A mile or so to the east of Kenmare lies old Killowen church. I have often walked through the churchyard on summer days. A more romantic scene can hardly be visualised - the abandoned church itself, open to the elements, crumbling, the graves overgrown, the hedgerows teeming with fuchsia, honeysuckle and wild strawberries.
There is a superb view down to the Kenmare River and across to the mountains which divide Kerry from Cork. Beating your way through the undergrowth you eventually come upon the grave of E.J. Moeran (1894-1950), an Englishman of Anglo-Irish origin, who died 55 years ago last Thursday. He was a composer of songs, choral, orchestral and chamber music, and a collector and arranger of folk songs from Norfolk, Suffolk and Kerry.
Every time I reach this spot, I place a bouquet of wild flowers on the grave. There is often a discarded bottle which another enthusiast has used for the same purpose. The headstone bears an inscription, which can just be made out: "He rests in the Mountain Country he loved so well".
Ernest John ("Jack") Moeran was born in London, but brought up in Norfolk, which he regarded as his native county. His father was an Anglican vicar, originally from Cork, who moved from Dublin to England before his marriage. Moeran served in the Royal Norfolk Regiment as a motorcycle dispatch rider in the first World War; in May 1917 in France he suffered a horrific shrapnel wound to the head. In 1918, still in the army, he visited Ireland for the first time to recuperate from his injury, and immediately acquired his lifelong love of his father's country.
As a composer Moeran was always inspired by landscapes, those of Norfolk, the Welsh Marches, and Kerry. In a radio interview of 1947 with Eamonn Andrews, he said he was going to walk the hills surrounding Kenmare to "think out my themes" for his Second Symphony. His finest works were composed in the 1930s and 1940s, most of them in Kenmare, where he lived for long periods. His music crackles with energy, boisterous or turbulent; it has lyrical beauty and at times conveys overwhelming sadness. He was no mere musical painter of landscapes.
His Symphony in G Minor (1934-7) evokes the fens and sea-battered coast of Norfolk and the seaboard and mountains of Kerry. But in its bleakness and anger Moeran confronts his own darkest ghosts, his experiences of the first World War. In contrast the beautiful, largely rhapsodic Violin Concerto (1937-1941), through its evocation of scenes around Kenmare River, expresses the composer's affinity with the Kerry countryside. It also testifies to his joy in human company, for the second movement conveys the delights of Puck Fair at Killorglin, with an unmistakably Irish flavour to its melodies and rhythms.
For much of his time in Kerry Jack Moeran was a very popular figure, despite his plummy English accent. His relaxed, friendly manner enabled him to coax folk-songs from countrymen and fishermen - just as he had done years earlier in Norfolk and Suffolk. Moeran found that, in Ireland as in England in the 1920s, he achieved his greatest success in the local pub, plying his subjects with drink. Ever since incurring his wartime head injury Moeran had suffered from a drink problem. Being on such good terms with the locals did not help matters in this respect.
In 1945 he married the cellist Peers Coetmore, for whom he wrote his Cello Concerto (1943-5). Its passionate, mournful music tells of the sweetness of love, but also its anguish. Peers gave the work's first performance in the Capitol Theatre, Dublin, in 1945. There is a sad story connected with a performance at the London Proms in 1946. The composer took his bow clearly in a state of inebriation, and had to be frogmarched on and off the stage by two attendants. Drink was one of the factors in the gradual breakdown of his relationship with his wife. Her career entailed world-wide travel, so they were rarely together and, in the following years, Moeran's situation became increasingly one of "miserable loneliness".
Some 200 metres beyond Kenmare pier at the southern end of the town, the rusting remains of a Nissen-type hut can be made out beneath long grass and brambles. This is a melancholic sight. For here, I have been told, Moeran, almost penniless and in poor physical and mental health, found his last shelter. From this place he must have set out, on the afternoon of December 1st, 1950, for a walk along the pier, even though a howling gale was blowing. At the end of the pier he was seen to drop into the sea. Following a post-mortem of the recovered body, the inquest established that Moeran was dead before entering the water, and a verdict of death by natural cause, namely cerebral haemorrhage, was recorded.
The location of death was remarkable for a man who felt such an affinity with his natural surroundings and who conveyed his impressions of their often wild beauty in his musical works.
Lawrence Swinyard's words for the choral song Irish Elegy, arranged by Desmond Ratcliffe in 1955 using the exquisite air from Moeran's Serenade for Orchestra of 1948, provide an epitaph which seems entirely appropriate to those who, mindful of Moeran's music, wander through this part of Kerry:
Though thy harp strings be
severed and muted thy tongue,
Though the roar of the waters
has silenced thy song,
Yet its echo still lingers upon
the sweet air
Blowing soft o'er the valleys
and hills of Kenmare.