THE HISTORY of cultural relations between Ireland and Romania has long been dominated by the work of one man, who famously never visited the latter country, a fact that didn’t hinder his imagination.
Now at last another chapter has been added – this time a musical one, by composer Shaun Davey. And although, in a sense, his opus too concerns the subject of the dead and the undead, that's where similarities with Bram Stoker's Draculabegin and end.
Well, actually, there is one other parallel. When he wrote his cycle Songs from the Merry Cemetery, Davey had not yet visited the place that inspired them.
He had been to Romania, all right. He had also seen pictures of the cemetery, and read the epitaphs, some of which he then turned into music. But until a series of extraordinary concerts held there last August, he had never been to the site itself.
It was a setting Stoker himself could hardly have invented. The Merry Cemetery is in a place called Sapanta, a village of greater Transylvania, nestling in the heavily wooded Carpathian mountains, near the border with Ukraine.
For one of the concerts, there was even a lightning storm to add to the effect, while further illumination was provided by torch-bearers among the audience. Against which backdrop, surrounded by the graves of those they were commemorating, Davey’s song-cycle was performed by an ensemble including singer Rita Connolly, piper Liam O’Flynn, a Romanian orchestra and an Eastern Orthodox church choir.
It must have been quite an event, although concerts or no concerts, the Merry Cemetery is an event in itself. Like the great necropolises of Paris, it has become a major tourist attraction, despite not being very old.
In fact, apart from its basic function, it has little in common with Montparnasse or Père Lachaise. It’s much more colourful, for one thing. The painted crosses are carved from wood, not stone. And above all, few if any of its residents were well-known in life, at least beyond the village.
They owe such celebrity as they have to a man called Stan Ioan Patras – a sculptor, painter and poet who in 1935 began writing lyrical epitaphs for the local dead. He also took to decorating the tombs with scenes from their lives, and sometimes their deaths. The tributes could be respectful, but they could also be mischievous; noting, as in one example, that the deceased “liked to drink, maybe sometimes too much”.
This reflected the area’s sense of humour. And the sculptor’s cheerfulness about mortality was founded in ancient beliefs about the afterlife. Hence his memorials proved popular. Over time, Sapanta and its cemetery became twin villages; as someone put it, “One for the living and one for the dead, just as loquacious and friendly as the first.” Perhaps the most celebrated headstone is one erected by a man in honour of his mother-in-law, with a verse joking that if she had lived three days longer, he would have died first, and she would be the one standing over the grave. The epitaph concludes: “You that are passing by/Try not to wake her up/For if she comes back home/She’ll bite my head off/But I’ll act in a way/That she will not return/Stay here my dear mother-in-law.” Not all the memorials are so cheery. A more recent one commemorates a local man who moved to Paris and died there, underneath the Metro. Sure enough, the picture of his demise shows him crouched between tram wheels; which sounds horrific. But like the other headstones, the scene is represented in a naive, medieval style, minimising detail. It’s more like the Bayeux Tapestry than a photograph.
Patras himself has long ago joined his former subjects, under an epitaph he had already prepared. Since when, his work has been carried on by apprentices, in keeping with the received style. The cemetery’s fame continues to grow, meanwhile, and Davey’s song-cycle can only increase it.
The August concerts were, incidentally, the initiative of another Irishman, Romania-based Peter Hurley, who hopes the Sapanta festival will become an annual event. For now, however, Songs from the Merry Cemeteryis heading west, to the composer's homeland.
The cycle gets its first Irish performance next week in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, which may lack some of the atmosphere of a Carpathian graveyard. But being home to such eccentric delights as the memorial to the Duke of Schomburg, in which Dean Swift sarcastically upbraids the dead man’s relatives for being too mean to fund a monument themselves, it’s the next best thing.
The concert has been titled The Music of Shaun Davey — A Romanian Journey. And making the journey in reverse, courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Institute, will be a male-voice choir from Sibiu, the city in Transylvania where the music was first performed. Rita Connolly, Liam O'Flynn, and Noel Eccles will also again feature, this time accompanied by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
Incredibly, it is 30 years since Davey's breakthrough work, The Brendan Voyage. But the St Patrick's Cathedral concert marks another milestone, the 20th year of modern diplomatic relations between Romania and Ireland, established in 1990 after the fall of the Ceausescu regime. The event is also timed to tie in with Romania Day, which follows shortly afterwards on December 1st.
The Music of Shaun Davey – A Romanian Journe” will be performed on Saturday, November 27th, 8pm at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. More details are available from www.rte.ie/concertorchestra.