It is hard to imagine the development of Cork's cultural life without thinking of the late Aloys Fleischmann. It is just as difficult to do so without considering the contribution of the late Joan Denise Moriarty.
When he retired as professor of music at UCC in 1980 I had occasion to interview the great man. By then he was operating out of what could be described as a garret while working on a major research project. There was no telephone so the porter in the refurbished Maltings - off campus, at the college - had to go into the yard and shout up: "Someone to see you, professor." Next thing, he appeared at the window.
The Fleischmann/Moriarty connection arises again because of a new book just published by Mercier entitled Joan Denise Moriarty Founder of Irish National Ballet.
Edited by Fleischmann's daughter, Ruth, who lectures in English at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, it deals with the rise of classical dance in Ireland. The book traces a sometimes tortuous trail from the establishment by Joan Denise of the Cork Ballet Company - and the influence she exerted to make possible the Irish Ballet Company in the 1970s, which would later become Irish National Ballet - to its demise in the 1980s. The day of our interview Aloys Fleischmann duly came down from his lofty perch to usher me up. His enthusiasm, as always, was unbounded for the subject at hand. Just then, it was the completion of his Sources of Irish Music. He was a doughty campaigner. Once, not too many years before his death, he joined a group of walkers who were climbing Mount Brandon in Kerry. His reason for the climb was that as a youngster with his father, Aloys senior, then celebrating his 70th birthday, he attempted the ascent but never finished it. So when his own 80th birthday approached he wanted to have another go. The group finished the climb. When they were divesting themselves of their climbing gear, to the astonishment of some, Aloys Fleischmann was wearing a suit and tie under his gear. "What else should I be wearing?" he said.
This book gives Aloys Fleischmann's memories of the start of his artistic partnership with Joan Denise Moriarty: "1945 was the centenary of the death of Thomas Davis, the poet of the Young Ireland Movement. Having been commissioned by Radio Eireann to write one of the works for a centenary concert, I thought of setting Thomas Davis's poem Clare's Dragoons for baritone solo, mixed choir, orchestra and war pipes. Miss Moriarty agreed to play the war pipes (she was an accomplished player) and helped with the ornamentation of the part. The first performance took place in the Capitol Theatre in Dublin and in the City Hall in Cork shortly afterwards, where it received a tumultuous reception.
"Not very long afterwards, she decided that her ballet group was sufficiently advanced to put on a programme of ballet. She asked whether I would conduct the Cork Symphony Orchestra which had been founded in 1934 for a ballet performance in June of that year. After some hesitation I agreed. This was the start of a collaboration which was to last a lifetime."
But what of the rumours that suggest that there was a more intimate side to the relationship between Fleischmann and Moriarty? It was an indelicate question to have to ask his daughter but her reply was categorical. "How could people in Cork, a small place, have missed such a thing for 40 years? It simply never happened. In any event, my mother, Anne, would never have tolerated anything like that. She had no hangups about their great artistic friendship. Miss Moriarty would come to our house on Christmas Eve and we would all exchange gifts. She was always welcomed by our family and by my mother. She was like an aunt to us. She was godmother to my youngest brother, Alan. There is nothing you can do about rumours. I'm giving you the facts as they were," she said.
Back at the beginning of their collaboration, the plan was to give that early ballet performance in the Capitol Cinema Theatre in Cork but it had to be transferred to the Opera House because the other venue proved unsuitable. "The programme included a solo dance, La Calinda, from the Delius opera, Koanga, in which Miss Moriarty danced to her own choreography, depicting a slave casting off bonds, a theme which symbolised what she herself was about to achieve in liberating dance from the shackles of ignorance and prejudice," remembered Aloys Fleischmann.
Her brave decision to introduce ballet to Cork, Fleischmann added, mirrored the fact that "up to now, the only form of ballet seen in Cork had been the odd interlude in the course of an opera, which was endured with as much patience as possible until the singing started again." In the piece quoted in the book, he recalled a letter written to the then Cork Examiner on May 27th 1951. The author was Eric Cross, who wrote The Tailor and Ansty. "Sir, Ballet Week is an event in the life of Cork of which its citizens should be proud. For the past four years, a group of the young people of Cork have worked with enthusiasm, idealism and no small measure of courage, to create this annual event and have thereby established Cork as the artistic capital of Ireland ." But Fleischmann also recalled that after one performance in the Opera House, Moriarty attended Mass at the Church of St Peter and Paul only to hear the priest denounce what he described as "the scandalous scenes" at the Opera House where a semi-nude female figure had offended against "all normal codes of decency". His account went on: "He was referring, of course, to the tutu worn by Swanhilda and it took years before tutus and leotards were no longer regarded as indecent by even a minority of the audience."
The process by which the Arts Council decided in the 1980s to remove funding from Irish National Ballet is described in Ruth Fleischmann's own contribution to the book. To her it was undemocratic and unfair: for spurious reasons, the company was allowed to die. The report, written by Peter Brinson, an English academic and dance theorist, sounded the death knell.
To spend any length of time in the presence of Joan Denise Moriarty was to realise that you were in the company of a special person. There were, of course, issues such as poor audience figures and escalating costs as the Arts Council saw it. The ballet critic, Robert O'Donoghue, who followed her travails from the beginning, was in no doubt that a bottom-line approach was the reason behind the demise of Irish National Ballet.
But as almost 100 people from the artistic world, and from all walks of life, maintain in Ruth Fleischmann's book, dance in Ireland would never have developed to the point it did without the boundless energy and grit of Joan Denise Moriarty. Ballet was brought to the provinces, the small towns and the larger cities. There was an awakening because of her. This is her story as told by professionals and others who were there. The manner in which dance at that time was allowed to fade away in the Republic, as Aloys Fleischmann saw it, meant that yet again, as he put it, we had "disgraced ourselves."