Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies were first published 200 years ago, and musicians and singers plan to prove that Moore's work has stood the test of time, writes Arminta Wallace
He was, in his own day, a celebrity. As a poet he was on a par with Wordsworth, while as a wildly popular songwriter his greatest hits were translated into Russian and Spanish and sung by all the biggest international stars of the time. Thomas Moore has always been this country's unofficial bard. A generation of Irish schoolchildren, including this writer, memorised traditional airs for the Inter and Leaving Certificates by inscribing the tunes note by pencilled note on to grubby manuscript pages as we ran through Moore's words - much easier to remember - in our heads.
"Putting the words with the melodies, that was Moore's genius," says the pianist, musicologist and 19th-century music enthusiast, Una Hunt. "That's what made Moore's Irish Melodies what they were."
But, as she readily admits, Moore has fallen off the radar in recent years. "How many of the Irish Melodies can you name?" she asks. "Most people would be hard-pressed to get half a dozen, yet there were 124 altogether, published in 10 volumes."
The first volume was published in 1808, and Hunt is determined to turn 2008 into a bicentennial hymn of praise to the melodious Mr Moore with a year-long series of commemorative events, beginning today with My Gentle Harp, a festival for young Irish singers. At the theatre of the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama on Dublin's Rathmines Road, young Irish singers will compete for a place in the grand final, to be held at the National Concert Hall on January 22nd.
"We need to make people aware of him and his achievements," says Hunt. "Most people nowadays don't know that he wrote biographies of Byron and Sheridan, or that he wrote a huge history of Ireland. And he wrote other collections of songs as well as the national melodies. Towards the end of the 19th century he was ignored by the literary glitterati, who considered him a bit lowbrow. But I think his songs have stood the test of time - and there's a huge potential there for modern singers to do a new take on them."
A singer in black tracksuit bottoms giving Moore the hip-hop treatment is not, however, quite what Hunt has in mind.
"Moore wasn't a trained singer," she says. "He probably didn't even have much training as a pianist. He played enough to accompany himself in a very basic way, but not enough to write the piano accompaniments down."
And so he got other people to do it for him. Hunt describes the original piano accompaniments, by Moore's friend John Stevenson, as "bad versions of Haydn or Mozart" which don't sit well with the traditional melodies. Later Irish composers, including Stanford and Balfe, also had a go, producing accompaniments which - while undeniably mellifluous - belong to a later musical period.
"He has been constantly updated," says Hunt. "But not recently. I'm sure there's a way of doing modern arrangements of these songs without wrecking the airs altogether." Arrangers, take note.
Meanwhile, Gavan Ring and Tara Erraught will be among the singers battling to qualify for the final of My Gentle Harp. Ring, a 20-year-old baritone from Caherciveen, Co Kerry, who gave a recital of Moore songs for last year's Parnell Spring Day at Avondale House in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, says he approached Moore by way of the words.
"There's a lot of beauty to Moore's poetry," he says. "And if you detach yourself from the music for a moment and just read those words, it's like any other art song where you interpret the emotion that the poet is trying to put across. And you try to infuse the music with that emotion. So it's all down to the singer's interpretation of what he or she believes the words are saying."
MOORE'S MELODIES WERE, he points out, originally performed in an informal domestic setting - usually a drawing-room - rather than the concert context which is the usual home of Lieder and French song. To replicate that intimacy and informality amid the nerves and tension of competition will, Ring feels, be crucial in order to do well in the competition.
"I wanted to select a varied programme," he says. "So I went for Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms; Come, Send Round the Wine; The Minstrel Boy; and The Meeting of the Waters."
Erraught, who says she has been singing Moore songs since she was 10, has chosen some less familiar titles, including Though the Last Glimpse of Erin, Weep On, Weep On and When He Who Adores Thee.
"I tried very hard to pick songs that the boys couldn't sing," she says. "Moore wrote some great soldier's songs - really great ones - so I went for the girliest songs I could find. But I'm also doing The Minstrel Boy. You couldn't do the Thomas Moore competition and not sing The Minstrel Boy. I couldn't leave that one to the boys, I'm afraid."
A mezzo-soprano who won second prize in last year's Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition, Erraught has just played the Baroness in a staging of Rossini's La Pietra del Paragone at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin and will be part of the Crash Ensemble's Aarvo Part festival in February. She also has a theory about why Moore has fallen out of favour.
"The trendiest voice in Irish music has always been the tenor, and the most popular Irish tenor - especially on the American market - was John McCormack," she says. "He sang a lot of Moore, and so did Frank Patterson. Then came the Three Tenors. They started off with lots of Moore - and then there were the Celtic Tenors and the Irish Tenors, and suddenly everybody was singing Moore all the time. Then Riverdance came on the scene, and there was a new type of Irish singing, Celtic and much more spiritual. Republican songs were put on the back-burner for a while."
Is this a good time to revive them? Hunt, who was born in Belfast, believes it is. Despite his republican ideals, Moore was a charismatic man and a highly popular figure in English liberal society in the 1800s. He has, therefore, a suitably ecumenical appeal.
"He has been criticised for being a fireside republican," says Hunt. "And it's true that when his country might have needed him to fight, he took off to London and, well, fopped his way around English society. I think his mother pushed him to leave Dublin. He had been to political rallies, was a friend of Robert Emmet's and so on, and I think she knew how dangerous it all was.
"But I don't think he was a frothy little fellow who just went around entertaining the aristocracy. He had a message, and he was trying to get it across - and he probably did a hell of a lot more for Ireland through his songs than he could have done any other way. They're not bloodthirsty political songs. They make their point, but they make it in a gentle way. He really was, as they said of him at the time, a true-hearted Irishman."
