Upright men - Arthur Beesley on Joyce’s piano players

For a Joycean extravaganza long ago I was asked to transcribe front-page adverts in this paper on the original Bloomsday in June 1904. This had all the makings of a thankless task, far removed from the splendour the great book. But it yielded an immediate dividend in the form of a notice for the piano people who made the very instrument I had played for years.

Pohlmann & Co advertised “a few special bargains” on that fateful summer morning, one of them a never-used model with a 95 guinea list price “offered for 65 Guineas cash”.

Sounds like a decent deal to me. Back then the company had a showroom at 40 Dawson Street, now home to Café en Seine, a bar and food place. Established in Dublin in 1887 and with a premises at Marlboro Street in Cork, it was linked to an enterprise in Halifax, Yorkshire, which itself had connections with the piano scene in Germany.

Family lore does not record how or when our Pohlmann came into my grandmother’s possession, but it would most likely have been in the 1920s or ‘30s. It is with us to this day, upright still, though sounding rather woozy and worn, a bit like a rickety black-and-white film skirting through a projector. Out of tune but not out of charm, its echoey melody can be imagined as something akin to the music of time passing. Newborn sounds these are not. They are more like something very old wakened from deep and silent slumber.

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James Joyce was himself an accomplished musician, a player of the piano and guitar who considered professional singing before dedicating himself to literature. His mother was skilled pianist, taking lessons for 14 years, and his father too was a noted singer. Music permeates the writing. In the Sirens episode in Ulysses, piano and song carry along the afternoon mood in the bar and diningroom of the Ormond Hotel as Leopold Bloom anxiously contemplates how his wife Molly will soon betray him with her lover Blazes Boylan.

Joyce’s depiction of assorted characters playing the Ormond piano and others seems to me to reflect how all pianists have their own particular manner of playing — with, inevitably, varying degrees of success.

Here is the blind piano tuner: “I never heard such an exquisite player…The real classical, you know.”

Simon Dedalus, modelled on Joyce’s own father, insists he was “only vamping” but this is how he conveys the air of Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye: “Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love’s leave-taking, life’s love’s morn.” When singing he has a “glorious” tone: “Could have made oceans of money.”

Contrast the Dedalus “sensitive hands” with the thumping of the piano keys by Ben Dollard, a big bass singer whose rendition of the “sorrow song” Croppy Boy will soon captivate the room: “He plumped him Dollard on the stool. His gouty paws plumped chords.” Moments later he is depicted “booming over bombarding chords” shook upon the keyboard.

A story is told of the unfortunate Professor Goodwin — an elderly player who had been accompanist to Molly Bloom in her singing career — making a discordant mess of a performance: “There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and Collard grand [piano].” He was a “crotchety old fellow” in the primary stage of drink, a treacherous condition when searching for the right note.

Then there is Fr Bob Cowley, a spoiled priest of shaky finances. Perfectly at home among the afternoon drinkers, he has a “nice touch” on the obedient keys and “knows whatever note” to play. “Way he sits in to it, like one together, mutual understanding.”

Cowley is the man whose “outstretched tendons gripped the black deep sound chords”. He is described being in something of a reverie with the intensity of his music: “He stunts himself with it: kind of drunkenness”.

These are but snippets from a twilight world, although they do tell how a piano can come to life or grief depending on the player.

Many hands have played the old Pohlmann over the years, among them visiting fellows with perfect pitch and toddlers trying new directions in experimental jazz.

I recall a besuited tuner arriving one childhood day with shining leather satchel, looking for all the world like a surgeon on his way to carry out a complex procedure. Tea was made before he sat down to play, mesmerising us all. Every instrument needs a good run now and then, he said. Then he tuned her up and played again, only sweeter. “She’ll be fine now for another while.”