There’s a sense of a circle fully turned for Stephen McNeff about the concert this month that includes the first Irish performance of his orchestral song cycle The Celestial Stranger. The concert, with the National Symphony Orchestra under the Colombian-American conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados, opens with Debussy’s languorous Prélude à l’Après-midi d’une Faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), which just happens to be the work that accidentally turned his head, musically speaking, when he was young.
“I was very into pop music as an early teenager. But I came across some pieces by Debussy, which were what piqued my interest in what I still call classical music.”
He credits the change of direction to his inspirational music teacher in Swansea, Clive John. His teacher’s father, Ivor John, who was a tenor and conductor, had been a founder of Welsh National Opera (WNO).
“In fact there are still posters in the boardroom at WNO in Cardiff that date from the early days of the company which feature Ivor John. One night he’s singing in Gounod’s Faust and the next he’s conducting Verdi’s Il Trovatore. That was when opera companies got really good value out of tenors.”
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The new song cycle was written for the tenor Gavan Ring. “I pulled his leg about this. So you’re singing tonight, Gavan. Are you going to be able to conduct tomorrow?”
McNeff was born in Belfast in 1951 but grew up in south Wales, which was “a very conducive environment. Music was everywhere back in the 1960s. There were lots of amateur opera companies, ranging from ones that did proper ‘grand opera’, as they would have referred to it, to musical theatre and lots and lots of choral societies.”
Back in the summer of 2015 Aoife [Mannix] and I took a road trip out west to where Patrick Pearse had spent a summer. And I suppose gradually the Irish heritage became more and more important
Small surprise, then, that the young McNeff was nudged in the direction of opera and music for voices – choral music and opera dominate in the performances his music has had in Ireland. A Chamber Choir Ireland/Cork International Choral Festival commission for the 1916 centenary commemorations, A Half Darkness, has made him one of the few composers whose work has been performed at the GPO in Dublin.
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Back in the 1960s he was given access to what was “a very good school choir”, which came with very practical advice about what would and wouldn’t work for performers. “In retrospect, I’ve kind of never had teaching that was ever any better than that. It was almost like an apprentice-and-master relationship. The opportunity to write something and hear it done straight away and get feedback was extremely useful. That love for, and I hope ability with, vocal music has stayed with me.”
Clive John introduced him to the music of Benjamin Britten and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, “which was still relatively unknown at that time”, and was barred from performance by Our Lady’s Choral Society in Dublin on the basis of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid’s objections to the bawdiness of the words.
Studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London was more problematic. “I was a kid arriving in London from an Irish family in south Wales. So we were outliers there, as it were – although I have to say, for Northern Irish Catholics, south Wales was not a bad place to be. There was no discrimination. There was no anti-Irishism that I ever encountered. Except in rugby!
“I put it down to Wales being a nonconformist country. It was liberal and accepting. London was an entirely different thing. There I came across people who had been to public school. I can’t remember if the Menuhin School existed in those days” – it did – “but those kind of elite schools. I found myself for the first year or so really rather out of my depth.”
It’s about finding a world that you feel comfortable in and a world that you feel you can contribute to without compromising what you might regard as your principles
He mentions some of his contemporaries there, the conductor Simon Rattle and the pianist Graham Johnson, who formed the ground-breaking Songmakers’ Almanac and would go on to record the complete songs of Schubert, as people “who were earmarked for greatness from the moment they arrived. And the rest of us just kind of got on as best we could”.
He was less than enthusiastic about much of the cutting-edge music of the time. “There was so much of it, and I found it quite hard to take in. I actually became rather repelled by the amount of stuff that there was to get your head round. I came out of the academy rather alienated from the classical-music scene. And I wasn’t the only one. My very good colleague the composer Judith Bingham, we were exact contemporaries at the academy. She had a very similar experience, because, like me, she didn’t come from what you might describe as an elite background.
“It was hard finding a slot. Judith went off to be a professional singer, and I started working in regional and repertory theatres doing any kind of job I could find. That’s how I edged my way back into music, jobbing in theatres ... ‘Do you want it tomorrow? Or can I make it really good and give it to you the day after?’
“I’m not trivialising it. It was an extremely good education, producing stuff to order, which of course follows on from a tradition that composers had been part of for centuries, working on a salary. Sadly, that’s something that’s almost impossible any more for a young composer.
“As a young man in my 20s, I was very politically motivated.” His involvement with the theatre of Bertolt Brecht in Bristol led to his discovery of Brecht’s best-known musical collaborator, Kurt Weill, whose career also embraced symphonic music and, later, musicals. “It’s about finding a world that you feel comfortable in and a world that you feel you can contribute to without compromising what you might regard as your principles.”
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Over the years McNeff’s self-description came to emphasise his Irishness more and more. “I guess it was when I worked with Chamber Choir Ireland back in 2016. I’d been talking to them before that, and I’d worked with the Ulster Orchestra a few years before that. I think it was when I started to become interested in the writing of Aoife Mannix, who wrote the words for A Half Darkness.
“Back in the summer of 2015 Aoife and I took a road trip out west to where Patrick Pearse had spent a summer. And I suppose gradually the Irish heritage became more and more important. I’d spent seven years in Canada, then came back to the UK. And I think it was partly about acknowledging the heritage but also, from a practical point of view, if I was working in Ireland then to let people know that this was the country that I was part of as well.
“We gave the first performance of A Half Darkness in Newry. The choir’s conductor, Paul Hillier, invited me to talk to the audience about the piece, and I had to become very, very much more aware of Irish history and the events of 1916 in order to write that piece. And the fact of being Irish took on a much greater significance for me at that time.
“Perhaps it’s also a thing of getting older. My parents had died by then. I’m not quite sure what the significance of that is, but it was an important thing to embrace the Irishness.”
McNeff talks of the generations of forebears who had to leave the country, and how he has come to feel that “my Britishness was something that was imposed on me. That’s how history works. So, to get to the heart of the thing we’re talking about, I would now identify as Irish rather than British. It was a very proud day when my Irish passport showed up.”
McNeff’s The Celestial Stranger, jointly commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and RTÉ for the National Symphony Orchestra, was sparked by a different cultural tension. The starting point was a 17th-century poem by Thomas Traherne which imagines an extraterrestrial discovering Earth and its beauties. The work embraces another text by Traherne and, through a sequence of poems by Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas and the Hawaiian writer, songwriter and queen Liliʻuokalani (1838-1917), ends with an optimistic thought of return.
The Celestial Stranger is performed by Gavan Ring with the National Symphony Orchestra under Lina Gonzalez-Granados at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, January 31st, in a concert that also includes Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’une Faune and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony
