FROM THE ARCHIVES:Dubliner Henri Pontet, aka M. Piccolomini, was a successful song writer at the end of the 19th century. In this appreciation cum obituary one John Sherlock (in a rare signed article) described his career. –
JOE JOYCE
PICCOLOMINI, THE famous song writer, has passed away. His end was sad. He has died while suffering from insanity in the London County Infirmary, and a collection has had to be made to save his remains from a pauper’s grave.
It is not generally known that Piccolomini was a Dublin man. His real name was Henri Pontet, and he was born in the Green lanes of Clontarf some sixty years ago. His father was Desirée Pontet, a Frenchman settled in Dublin, who in his day was a well-known teacher of French and wrote a French grammar.
The career of Henri Pontet was quite a romantic one. When a young man he went to France and entered the army, in which he served for several years. He took part in a number of engagements in the Franco-Prussian War. Subsequently in Paris he became mixed up in some political movement against the Government of the day.
The intervention of a lady of influence in official circles saved him from dismissal from the service and imprisonment, and his offence was visited merely with the minor punishment of exile to a remote station in Algeria. It was this that decided his future career.
Up to that time he had known practically nothing about music. In his new quarters he met with a French priest, who was in charge of a mission station, and who was a highly accomplished musician. To a man of Pontet’s abilities, education and mental activity, the society of such a man was the greatest boon imaginable.
About the middle of the seventies he returned to Dublin, and for four months lived in my father’s house in Dorset Street.
It was about this time that Pontet composed what was probably his best song, though it was anything but his most popular effort – a setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A dream within a dream.” This he succeeded in getting published by a London firm, and shortly afterwards he left for London with the intention of settling down to the writing of song music as a regular occupation.
Several songs followed in fairly rapid succession, but they did not sell to the satisfaction of the composer, and it was then he resolved to change his pen name to see would it bring him a change. Piccolomini, which he selected, was the name of an Italian operatic artiste who used to come to Dublin with the Italian opera companies which appeared at the old Theatre Royal.
Under the new name he certainly did better than he had under his own. He was a prolific composer, and all his songs published under the new name were more or less successful. Many of them had an enormous sale, and realised large sums of money. This was notably the case with his “Ora Pro Nobis” and his “Whisper and I shall Hear.”