I had not expected to find myself back in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral. I sang there from 1982-6 with the Palestrina Choir as a far-from-angelic chorister. As my teenage voice broke, I left the choir and dispensed with all religious practice. But there I was again this month, to deliver a lecture on Dublin in 1903 to mark the 120th anniversary of the choir’s foundation. There were many memories running through my head, especially those walks from the Hawkins Street bus terminus to Marlborough Street in the mid 1980s for choir practice, through streets with glue sniffers and beggars a plenty in the capital city of a country weighed down with unemployment and moral Civil War. But there was always, amid dark days, music being made and sung, part of a cultural robustness that took the edge off some of the difficulties.
The choir was a salve, an enduring legacy of Edward Martyn who founded and funded it 20 years before his death one hundred years ago this month. Some 120 years ago, he was wearing his patriotic suit, as a member of the People’s Protection Committee, formed to oppose the visit of King Edward VII to Dublin. By 1923, he was a recluse in his Galway castle, focused only on salvation and sacred music.
For all his involvement in Gaelic resurgence and nationalist politics and theatre, Martyn, as his Irish Times obituary noted, was also consumed “with currents issuing from advanced artistic groups on the Continent”. His devotion to the music of the sixteenth century Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was one reflection of that. He insisted that only boys’ voices could reach the required liturgical heights, so no women could join the choir. He was also adamant that Dublin music teacher and conductor Vincent O’Brien had to direct the choir because “he is a very rare product of our country… he has imbibed a unique knowledge of Gregorian chant.”
There was no rule, however, that barred women from directing the choir, and when I auditioned, it was in front of the indomitable Ite O’Donovan who became director that year. I sang Leo Maguire’s The Whistling Gypsy, a tune far removed from sacred music. But it was an appropriate choice; born in the Liberties the year the choir was founded, Maguire also became one of its members, later becoming a renowned RTÉ broadcaster and stalwart of the Dublin Operatic Society.
[ A man of many parts - Ray Burke on Edward MartynOpens in new window ]
The Dublin of 1903 was a place of creativity, contrasts and conflicting loyalties, tenements, alarming infant mortality rates and workhouses housing many from rural Ireland. It was also the city of Seán O’Casey, who at that stage was experimenting with music, drama and politics. The four facets ascribed to O’Casey as a writer by Robert Hogan – “the lyric, the caustic, the playful and the sombre” – were also what characterised the city in a more general sense and continue to. Dublin in the early 20th century was, according to novelist James Plunkett, a mixture of “pride and poverty, hunger, heroism and poltroonery and an elusive and scattered kind of grandeur”.
The Irish tourist board of the new Free State insisted the city was not the Dublin of old ‘with the pathos of long striving unfulfilled’, but ‘a place that has put on its best clothes and begins to walk out for conscious admiration’
The city was to experience more fraught years during the revolutionary decade. After that, the Irish tourist board of the new Free State insisted the city was not the Dublin of old “with the pathos of long striving unfulfilled”, but “a place that has put on its best clothes and begins to walk out for conscious admiration”. Seeking to draw a line under the city’s past, however, was nonsense, as it continued to juggle heritage and contemporary strains.
[ Palestrina Choir: 'Singing makes me feel like I'm in a different world'Opens in new window ]
As Edward Martyn was laid to rest in Glasnevin 100 years ago, the city was recovering from Civil War. There was still much instability, with reports of armed raids on Christmas Eve 1923, including the robbery of Gaffney’s pub in Gloucester Street; four men “who pluckily resisted the robbers” ended up hospitalised. Unemployment weighed heavily, but this newspaper also heralded the return of a “cheerful spirit ... not for many years have people been so disposed to enjoy the Christmas”. The trams and trains were crowded and shops busy. A Dick Whittington pantomime was staged in the Gaiety Theatre, regarded by a reviewer as “the biggest and the merriest children’s party that our city has got together for some years”.
Despite poor weather, there was a Christmas Day swimming race at Clontarf and “a good size crowd turned out to witness the trial of hardihood which the race presents”. From the pulpits on Christmas morning, church leaders preached peace, while the unionist Provost of Trinity College, John Henry Bernard, urged Dubliners to “try to live on terms of goodwill with all your neighbours in this city, however they may differ from you in political or religious aspirations”.
The Christmas messages, practices and singing voices of yesteryear have an enduring relevance for the city today.