As noted last week (Diaries July 16th and 17th), that 1965 recording of the national anthem by Our Lady’s Choral Society has its admirers, thanks in part to “heroic” key which, for drama at least, saw it outperform La Marseillaise at the French Embassy’s Bastille Day party.
But for some of the same reasons, those admirers do not include my occasional correspondent David O’Shea, musicologist and Dublin church organist.
“The rather Wagnerian effect you spoke of seems to be the fault of the unusual choice of E-flat major, which moves the melody into a rather screechy register,” he writes.
“One is used to hearing the National Anthem in B-flat, which makes it singable by most voices, in spite of its large melodic range . . . E-flat is extraordinarily high, and the combination of this grandiose key with the rushing string scales and flutey twiddles makes the whole thing feel rather overblown.”
Soldiers Are We (Not) – Frank McNally on the beauty of Brian Boydell’s Amhrán na bhFiann
Making waves – Guglielmo Marconi and three generations of Irish-Italian women
Reel-life pioneer – Mary Rose Callaghan on Ellen O’Mara Sullivan, a trailblazer of Irish cinema
Sound reasons – Colm Keena on music and meaning
By contrast, David reminds of the “wonderful orchestration” in an even older version of the anthem: the non-choral one by Brian Boydell, commissioned by RTÉ back in 1961 and until the late 1990s the accompaniment of the station’s nightly closedowns.
This is turn reminded me of the lovely film that long accompanied it, featuring scenes from nature and the Irish countryside.
When I was a child and teenager, the combination used to send me to bed every night with vaguely patriotic tingles running down my spine. And when I looked it up on YouTube just now, it still had that effect.
The irony of Boydell’s “masterpiece”, as David says, is that he took the job on reluctantly, being unenthused by the anthem’s music and feeling little of the militaristic fervour expressed in the lyrics (a quality Amhrán na bhFiann shares with La Marseillaise, even if it does not quite go as far as the latter in, for example, extolling the use of enemy blood for rural irrigation).
Boydell was Anglo-Irish, educated mostly in English public schools. Mind you, he later claimed to have become “violently republican” while at Rugby college, where the general anti-Irishness included a teacher’s report on him that commented: “Must not make his nationality an excuse for his behaviour.”
In any case, if the Soldier’s Song was a sow’s ear musically, as many others still think, Boydell turned it into silk purse, and nowhere more upliftingly than on his improvised fanfare that preceded the last line.
The fanfare itself was a sub-commission, suggested to him by a TV executive to match the part of the original accompanying film in which an Aer Lingus DC-10 is seen taking off.
That was in keeping with the propagandist nature of the 1961 video: a trains, planes, and combine-harvesters’ tribute to the practical patriotism of Sean Lemass’s Ireland.
It opened with Army officers raising the tricolour at Collins Barracks, but also featured scenes of heroic, six-lane traffic on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, children going to school, fishermen unloading nets, a turf-burning power station in Offaly, Ardnacrusha’s hydro-electric scheme, Cork’s Verolme dockyards, and an onrushing train.
Magnificent in its own way, that must also have been a bit stressful for pre-bedtime viewing. Whereas the anthem video that stirred my boyhood blood was all about Ireland’s natural beauty: waves crashing on rocks, water trickling down streams, dappled sunlight in trees, and so on.
Speaking of silk, the nearest thing it had to industry were the recurring scenes of beautifully-lit spider webs. And rather than a plane taking off, Boydell’s climactic fanfare accompanied a film shot rising from the sea over a dark mountain (Howth Head, I think) towards a sunny sky.
It had nothing overtly patriotic, never mind militaristic. Even so, it sent me to bed every night thinking: “I love Ireland.”
But getting back to the Our Lady’s Choral version, Bill Whelan of Riverdance fame has been in touch too to argue that, in whichever key it’s performed: “I have long felt the original melody for our anthem delivers on all fronts: dignity, sing-ability, and emotional impact.”
He compares it favourably with the French, which he believes is worth “at least six points at all rugby games”. (On which theme, for fervour if not musicality, I thought the Our Lady’s version beat the Marseillaise on Bastille Day by at least as much as Ireland won in actual Marseille last February).
So rather than continuing the “half-hearted search for an anthem that would resonate for the whole island”, Bill suggests challenging Ireland’s poets and lyricists to come up with new and better words for the blameless original tune.
On the other hand, as I used to think when listening to Boydell’s beautiful arrangement every night, maybe the music itself is enough.
We’re not very good at singing it anyway. And as Bill also reminds me, the recent European Cup final cast a question on whether lyrics are needed at all. Spain is one of a handful of countries whose anthem has no official words. This does not appear to have had a negative effect on football results.