Was James Joyce a great singer?
His wife was not the only one who thought so
‘Strange, almost incredible as it may seem now to his admirers, Joyce was more intent on becoming a singer than a writer.’ Oliver St. John Gogarty
Famously indifferent to her husband’s writing, Nora Joyce was a keen champion of his side-gig — as an operatic singer. Others in the increasingly sycophantic Joyce entourage of the 1920s were similarly smitten, with talk of a talent akin to fellow Irish tenors, McCormack and O’Sullivan.
This was overstating the case but there was no doubting his fundamental musicality and its centrality to his work.
In Dubliners (1914) Joyce weaves popular song into the fabric of the stories. The Lass that Loves a Sailor is key to Eveline, while Silent, O Moyle! denotes the change of mood towards the end of Two Gallants.
Perhaps the best known examples are The Lass of Aughrim which is central to themes of loss and memory in The Dead, and I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls from The Bohemian Girl. The latter opera by the Irish composer Michael Balfe was a particular favourite of Joyce’s and repeatedly pop up in Finnegan’s Wake.
Other direct musical references abound in Joyce’s work — with countless more buried in the subtext.
James Joyce came from a very musical family. His father was a locally celebrated singer and his mother an accomplished pianist. James followed in the footsteps of both, and also became a skilled guitar player.
As a performer, showed promise from an early age. In May 1904 he entered the annual Feis Ceoil national singing competition, which the previous year had been won by John McCormack. According to the Irish Daily Independent Joyce dazzled in the first stage, with his renditions of Mendelssohn’s Elijah and an arrangement of the traditional Irish traditional Irish air ‘Lullaby’.
‘Mr. Joyce showed himself possessed of the finest quality voice of any of those competing…’
The judges did not quite go that far, awarding him the bronze medal. The What appears to have counted against Joyce related to his sight reading, though the circumstances are disputed. Some reports suggest that Joyce stepped off the stage when asked to sing from a previously unseen score. Joyce’s (then) friend Oliver St. John Gogarty, suggests that the problem was physical — poor eyesight meant that Joyce literally could not read the notes.
According to Gogarty (the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) Joyce was so disappointed by the result that he threw the bronze medal in the Liffey. This was not his Aunt Josephine recollection. She claimed that her proud nephew gifted it to her, a more plausible account given that the medal was eventually bought at auction by Michael Flatley.
Joyce did give one more semi-professional performance in Dublin, during Horse Show Week in August 1904. At the Grand Irish Concert, JA Joyce was listed as second first tenor with JF McCormack getting top billing. At this point he effectively retired from public performance, though he remained a committed musician and singer.
There is only one known Joyce composition, an air for his poem ‘Bid Adieu To Girlish Days’ from Chamber Music. This was set by Edward Pendleton has been performed by Joyce’s opera singing son Giorgio amongst others.
In the inter-war years often sang for friends, specialising in traditional ballads, including a famous parody Mollie Bloomagain. These performances entranced camp followers like James Thurber:
To hear Joyce sing with his beautiful tenor was an enchanting experience…the purest manifestation of music.
Joyce did not discourage such extravagant praise and drew attention to comparisons with the now world-famous McCormack as Padraic Colum recalled
Joyce said to me: ‘John McCormack’s voice and mine are so similar in texture…that more than once when a disc of McCormack’s has been on, the girl in the kitchen has thought it was me.
Perhaps ‘the girl in the kitchen’ had no pretensions to expertise in the area of operatic singing.
Legacy
On the available evidence it seems that Joyce was a talented amateur rather than one of the great voices of the era. Certainly P.G Wodehouse, his exact contemporary had a much stronger claim to leaving a major musical legacy. Nor did Joyce provide the words for a ‘new’ traditional standard, as Yeats did with Down by the Salley Gardens.
The singing gene was passed down to his son, Giorgio, who was a professional opera singer, though one who performed sporadically. Joyce was also a significant source of inspiration in the classical more generally. Elliott Carter cited Ulysses as a key influence on his String Quartet №1 while Ross Lee Finney created his Chamber Music Suite in direct tribute.
At the more intellectual end of pop/rock Joycean references have also been a badge of honour — Kate Bush’s ‘Flower of the Mountain’ being perhaps the most distinguished homage. Traditional musicians have similarly paid tribute, with the broadside ballad Finnegan’s Wake revived by The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers amongst others.
Music was at the core of Joyce’s artistic endeavour. As he explained to his friend the composer George Borach in 1919, this relentless technical experimentation came at a cost
I wrote this {Sirens}chapter with the technical resources of music. It is a fugue with all musical notations: piano, forte, rallentando, and so on. A quintet occurs in it too as in the “Meistersinger”, my favorite Wagnerian opera. Since exploring the resources and artifices of music and employing them in this chapter, I haven’t cared for music any more. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more.
