Cathal Gannon, who died on May 23rd aged 88, held a very special place in Irish musical life. He is remembered as a maker of harpsichords, whose instruments in the 1960s helped fire a burgeoning public awareness of early music, and an interest in keyboard music played on the instruments for which it was written.
He was born in Harold's Cross, Dublin, in 1910, into a family of carpenters. His father, Charles, a carpenters' workshop foreman in Guinness's, and mother, Susan, both came from the Francis Street area. He left school at the age of 15, when his father secured him a place in Guinness's Brewery as an apprentice carpenter.
The apprenticeship brought an end to his piano lessons. But his interest in music remained undimmed - he heard Paderewski play at the Theatre Royal - and he acquired further interests in antiques (particularly old watches and clocks), art, and a habit of frequenting libraries.
He met his future wife, a Londoner, Margaret Key, while on holidays in Glengarriff in 1936. They married in 1942, and their only son, Charles, was born in 1955. Charles, a vision mixer in RTE, has retained his father's interest in music, as a viol-player.
Cathal Gannon's interest in harpsichords had been sparked at the age of 14 by an article in The Children's Newspaper. He later studied the historical instruments of the National Museum, and his first restorations - of pianos - soon followed. By the late 1940s he had made his first clavichord, an instrument which has none of the mechanical complexity of a harpsichord. In 1951 he made his first harpsichord, following the measurements he had made of a 1777 Kirckman instrument in the Benton-Fletcher Collection in Chelsea. He was unhappy with the results, and in 1957, inspired by a BBC Third Programme talk by Raymond Russell on the authentic copying of old instruments, he re-approached his work from a fresh perspective.
In 1962 another Kirckman harpsichord, discovered in the attic of Townley Hall near Drogheda, provided further inspiration, and became his model for future copies. A year later Guinness's Brewery took up a suggestion of John Beckett's and set up a special workshop within the brewery where Cathal Gannon would make commissioned harpsichords. In 1964 Lord Moyne invited him to live in a house in Knockmaroon.
In 1965 he made a Late Late Show appearance with his new Kirckman-model harpsichord, and the instrument was later donated to the Royal Irish Academy of Music. More harpsichords followed, and his restoration work included Thomas Moore's square piano and an 1809 Broadwood grand (Broadwoods were the firm that famously supplied a piano to Beethoven in 1817).
In 1968 he declined to make any more harpsichords in Guinness's, and the workshop was closed. He was able to buy the contents cheaply and set them up at home; he became a maintenance inspector at the brewery until his retirement in 1970. The harpsichord-making continued, now extending to models made in the manner of the French maker Pascal Taskin. He was conferred with honorary MAs by Trinity College, Dublin (1978), and St Patrick's College, Maynooth (1989).
Cathal Gannon was known to all who met him as an affable, independent-spirited man. He was also a man of many surprises. His true instrumental passion was actually not harpsichords, but early pianos. And his interest in old watches was at least as great. He was generous to all with his time and expertise.
As he explained to Ray Lynott in an RTE interview in 1983, "I'm interested in everything". His harpsichords are simply the most public manifestation of that interest.
Cathal Gannon: born 1910; died May, 1999