'Jim should have stuck to the singing'

James Joyce had been a professional musician – once sharing the bill with John McCormack – and music played a very important part in his life and work

WHEN JAMES JOYCE was buried at Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich on January 15th, 1941, his wife Nora ordered that a wreath in the shape of a harp be placed upon the grave.

Lest anyone mistake the gesture as a patriotic tribute to his homeland, Nora observed that she “chose this shape for my Jim who so loved music”. Indeed, Nora, who reputedly never read any of her husband’s books, was often heard to say, “Jim should have stuck to the singing.” She was referring not just to the financial and emotional uncertainty of life as a literary wife, but also to Joyce’s tentative forays as a musician in the early days of their courtship, when he had invited Nora to see him sing in an afternoon concert at the Antient Concert Rooms on Pearse Street in Dublin; he shared the bill on that occasion with the already famous John McCormack.

Despite his natural musical talent, Joyce was not to pursue a career on the stage, but music remained an important part in his life and work. Visitors to the various hotels and flats that the Joyces inhabited during their 40 years in Europe were nearly always regaled with informal performances, the writer accompanying himself on a famously untuned piano or in concert with his children. The family were also regular visitors to the opera in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, even when they had no money to pay their rent. One of Joyce’s most successful ventures was his promotion of the Irish tenor John Sullivan, for whom he organised concerts in London and Paris.

Music was to become one of the recurrent motifs, metaphors and structural devices of Joyce’s writing. In Ulysses, snatches of song are woven into the patchwork fabric of his stream-of-consciousness technique, while Joyce went so far as to describe his compositional method as that of “a fugue with all musical notations: piano, forte, rallendo and so on”.

Finnegans Wake, with its bubble of voices and dissonant sounds, he described as “pure music”. Indeed, Joyce borrowed “the resources and artifices of music” to such an extent that he wondered whether, “I, the great friend of music . . . see[ing] through all the tricks . . . can enjoy it anymore.”

Joyce need not have worried; his love of music would never desert him. The Christmas before his death was a celebration marked by his renditions of Irish ballads and Latin choral songs. Along with the placing of the symbolic wreath, the aria Addio terra, Addio cielo from Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo was sung the following month at his funeral.

Over several years, singers Darina Gallagher and Sinéad Murphy have fine-tuned a musical repertoire that pays tribute to the important role that music plays in Joyce’s work. This week they launch a new musical performance, Café Chantant, which coincides with the One City, One Book initiative, and draws specifically on the music used in Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection infused with song. Indeed Café Chantant refers to the stall at the emptying bazaar in the short story Araby, where the narrator waits for his sweetheart against a soundscape of “the nasal chanting of street-singers” singing “come-all-ye’s”. The story’s title is taken from the wistful cantata I’ll Sing Thee Songs of Araby, which was popularised by Thomas Moore; it was a favourite of Joyce’s, which he would use again in Finnegans Wake.

Dubliners is full of romantic affairs played out to music. In Eveline, the young woman’s suitor seduces her with trips to the music-hall and songs from which she can infer personal meaning. In Two Gallants, “the melody of Silent, O Moyle” – another Thomas Moore – “throb[s] deep and full” as Corley’s “fine tart” comes into view. In some stories, music is used merely to provide texture or tone, like in Clay, where Maria’s performance of I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls moves the listener to tears and the reader towards melancholic contemplation.

It is in The Dead, however, that Joyce uses music to its fullest effect, where it enhances the setting and psychological subtext of the characters, as well as the story’s mournful mood. Snatches of song can be heard as Gabriel arrives at his aunts’ soiree, and as the party moves into full swing there is a toast of celebration – For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow – amidst the melancholy. But later the strains of The Lass of Aughrim drift down the stairs, “the voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief”. Back at their hotel, the song prompts Gabriel’s key moment of self-realisation. As his wife Gretta reveals the lost sweetheart of her youth, Gabriel realises his own mortality and that “he had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love”.

Perhaps the emotional devastation in The Dead rings so true because it was drawn from Joyce’s own repertoire of feeling. He had first heard The Lass of Aughrim from Nora and it was her favoured party piece throughout their life together. Its lyrics were especially significant for the couple as they reminded Joyce of Nora’s life before him; the tragic deaths of her childhood sweethearts, which he tormented himself with throughout their life, as if love was only true if driven by betrayal.

Café Chantant is at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon on May 16th; Dalkey Community Centre on May 17th; the Promenade Cafe, Dún Laoghaire on May 25th and 26th; and the International Joyce Symposium, Dublin, June 10th-16th