Hostess with the Mozart – An Irishman’s Diary about Ite O’Donovan’s big birthday

A 250th anniversary is called a sestercentennial, as you all know.  But I’m fairly sure there’s no word in English for a 260th. So, for that and other reasons, famous as he was, Mozart would not necessarily have qualified for a birthday party tonight.

That he's getting one anyway, at the National Concert Hall, is in part due to another prodigy, more local and still very much alive, who also happens to have a big milestone this week.

Her name is Ite O’Donovan. And, by a happy chance, she was born 60 years ago tomorrow, as the world had just finished celebrating the 200th anniversary of the man who would become her favourite composer.

Mind you, in the intervening years, O’Donovan has helped immortalise two other musical geniuses, both of whom lived long before Mozart.

She became in 1982 the first female director of the Palestrina Choir (Dublin’s answer to the Vienna Boys), named in honour of a 16th-century Italian.

Harmonious

And when she moved on from that, after a glorious 13 years, it was to embellish the fame of a second Renaissance composer, the Flemish Orlande Lassus, aka Orlando di Lasso. She did this first by setting up the

Dublin Choral Foundation

in 1996, which has since spawned almost as many subdivisions as the Irish republican movement, albeit with much more harmonic results.

For 20 years, the mother organisation has comprised an adult choir, the Lassus Scholars, and a youth wing, the Piccolo Lasso. Now there’s to be a third group, an elite corps (or at any rate a professional chamber choir) called simply Lassus.

In fact, tonight’s event is billed as a four-parter – incorporating the “birth” of Lassus, a 20th anniversary celebration of its mother (the DCF), O’Donovan’s 60th (she’d be the grandmother, I suppose), and Mozart’s 260th. If that’s not a combined excuse for a late-January knees-up, I don’t know what is.

Poor Mozart, of course, never lived to be 60, or anything near it. Fragile both physically and mentally, he is said to have remained a child, in everything except music, all his life.

It has also been written of him that his hands were so attuned to the piano, he could do little else with them – so that at dinner, for example, his wife always carved.

This is somewhat at odds with a detail left to us by the 18th-century Irish tenor Michael Kelly (also called O'Kelly, and known in Italy as "Ochelli"), who was close friends with the composer for a time and, in his memoirs, claimed that Mozart always beat him at "billiards". Kelly also assures us that Mozart loved drinking "punch", which I'm happy to believe.

But I can't find a reference in the memoirs to my favourite piece of trivia about the composer, which I owe instead to a former president of the Irish-Austrian Society, Dr Otto Glaser. According to him, Mozart was so fond of an old Irish drinking song, Cruiskeen Lawn ("little brimming jug") that he worked it into one of his own larger pieces. And not just any piece, but a Mass, where the song is now embedded.

Although it is still sung occasionally in Ireland, "Cruiskeen Lawn" has become better known, as least in this parish, as the title of Myles na gCopaleen's celebrated column, the end of which – and of its author – will have its own major anniversary this coming April.

But I’m also reminded that the next biennial conference of the International Flann O’Brien (incorporating Myles) Society is scheduled for Salzburg in 2017.

Version

So between then and now, I must find Mozart’s version of

Cruiskeen Lawn

and learn to play it on something, if only the spoons.

If I do make it to Salzburg next year, I may also have to investigate the Mozartian tourist kitsch about which I read, with appalled fascination, in Mae Leonard’s Irishwoman’s Diary on Monday.

Particularly striking was her mention of a bra that plays Eine Kleine Nachtmusik when unfastened. Now I'm wondering how much worse the souvenirs get. My worst guess so far is a pair of Y-fronts that, when opened, bursts into the strains of Die Zauberflöte.

On that indelicate note, and with due apologies, I should get back to tonight's concert. But as it happens, the programme does include an extract from Die Zauberflöte. There are also pieces from Cosi Fan Tutte, the Marriage of Figaro, and many others, plus the whole Requiem in D Minor. A full list is at nch.ie.