The joy of sects – An Irishman’s Diary about luthiers, Lutherans and unrequited love

If you learned of an event at which a “luthier” would be speaking in a “Lutherhaus”, as I did from an email this week, you might be forgiven for assuming the two words were related. That was my first thought, anyway.

Then I remembered, even as the email explained it, that luthiers are not members of religious sects – at least that’s not where the get the name. They’re just people who make lutes, or more commonly these days, violins.

The luthier in this case is a man called Youenn Bothorel, a Breton long based in Ireland and now plying his trade in Dublin’s Capel Street. But the email was from Emma Montonen, a Finnish-born violinist, also living in Dublin, who has known him for years.

Surprised to learn from the master craftsman that he had never heard one of his own violins played in a classical concert, Montonen decided not only to organise such a concert, but to invite him to speak at it, describing the creation of the instrument he will lend her for the occasion.

Hence the event, entitled “Meet the Violin Maker”, to be held next week – May 21st, 7.30pm – in a venue where people have been going to meet their makers for two centuries – St Finian’s Church, aka the Lutherhaus, on Dublin’s Adelaide Road. Montonen will be performing music by Mozart, Wilson, Boulanger, and Franck, and will be joined by pianist Dearbhla Collins.

St Finian’s is around the corner from the National Concert Hall, where only last weekend I saw Maxim Vengerov playing a violin made in 1727 by the greatest luthier of them all, Antonio Stradivari.

But presumably there are instruments being made today that will be played in 300 years time. And, if you can’t make the St Finian’s event, further insights into the craft will be on offer at this year’s West Cork Chamber Music Festival (June 26th to July 4th) when the same Bothorel will be among a group of international violin and bow makers exhibiting and discussing their work.

Getting back to the Lutherans, the aforementioned St Finian’s Church has interesting, if obscure, origins. It used to be an Anglican church but, originally, it housed a 19th-century sect known as the Irvingites, after their founder.

Edward Irving was at first a charismatic preacher with the Church of Scotland, until excommunicated for unorthodox views. His later movement was noted for millenarianism, healing, and speaking in tongues. And by its height, adherents included some prominent public figures.

A contributor to the 1837 Dublin Journal of Medical Science took a more sceptical view, however. Referring to a cult he had witnessed on travels in Egypt, he described its members "dancing and whirling until they become as crazy as our own Irvingites, with their gibberish, howlings in an unknown tongue".

Irving was dead by then, “worn out”, aged only 42. But his movement evolved into something called the Catholic Apostolic Church that, with a leadership known as “apostles”, continued until the end of the century. By then, its Irish membership had dwindled to fewer than the original apostles – six to be exact.

Irving’s other claim to fame was indirect responsibility for one of the unhappiest marriages of all time, that between the essayist Thomas Carlyle and a woman name Jane Welsh. In fact, Irving was himself in love with Welsh, but introduced her to Carlyle. And we know the subsequent marriage was a disaster because it was so prolifically documented.

The couple wrote some 9,000 letters to each other, many of them recriminative, which suggests little time for anything else. Indeed, a biographer of Carlyle later suggested the marriage was never consummated. The writer Samuel Butler thought them equally to blame: “It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.”

Butler’s quip may have missed the point. In a 1902 article on “religious crazes”, the veteran Irish journalist and politician TP O’Connor suggested that the entire Irvingite movement had been the result of the founder’s frustrated love for the woman who married Carlyle.

Before meeting her, Irving had been engaged to someone else. Realising his mistake, he tried an to extricate himself but failed, and instead settled into his own mutually unhappy marriage. This, O’Connor claimed, was “largely accountable for the religious mania”. And he believed the doomed romance was responsible for “wrecking” the lives not just of the four main protagonists, but also of all those who had followed Irving’s “absurd and childish superstition”.

@FrankmcnallyIT