Walkinstown’s Musical Roads – 2

The Halfway House, Walkinstown Road.

The physical parameters of Walkinstown are not obvious to the lazy eye. But there are signals in the architecture, in the subliminal landscape, and in the nomenclature. At the southern slopes of Drimnagh, the main road crosses the Walkinstown Water and takes its name. Walkinstown Road neatly bisects the area with the private housing to the east and the local authority scheme occupying most of the west. These are known respectively as the Melodies, or Musical Roads, and the Scheme. 

Walkinstown takes its name from a 15th century farmer, Wilkins. Wilkinstown House became established as the local manor and a small village grew around it. The village disappeared during the Famine. The nineteenth century Wilkinstown House lasted over a century before being demolished for a supermarket in 1971.

In the later forties, work began on Walkinstown’s musical estate.. On the far bank of the stream that once defined the village, the back windows of a crescent of houses for long overlooked the paddocks of Wilkinstown House, and open countryside to the Norman tower of Drimnagh Castle beyond. The environs are now subsumed in Dublin’s suburban sprawl. The terrace lies to the west of Thomas Moore Road and is called Hardenbeck Avenue. Carl Hardebeck is one of a handful of foreign born artists honoured in the Melodies. He lost his sight while still a baby, but immersed himself in the river of sound. Born in London in 1869 of German/Welsh parentage, he ultimately came to claim his devotion to “God, Beethoven and Patrick Pearse” and was much honoured as a Nationalist on his death in 1945. 

Drimnagh Castle

The Musical Estate is entered nearby, where the main road crosses the stream. Balfe Road, in its own sweet way, forms the northern boundary of the estate. From its western extreme it runs uphill as far as Bunting Road, stopping where Mooney’s Field is now a green park. Beyond this expanse, Balfe Avenue takes up the journey east before Balfe Road East draws the border with Crumlin.

Michael William Balfe (1808-1870) was born in Dublin, son of a violinist and dancing master. He was sixteen when his father died and the following year he took his precocious musical talent to London. He was a violinist for the orchestra of the Theatre Royal but decided to become an opera singer and travelled to Italy for tuition in 1825. Ten years later he returned to London and quickly achieved success as a composer. One of his first operas as a composer was Falstaff in 1838, adapting Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. In 1843 he wrote The Bohemian Girl based on a Cervantes story, La Gitanella.

Teatro Cervantes, Malaga

La Gitanella tells of a fifteen year old gypsy girl, Preciosa, who captures the heart of a nobleman, Don Juan, but to marry her he must spend two years as a gypsy. The story examines the nature of stereotypes, truth and lies. The twist in the tale is that Preciosa had been kidnapped by the gypsies as a child. 

Balfe’s version, with libretto by Alfred Bunn, is rather more melodramatic. It was hugely successful at the time and remains his best known work, in particular the Aria I dreamt I dwelt in Marble Halls. Here Arlene, the gypsy girl of the title, recalls her almost forgotten earlier life.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls

With vassals and serfs at my side

And of all who assembled within those walls

That I was the hope and the pride.

The song resonates in Irish music and literature. James Joyce namechecks it twice in Dubliners, in Clay and Eveline, and it also features in Finnegans Wake. It has been performed by Enya, Celtic Woman and Sinead O’Connor.

Balfe died in 1870 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London next to fellow Irish composer William Vincent Wallace.

First left off Balfe Road is Hughes Road, forming a regular promontory up in Walkinstown’s north. It brackets Field Avenue, the one street in the capital named for John Field. Herbert Hughes (1882-1937) was born in Belfast and studied with Stanford in the Royal College of  Music, London. He was a music critic for the Daily Telegraphs, but is best known as an arranger and collector of traditional folksongs. With the support of Francis Joseph Bigger, he published Songs of Uladh in 1904. From 1909, his four collections of Irish Country Songs were written in collaboration with poets WB Yeats, Padraic Colum and Joseph Campbell, including such Irish folk classics as She Moved Through the Fair and Down By the Salley Gardens.

She Moved Through the Fair has a haunting melody that seems to chime with every age. The song was collected in Donegal by Hughes with lyrics written by Padraic Colum. A host of Irish and international artists have covered it from John McCormack to the Waterboys, Tangerine Dream to Clannad. In the film Michael Collins it is sung by Sinead O’Connor. The melody is incorporated in the Simple Minds song, Belfast Child.

Down By the Salley Gardens appears as a poem in Yeats collection The Wanderings of Oisin. Yeats remembered snatches of an old song, The Rambling Boys of Pleasure. It was set to music by Hughes to the traditional air The Moorlough Shore

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet

She passed the salley gardens with little snow white feet

She bid me take life easy, as leaves grow on the tree

But I being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

Hughes saw the arrangement of music as an artform on a par with original composition. According to him, the arranger takes the original material so that it is “transmuted into an art song, an art song of its own generation.”

Stanford Green is a wide hemisphere south of Balfe just before Bunting Road. This green and Thomas Moore were convenient football pitches for us as youngsters. As a Chelsea fan, I imagined Stanford as Stamford (Bridge), with me as Peter Bonnetti and my friends as Bobby Tambling and Charlie Cooke. My friends in truth were fans of either Manchester or Leeds United, and the road was named for Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). He was a Romantic composer and a child prodigy who was performing and composing at eight years of age. 

Charles Villiers Stanford, age 8 and a half.

Stanford studied Classics at Cambridge University, but his devotion to music won out. He went on to study at Leipzig and Berlin, returning to Cambridge as Professor of Music. .He was the founding professor of the Royal College of Music in Kensington, which, by the way, is not far from Stamford Bridge. His pupils at Cambridge included Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst.

George Bernard Shaw praised the Celtic elements of Stanford’s music. His orchestral work, Irish Rhapsodies, incorporated Irish folk songs. He was the first to popularise the Londonderry Air, published in 1855 by George Petrie in the Ancient Music of Ireland, the song originally collected by Jane Ross of Limavady.

Wallace Road leads east off Bunting Road, opposite Harty Avenue. William Vincent Wallace (1812-1865) was born in Waterford. He was a virtuoso on violin and piano and a composer of opera, piano music and parlour songs and ballads. He married at twenty, to a pupil Isabella Kelly, converting to Catholicism for the purpose, and moved to Dublin. In 1835, he took his family to Australia, and three years later left them there. He later spun a colourful yarn that he voyaged the Pacific on a whaling ship. From his arrival in South America he was celebrated as a virtuoso, making his way to New Orleans and New York. In 1845 he composed the first of six operas, Maritana, which was a huge success.

He took American citizenship and a second wife, German pianist Helene Stoepel, in1854. His tomb in London carries the epitaph: music is an art that knows no locality but heaven.

Walkinstown’s Musical Roads

 

Our Lady of the Assumption

Dublin is a musical city, a storm of sounds. I grew up on the edge of this storm system, in Walkinstown’s Musical Estate, also known as the Melodies. Here, the roads commemorate eighteen musicians and composers, either Irish or connected to Ireland, including: John McCormack, Thomas Moore, Michael Balfe, John Field, Percy French, Edward Bunting and John Dowland.

 Those names came from the perspective of 1940s planners, imagining the songs new residents would sing, gathered in kitchens and living rooms with a bottle of stout or two, and a Woodbine twixt finger and thumb. I can still hear those serenades with their echoes of John McCormack and the recordings of Brendan O’Dowda, Bridie Gallagher and Joe Locke blaring from Radio Eireann on the wireless. 

Ireland’s musical tradition is something we like to flaunt. It was not always so. Myles na Gopaleen (Brian O’Nolan) complained mid century of “this nation of befuddled paddies, whose sole musical tradition is bound up with blind harpers, tramps with home made fiddles, Handel in Fish-handel street, John McCormack praising our airport and no street in the whole capital named after John Field.” There is in fact, since Walkinstown obliged in the later forties. Field Avenue is a small cul de sac terminating around a green at the northwestern edge of the estate where Walkinstown touches Drimnagh.

Field was born in Dublin in 1782 and made his concert debut at the age of nine. Moving to London in 1793 he became one of the renowned concert pianists of his day. Field travelled to St Petersburg, the ultra modern metropolis of its time, the pinnacle of the cultural world. His fame allowed him live the lavish lifestyle of the Rock Star, as we might put it today. He took up residence in Moscow where he died in 1837.

A painted nocturne.

As a composer Field is remembered for developing the Nocturne. The Nocturne marks a specific shift in composition where the artist explores the light within the darkness. Characteristically meditative, with a moody melody overlaid on a distinctive arpeggio, it takes the listener into a spiritual landscape. Frederic Chopin was a master of the form, becoming its most famous exponent. Like all art, it developed over time into quite different things. James MacNell Whistler’s painted Nocturnes caused outrage at the Fin de Siecle. Now it would seem absurd for any artist in any field not to dally with the Muse after sunset. One imagines Field’s nocturnal inspirations were rather seasonal. St Petersburg’s summers are the White Nights, the sun barely setting and the sky a permanent bell of startling northern hues. Throughout winter, the world’s northernmost great city is clad in a different whiteness, veils of snow and ice turning everything into a winter wonderland.

Bunting Road

I was raised on Bunting Road, the bisecting avenue of Walkinstown’s Musical Estate. Originally the road didn’t reach Crumlin. From near Walkinstown Cross it runs north, but stopped dead at the ditch bordering Mooney’s Field. As kids, we’d haunt the hedges there, sending up a regular coyote like refrain of the farmer’s name. Moo-oo-ney! Moo-oo-ney! The poor man died at last, leaving the field free for development as playing pitches, while the road pushed through to Crumlin around 1970.

Edward Bunting may seem obscure these days. Yet, as the estate itself flows from Bunting, so does our rich repertoire of Irish music. Born in Belfast in 1773, he was a classically trained organist. By chance he was given the task of recording the music of Belfast’s Harp Festival in 1792. He collected songs directly from the harpists, leading to the publication in three volumes of his book: The Ancient Music of Ireland. This became the definitive repository of Irish music, music which might well have been lost. Bunting helped arrest the decline of the harp as instrument and symbol, and it waxed once more as an icon for the country, synonymous with the very concept of Irishness. Thomas Moore’s The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls is prefigured here. 

Harty Avenue

 Before the short cul de sac leading to Mooney’s field, Bunting passes Harty Avenue, named for composer Hamilton Harty (1879 – 1941). Born in Ulster, he came to live in Bray, his mother’s hometown, where he was church organist. Taking advantage of the excellent rail service to visit Dublin, he came under the influence of Michele Esposito at the Royal Irish Academy. In 1901 he moved to England and became a successful conductor, ultimately with the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s. His last composition was the symphonic poem, the Children of Lir.

Harty Avenue is a short road leading west to Thomas Moore Road. It was Moore who made flesh of Bunting’s bones, and came to be seen as the Bard of Ireland.He was born in Dublin in 1779, in Aungier Street, that edgy thoroughfare flowing south of Temple Bar from George’s Street to Camden Street. Today it blossoms with music venues and Moore’s birthplace is now occupied byJJ Smyth’s Blues Bar.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

Though a Catholic, Moore studied at Trinity College before going to London to study law. As an undergraduate he became friends with Robert Emmett although he remained remote from Emmett’s revolutionary group, The United Irishmen. At times he was moved to rabble-rousing polemic in prose and ballad, to the extent that Emmett was forced to tell him to dial it down, such stances garnering unwelcome attention. For the most part, and increasingly in later life, he was more disposed towards constitutional nationalism than armed revolt.

At Trinity, he was introduced to the work of Edward Bunting who had recently released his first volume of Ancient Music of Ireland. Moore was inspired to write lyrics to a series of traditional Irish tunes. The Irish Melodies made his reputation, today they are generally referred to as Moore’s Melodies. 

These songs provided the soundtrack for my childhood with my father’s robust baritone, and my mothers gentle crooning – whether in pram or bed, or of an evening by the fire, on family walks in the neighbouring countryside or drives further afield in an old Morris Minor. Sometimes lingering as the adults limbered up at nightfall, the lyrics and tunes seeped into my memory: Oft in the Stilly Night, The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls, Believe Me if all those Endearing Young Charms and, most memorably, The Meeting of the Waters

There is not in this wide world a valley so sweet

As the vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet,

Oh, the last rays of feeling and life must depart,

Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.

it is not merely a rambling on the wonders of Irish scenery, but that friends, “the beloved of my bosom”, were near.

Sweet Vale of Avoca how calm could I rest,

In thy bosom of shade with the friends I love best,

Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease,

And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.

Moore travelled In America in 1803, two decades after the United States had gained independence from Britain. Returning via Canada he wrote The Canadian Boat Song, grafting his lyrics to the stem of a French language song, a haunting evocation of piety and the pioneer life in ancient Acadian days.

He expressed low regard for America, and railed particularly against slavery. Outrage at his stance followed him back to London and culminated in an abortive duel with a literary critic. Lord Byron heaped scorn on him, but later they became close friends. He stayed for a while with Byron in Venice and the poet appointed him literary executor. However, Moore was persuaded to burn the memoirs on Byron’s death, as his family considered them scandalous.

Moore is often considered Ireland’s national bard, capturing the nascent Irish nationalist ethos in poetry and song. There were contradictions in his long life. Though an advocate of Catholic Emancipation, he considered O”Connell a demagogue. His path may have been less heroic than that of his friend Emmett, but its quiet luminosity can’t be doubted. He died in 1852