Reclaiming an Irish National Hero: Seamus De Búrca’s Biography of Peadar Kearney, The Soldier’s Song (1957)

Abstract

ABSTRACTAnalyses of musical biography have, understandably, largely focused on well-known composers with an established place in the national myth. To explain why particular events or individuals become incorporated into national narratives, historical research on memory has increasingly turned to the analysis of both forgetting and remembering. Likewise, biographical studies must look beyond great composers to those not deemed worthy of the national myth. Irish playwright Seamus de Búrca attempted to create a canonical space in the national myth for his uncle, Peadar Kearney (O Cearnaigh), in a biography he titled The Soldier’s Song: The Story of Peadar O Cearnaigh. From an Irish nationalist family, de Búrca revered Kearney, a nationalist revolutionary and lyricist of the national anthem, “The Soldier’s Song.” The biography was, however, strikingly unsuccessful, and Kearney remains largely forgotten. A reception history of de Búrca’s biography and an analysis of why Ireland’s national narrative excluded Kearney facilitates an understanding of its ideological underpinnings. A study of de Búrca’s work indicates the value of looking beyond biography itself, not only to reception but to commemoration and processes of social and institutional forgetting.