STAGE WORKS

This chamber opera, employing words from the old Irish legends in a new adaptation by Leon Wiltshire and specifically designed for church presentation. It was first performed at St Catherine’s Church, Pontypridd, on 14 July 1979, with Anthony Campbell and Jason Shute in the roles of the protagonists, Pendyrus Chamber Choir and the Celtic Chamber Opera conducted by the composer. It was then revived in 1981 in a fully staged performance at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff. The scoring, as befits a church opera, includes a major part for church organ.

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Óisin, the great Bardic poet of the old Celtic legends, set sail in the days of his youth to seek contentment in the Uttermost West, leaving behind him his father Fionn and the other heroes of the Fianna. Returning to Ireland after many years of wanderings, he finds that the land of his youth is now under the rule of Saint Patric and the armies of the Church. He is converted to Christianity and enters a monastic order.

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The action opens as Óisin, now near to death, is aroused from his sleep by Saint Patric, who seeks to turn his mind towards God and the glory of the heavenly destiny awaiting him. Óisin cannot at first comprehend him, since his memories are full of the long-distant past—I have heard the song of the blackbird. Patric warns him of the perils of Hell into which his old companions have already fallen, but Óisin in increasing ecstasy finds in himself no response to Patric’s admonitions. He relates his own death, as an old blind man in a monastery, to that of his father—Fionn was lucky—and spurns Patric’s increasingly urgent evangelism.

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At last he rouses himself to call on his dead friends to come to his aid, and Patric’s protestations—It is my King that formed the Heavens—no longer move him. But the only voices that respond to his summons are the voices of the priests, who as he dies chant a requiem for the soul of the hero. The final words are left to the orchestra, who play the melody formerly heard when Patric declared It is better to be with God for one hour, than the whole of the Fianna of Ireland forever. It is on this question—to hope or to despair?—that the drama draws to its close.

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The original Irish legends of Óisin fall into two discrete parts. The first, describing his journeys in mystical realms in the West, clearly belong to a pagan realm of dreams and visions parallel to other such voyages in Celtic mythology: Maeldune, Brendan, Madog, and so on. But the second part, describing the encounter of the hero with Saint Patric on his mission to Ireland some centuries later, is rather different since it is equally unambiguously placed in a realistic historical setting where indeed the speecifically supernatural elements found in the tale of his wanderings are entirely absent. As such this forms a parallel to other laments credited to ancient Fenian heroes such as Goll Mac Morna and Caoilte, although it is far more extensive and the specifically religious elements of the discussion—indeed, the argument itself—are much more pronounced even than in similar Christian conclusions that one finds attached to other pagan subjects such as the Children of Lyr or the death of Conchubar.

 

In his 1889 narrative poem William Butler Yeats inserted his own version of the pagan myths into their later Christian context, employing the latter as a framework surrounding the former. But in her comprehensive 1904 collection of Irish legends and mythology Gods and Fighting Men, his contemporary and sometime collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory reverted to the two distinct tales of the Irish originals, rendering them into colloquial rural dialect of the early twentieth century. Her reasons for so doing were clearly explained—she wished to reclaim the myths for the Irish people who remembered them, rather than for the Irish upper classes “where I have not heard them” —but even by the 1970s, when I came to read her translations, the idiom she employed was irreparably antique and dated, reading more like a burlesque of Victorian Irish stage brogue than anything more elevated, and thereby obscuring the very real nature of the debate which was taking place between the hero and the saint. This indeed was an astonishingly modern discussion, in which the relative merits of spiritual salvation through faith in divine revelation competed against the worship of nature and the place of humanity within what would now be described as “an environmental context”—something quite outside the normal scope of mediaeval debate. It says a great deal for the anonymous author (presumably an Irish hermit or monk) that he constructed such a well-reasoned dialogue between the two protagonists, in which each was given the full opportunity to make the best argument he could in the course of a long and discursive text.

 

I suggested to my friend the poet Leon Wiltshire that something dramatic could be made of this unique dialogue if the language could be brought into a more contemporary style, having in mind elements of the treatment of ancient conversation employed by Robert Graves in his historical novelisations of Roman history. What was needed was not a scholarly treatment of the original Irish text, but a rationalisation of the argument so that the words of both Óisin and Saint Patric could resonate with and engage a contemporary audience. To bring the dialogues to an end—in Lady Augusta’s translation they peter out somewhat unconvincingly—we added Óisin’s famous lament for his fallen comrades, sung as a counterpoint to the Latin chanting of the priests at his funeral rites. I was much gratified when, following the first performance in 1979, various members of the audience commented (not always with approval) that I was clearly on the side of the pagans or the Christians, depending on their own views on the words of the protagonists—which led me to hope that the ambiguous conclusion at which I had consciously aimed had been achieved.

 

The musical treatment of Leon’s extensive transformation is not intended to be symbolic in any way. There are however recurring musical themes and occasional references to my other works on Irish mythology written at this time. There are two quotations from my short symphonic suite The wanderings of Óisin (based on the Yeats poem): the first the theme associated with Óisin himself, which enters halfway through the dialogues, and the second a brief reference to the phrase “God is Joy, and Joy is God!” from Yeats’s description of Óisin’s travels, appearing here as Patric tries to adopt a more convivial tone in his reassurance of the dying man. There also appears, although not until the closing stages of the work, the opening theme from my opera Diarmuid and Gráinne, which may perhaps be taken as a reference back to the heroic days of Óisin’s youth although it does also occur at the end of The Children of Lyr as part of a rather different Christian consolation. Two other themes from my first symphony The Mists of Time also figure at different stages in the score, and one of these—the extended melody of consolation at the end—is a modified version of a similar theme which will return in The Silmarillion as Lúthien passes to the realm of Death. Its appearance here is not in any way intended to be symbolic except as a reference back to Patric’s earlier words, and indeed in the closing bars it is combined both with the opening theme from The wanderings of Óisin and the plainchant Magnificat which launched the dialogues themselves. There are other direct references to Gregorian chant, most notably the well-known melody of the Dies irae which appears when Patric first makes reference to the dangers of Hell but afterwards is subsumed into the music as a whole, making a final appearance as a distant counterpoint to the Kyrie chanted by the monks as Óisin dies. Otherwise much of the music derives from evolutionary development of the plainchant themes, with a counterpoint provided by the many sounds of the natural world apostrophised by Óisin in his lyrically impassioned outbursts.

 

Click on the arrow below to be taken to the page for the libretto.