day. You don’t know what’s in you. But it was Nuala’s instinctive feel for Nora’s west of Ireland speech patterns that coloured much of the music.”

Hiberno-English

Ní Dhomhnaill's first language is English, and she learned Irish on her return to Ireland from England as a child. She never learned to speak English as most Irish people do, using Hiberno-English, with sentence structures reflecting a translation from Irish. It was Hiberno-English Barnacle primarily used. "I could spend my time thinking of these phrases and how wonderful they are," she says. "'You have me killed: táim marbh agat.' A Dubliner wouldn't say that but someone from the west of Ireland would. You can hear the cadences of Nora's speech, especially in Finnegans Wake, which makes no sense unless read aloud. It's a river of sound, and the musical patterns of it are very much west of Ireland. So it wasn't difficult to be inspired by Nora's words, imagining what she would be saying and how annoyed she must have been so often by Joyce."

This was Davey and Ní Dhomhnaill’s ultimate challenge: to reimagine the words of Barnacle, most of whose letters were destroyed. In some ways, this void was what gave them the creative space they needed.

“I suppose we’re really describing Nora’s life in letter or postcard form,” Davey says.

Connolly knew that simplicity had to be at the core of whatever music would emerge. “The challenge was to keep it simple, because Nora was simple,” she says. “She wasn’t an intellect. She was very intelligent, but she wasn’t educated in the same way Joyce was. She didn’t have an awful lot of time for intellectuals, and we wanted to keep it in her voice.”

It was Barnacle who grounded Joyce, Ní Dhomhnaill says. “She was the rock; his emotional centre.” Her multiple contradictions provide more pause for thought. She seemed so free in terms of her sexuality, and yet, as Connolly observes, she was very old-fashioned in her loyalty to her man. She was a feminist in some ways, an adventurer, exuding what might be called in Irish “taispeach” (or “ballsiness” today).

"She was a frontierswoman except she went the other direction," Connolly says – and this from a woman who's no stranger to the portrayal of strong female characters herself, having brought the mythical Grace O'Malley to life in Davey's 1985 suite Granuaile. Connolly is hopeful that the songs will shed a light on Nora's life and might in some way right some wrongs that have been done to her over the years.

“Nora deserves a place beside Joyce,” she says. “He wouldn’t have been the writer he was without her. People need to recognise that.”

• Nora Barnacle premieres at the National Concert Hall on Bloomsday, June 16th, at 8pm. Tickets €25/€20, nch.ie