Thomas Moore was Ireland's first pop star and despite going in and out of style his 19th-century Irish Melodies are still significant for our sense of ourselves, writes Fintan O'Toole
In Brian Friel's latest play, The Home Place, set on an estate in Co Donegal in 1878, the local Catholic schoolmaster forms his charges into a well-drilled choir. They sing, of course, nothing but the songs of Thomas Moore: The Minstrel Boy, Oft in the Stilly Night, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.
"The music," remarks the schoolmaster of the children's response to the songs, "liberates them briefly from their poverty . . . When they sing they fashion their own ethereal opulence and become a little heavenly themselves."
It is a brilliant summary of Moore's extraordinary importance for 19th-century Ireland.
Artistic reputation is notoriously fickle, but in Moore's case it has been wildly promiscuous. In his own time, he was a superstar. His 10-volume work, Irish Melodies (1807-34), consisting of 130 poems set largely to traditional airs, was so popular that it earned Moore £500 annually for more than 25 years. It was translated into most major European languages, including Hungarian, Polish and Russian. More than a million copies of The Last Rose of Summer were sold in the United States alone.
Henry Luttrell wrote in 1818: "I'm told, dear Moore, your lays are sung/ (Can it be true, you lucky man?)/ By moonlight in the Persian tongue,/ Along the streets of Ispahan."
The Melodies were so famous that they could be parodied without being named, as in William Maginn's burlesque of The Last Rose of Summer in 1821: "Tis the last glass of Claret,/ Left sparkling alone,/ All its rosy companions/ Are clean'd out and gone."
Moore's poetry was almost as successful. As early as 1803, the UK government proposed to establish an Irish laureateship and offered Moore the position with the same salary and emoluments as the English office. (Moore declined the honour.) In 1817, he was paid £3,000, a record at the time, for his oriental verse fantasy, Lalla Rookh. His reputation equalled that of Lord Byron, who marked his own departure from England with a farewell to Moore: "My boat is on the shore,/ And my bark is on the sea;/ But, before I go, Tom Moore,/ Here's a double health to thee!"
Walter Savage Landor, a tough and astute critic, informed Moore that "I think you have written a greater number of beautiful poems than anyone that ever existed".
Yet, even before his death in 1852, Moore's reputation was coming under sustained attack, especially from Irish nationalists. Tom Moore became Ireland's Uncle Tom. The golden boy became the whipping boy. Thomas Davis criticised Moore in 1844 as a cosy elitist whose nationalism was that of a dilettante. The Fenian John O'Leary wrote of "the spurious Irishism of Moore's song", while the young WB Yeats criticised Moore's "artificial and mechanical" style.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus, passing Moore's statue in College Green in Dublin, remark on his "servile head". Seamus Heaney was entirely accurate when he noted that by the early 20th century, Moore had become "an emblem of 19th-century Ireland's cultural and political debilitation". By 1979, the bicentenary of his birth in Aungier Street, Dublin, into a small-time Catholic merchant family, was greeted with something like indifference.
At this distance, and at a time when Moore's place in Irish culture has become marginal, it is possible to see that the over-valuing and the under-valuing of his achievement are simply two faces of the same mountain. He occupied a huge place in the Irish popular imagination because he filled a fierce need. He satisfied a hunger that was itself driven by anger, alienation and dispossession. The lush tapestry of the Irish Melodies covered a gaping crack in the wall and for those who wished to expose the true surface it was necessary to tear down the tapestry.
Moore himself wrote that "the language of sorrow is, in general, best suited to our music" and his own sense of what he was doing with the Irish Melodies was that he was giving voice to a silence and shedding light on a darkness.
When he apostrophises the Dear Harp of My Country, his image of the native Irish cultural tradition, he writes that "in darkness I found thee/ The cold chain of silence had hung o'er thee long". The silence and darkness are what give Moore's melodies their peculiar lilt, and they were as much political as cultural.
THE AIRS, ARRANGED by Sir John Stevenson to fit Moore's words, were mostly those collected by Edward Bunting at the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. That festival itself was an explicitly political event, organised by the United Irishmen as part of their celebration of the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. In bringing together the last few traditional harpers in this context, it forged a conscious link between cultural survival and political resurrection. That link is made even more explicit in Moore's memory of a time when, as a student at Trinity College, he sat playing a traditional tune on the piano, in the company of his close friend, Robert Emmet, who started up "as from a reverie, when I had just finished playing that spirited tune called The Red Fox. 'Oh that I were at the head of 20,000 men, marching to that air!' " Traditional music was to be the beat of a revolutionary march into a better future.
In the decade that followed, however, this optimism was savagely undercut. The failure of the 1798 rising and the black farce of Emmet's attempted rising of 1803 cut the musical revival off from much of its immediate social and political hinterland. In reinventing the music, Moore had to invent a whole new hinterland.
If the one he invented - a weeping Erin full of harps, mists, rainbows, chains, Tara's halls, golden collars, warrior minstrels, romantic landscapes and round towers - seems artificial, that's because it could hardly be anything else. If Moore's songs, Oh! Breathe not his Name and She is Far from the Land, transformed Emmet into an object of almost necrophiliac veneration, that is because Emmet, and everything he represented, was dead.
Moore's lyrics may be too lush to read, but they are, after all, written to be sung, and Moore himself expressed his "strong objection to this sort of divorce" of words from music. The arrangements of the traditional airs, as Edward Bunting complained, did "violence" to the originals. But then Bunting himself had radically adapted the structures of the music to fit the demands of classical annotation. Moore's enterprise in the Melodies is essentially one of translation, rewriting an Irish tradition in the language of 19th- century bourgeois sensibility. But his songs escaped from the safety of the stuffy drawing-room and earned their place by the rough fireside of popular nationalist culture.
Seamus Deane has written, justly, that "Moore's Irish Melodies provided nationalist sentiment with a degree of respectability that was guaranteed by the possession of a drawing-room and a pianoforte". But respectability alone does not account for what Anthony Cronin calls "the role that the Melodies played in the history of the Irish imagination, providing images round which a sense of nationhood could focus, providing, almost of themselves, the curious illusion of a golden age before the intrusion of the rude stranger, acting as a balm for national pride, and, above all, for a sense of national betrayal and defeat".
Even the revived nationalist movement that affected a contempt for Moore's cosy relationship with the Whig establishment remained saturated in those images. If you read the speeches even of a hard-nosed nationalist such as Michael Collins, it is still Moore's imagery that provides much of the emotional ballast.
Few pop songs - and Moore was the first Irish pop star - can claim such a lasting political influence. While some of that influence - the sentimentality, the abstraction, the wallowing in an almost existential self-pity - may have been pernicious, there is another side to the story. There is a great deal of guff in Moore's songs, but there is also a thread of real beauty.
AUTHENTIC OR OTHERWISE, the airs often have a haunting grandeur. And Moore's lyrics have flashes of pure poetry whose combination of sinewy metre and controlled yearning harks back to the 16th century. In lines such as "Since the lovely are sleeping,/ Go, sleep thou with them", "At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping", "youth that now like snow appears,/ Ere sullied by the dark'ning rain", and in all of the exquisite Oft in the Stilly Night, you can still hear why Moore's contemporaries mistook him for an equal of Byron and Shelley. Together, such momentary fusions of words and music inhabited the imaginations of generations of people whose lives had little that was so sumptuous and helped them fashion their own ethereal opulence.
One Faithful Harp: The Life and Music of Thomas Moore is on RTÉ1 on Thur, Dec 29, at 10.30pm