A little over two years ago, I received an email from music professor Una Hunt, asking if I might mention a very rare performance of an Irish opera – William Vincent Wallace’s Lurline – that she was in the process of producing at the National Concert Hall.
And I fully intended mentioning this at some point. Then I forgot. The show was scheduled for June 17th, 2022, which accidentally coincided with the centenary Bloomsday Festival.
So my excuses included such distractions as spending two whole days in a theatre, mesmerised by a large part of Barry McGovern’s week-long reading of Ulysses.
By the time I remembered the very rare performance of the opera, it was June 18th. So I guiltily mentioned it after the event, hoping it had gone well. Only then to learn it had been called off at the last minute, because of a rampant summer surge in Covid.
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Of course I should have known. The same surge had cut a swathe through Bloomsweek, when Joycean scholars were dropping like flies and the Joyce Symposium ball also had to be called off.
Happily, two years later, Prof Hunt has again emailed me about what is now an even rarer production of William Vincent Wallace’s Lurline. Touch wood, this one will take place next Friday week, July 26th. At which point, it will have been more than 75 years since the opera last graced a Dublin stage.
We’ll come back to the 1939 event shortly. But first a brief recap of Wallace’s extraordinarily colourful life, which began in 1812 in Waterford, where his father – a regimental band master from Mayo – was briefly stationed.
The future composer was brought up Protestant, as plain William Wallace. Then in his late teens, teaching music at the Ursuline Convent in Thurles, he fell in love with a novice nun who had taken the name Sister Vincent.
When they married in 1832, Wallace converted to Catholicism and, for good measure, added her abandoned religious name to his own.
Alas, after emigrating to Australia, the couple fell out of love (this seems to have happened as early as the boat trip down under, on which he fell into love with her sister, also an ex-nun).
More happily, he went on to be the first major classical musician to tour what had until then, for Europeans, been mainly a penal colony. In the process he became known as the “Australian Paganini”.
After separating from his wife, he then embarked on an extraordinary series of other travel adventures that took him on a whaling voyage to New Zealand, followed by trips to Chile, Argentina, Peru, Jamaica, Cuba, and the US.
In London in 1845, Wallace enjoyed his greatest success, with the opera Maritana.
Two years later, he started work on the more ambitious Lurline (based on the Lorelei legend) but didn’t finish it for a decade. When first staged, in 1860, that too was a critical and – for others if not him – commercial triumph. Alas, his later years were spent in relative poverty until he died of a heart condition, aged 53, in 1865.
His work is now “very neglected”, says Prof Hunt, who blames that partly on his nationality. Historically, she believes, “being an Irish composer was tantamount to the kiss of death”. But even before Covid, Lurline may also have been cursed with bad luck.
Here’s The Irish Times reviewing the Dublin Opera Society’s performance of April 22nd, 1939:
“It was a tribute to the fighting spirit of the society that the opera was produced at all. Difficulties had beset them on every hand. Elena Danieli had been indisposed all the week with a severe attack of laryngitis, and it was against her doctor’s orders that she sang on Saturday night rather than disappoint her Dublin admirers. Obviously, however, she was in great pain, and was only singing by sheer will-power. Geraldine Costigan, the Belfast mezzo, also fell to the throat trouble, and she could hardly sing a note; indeed she found it difficult even to speak her lines . . . Leslie Jones [who had a sprained ankle] struggled along bravely in the part of the Baron, but it was obvious that everyone on the stage was ‘on edge’.”
It must be hoped that the July 26th performance – with Péter Halász conducting the National Symphony Orchestra and Rachel Kelly in the title role – enjoys better luck, plague and pestilence permitting.
But I mentioned touching wood earlier. Which also brings me back to the fact that Wallace benefitted little from Lurline’s 1860 production. An unexpected hit, that ran for months in London, earning a reported £50,000 for the lead singers alone.
Two years beforehand, however, the composer had sold all performing rights for “10 shillings”.
And – here’s the wood-touching bit – he didn’t keep even that.
On a whim, according to one of his biographers, he gave the money away “to the widow of a stage carpenter at Covent Garden Theatre”.