James Joyce's Favourite Songs by G. Molyneux Palmer et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: James Joyce's Favourite Songs by G. Molyneux Palmer et al. Scott W. Klein (bio) JAMES JOYCE'S FAVOURITE SONGS. by G. Molyneux Palmer, Martyn Hill, Meriel Dickinson, and Peter Dickinson. London: Heritage Records, 2020. 1 CD. £13.25. James Joyce's Favourite Songs is a fascinating CD, but it surely does not contain James Joyce's favorite songs. Those would include Irish ballads; nineteenth-century bel canto arias and the operatic songs of William Balfe; the stray show piece from Arthur Gilbert and W. S. Sullivan's operettas; and a miscellanea of comic and sentimental songs of the late nineteenth century—the titles and lyrics to which can be largely found woven through the fabrics of Joyce's works from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. The CD's contents are, however, settings of most of Joyce's first collection of poetry, Chamber Music, by the little-known Anglo-Irish composer Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer, and the songs of The Joyce Book, a collection of musical settings of Joyce's Pomes Penyeach by a series of Irish, American, and English composers, and published by the Oxford University Press in 1933.1 The adjective "favourite" for Joyce only applied to Palmer's settings. Joyce conceived of Chamber Music as fundamentally lyrical. He wrote, "It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope some-one will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like."2 While several composers were attracted to the poems as lyrics for art songs, Joyce thought that Palmer's settings were the best. Palmer had written to Joyce in 1907 shortly after the publication of Chamber Music asking for permission to set some of the poems to music. By 1909, Joyce had approved of several of Palmer's songs and expressed the wish that he would eventually work with all of them, writing "if I were a musician I suppose I should have set them to music myself."3 Palmer was born of Irish parents in Middlesex and studied at Oxford and the Royal College of Music under the prominent Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford. He moved to Ireland in 1910, served as a church organist in the suburbs of Dublin, and died there—suffering from multiple sclerosis and cared for by his two sisters—in 1957. Palmer's Joyce settings were extensive. He composed them over a long period, from 1907 to 1949, well after Joyce's death. Despite this long compositional history, Palmer's style remained consistent. At the time of his own death, he had set thirty-two of Joyce's thirty-six poems to music, to create something like a forty-minute song-cycle, a relative rarity in the English song tradition.4 For years, they were believed lost. Palmer never published them—in part because of his physical condition, perhaps in part because of Joyce's then-status as persona non grata in Ireland—and they were only rediscovered in the archives at Southern Illinois University by the American researcher Myra Teicher Russel in 1981.5 [End Page 365] Palmer's settings are fluent and at times imaginative. If the settings form an integral cycle, the whole is less like Franz Schubert's Winterreise—a claim made in the liner notes—than his Die schöne Müllerin, a young man's emotional journey set to youthful-sounding music. The strengths of Palmer's settings reside in their consistent flow of melody—they were particularly tailored to Joyce's own high tenor voice—and, to Palmer's credit, their resistance to other composers' overt influences (although they do show occasional echoes of Richard Wagner and Gabriel Fauré, and in the case of XX, "He who hath glory lost" (Poems 33) a bit too much of Edward Elgar). If the songs tend to fall short of the best word-setting, the music is generally a good match for Joyce's lyrics, which are those of a young writer working out his relation to both archaism and modernism, feeling his way between Victorian conservatism and newer modes of expression. For a composer who studied...