Fleischmann Centenary Celebrations

CIT Cork School of Music, and UCC School of Music

How many Aloys Fleischmanns were there? Well, there was the one who became professor of music at University College Cork in 1934, at the tender age of 24. There was the one who founded the Cork Symphony Orchestra a year later and would enter the

Guinness Book of Records

for the length of his tenure as its conductor – he stayed at its helm until he died in 1992.

There was the one who composed, not just the kind of music you might expect a classical composer to write, but also works involving audience participation – and who, early in his career, used the ruse of pseudonyms in Irish (Muiris Ó Rónáin) and English (Maurice Ronan). There was the one who, initially single-handedly, began compiling The Sources of Irish Traditional Music, a codified collection of nearly 7,000 traditional Irish airs, published posthumously in New York in 1998.

There was the Aloys Fleischmann who founded the Cork International Choral Festival in 1954, and steered its fortunes for over 30 years. There was the Aloys Fleischmann who agitated for properly enforced standards in the music-teaching profession, and campaigned for a professional orchestra to be located in Cork. His consolation prize was the establishment of the Radio Éireann String Quartet, now the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, in 1959.

Fleischmann began his professional life at a time when Government policy was decidedly isolationist. But it quickly became clear that he was ready to surmount any number of hurdles in his endeavour to connect Ireland with the European musical mainstream – his preferred outcome would have been a school of composition with a distinctive Irish flavour – and to try to set up the kind of structures for supporting musical life that were to be taken for granted in most European countries.

The Cork connection goes back to 1879, when the German musician Hans Conrad Swertz took up an organist’s post at St Vincent’s Church. It was his newly married daughter Mathilde, known as Tilly, who persuaded her husband, Aloys Fleischmann snr, to take up her father’s post. Four years later Aloys jnr was born in Munich, his mother preferring to stay in Germany after a concert tour, rather than return to Ireland to give birth. The die was cast.

Once Aloys jnr had the bit between his teeth, music in Cork would never be the same again.

The actual centenary of Aloys's birth on Tuesday was marked by commemorative events in Cork. One of his former students, Ita Beausang, set the scene in her Aloys Fleischmann centenary lecture, at the CIT Cork School of Music, and the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet were joined by pianist Hugh Tinney for a programme that included a number of works from the 1930s. His Sreath do Phiano, a Piano Suite, was published in 1935 with musical markings in both Irish and Italian. The Piano Quintet of 1938 has moments of traditional Irish flavour that are both obvious and well integrated, but which raised hackles at its first performance in Cork, and the work waited over 50 years for a second performance. And an early movement for string quartet from 1930 shows an even more blatant, melancholy, Irish tinge.

A day-long seminar at UCC on Wednesday filtered consideration of Fleischmann’s life and work through the experiences of those close to him (family, students, colleagues) and others who have only known him through his various legacies. There are still mysteries to be solved. He seems to have seen composing as his primary calling, yet he subordinated it in his priorities.

Perhaps Gareth Cox hit the nail on the head by calling him “the quintessential community composer” – he wrote for others’ needs, not his own.

He was also, said John A Murphy, “a great college man”, though also a combative one. He was fearless in the pursuit of his goals, and I can vouch for that, as someone who attracted his ire on a number of occasions. In 1936, he wrote of jazz, that were it to be translated into literature, “not a page of it would be passed by the censorship board”.

He complained about the national anthem (“an extremely bad tune with bad doggerel verse”), and he wrote to the pope to object to the quality of the music in a Mass broadcast from the Vatican. But he was always personable, and ideological differences were no barrier to personal friendships. He was, in that old-fashioned phrase, the perfect gentleman.

His most public monuments are the choral festival and the thriving music department in the university. The great collection of Irish tunes has yet to be fully appreciated. It’s “so large and so revolutionary”, said Nicholas Carolan, “it’s almost invisible”. And his music has been less well served in concert and on disc than that of his contemporaries.

In life, he may have been a man who couldn’t help himself, because he was too busy helping others. Séamas de Barra’s monograph on him was published four years ago. In addition to this week’s activities, there are further performances coming up, there’s a new CD of orchestral works just out on the RTÉ Lyric FM label, and he’s even had a room named after him in UCC.

There’s also currently an exhibition at Cork City Library, which is making copies of his scores available online. It’s taken a while, but Fleischmann is now surely settling more securely into the fabric of a musical Ireland he did so much to nurture.