`No no papa! Don't light the fire. We are storing rifles for the IRA!" Few professors of music can have come home to find that their domestic chimney had become an arms dump, but this was one of the extraordinary aspects of the career of the Neapolitan pianist Michele Esposito, who was the dominant figure in Irish music from his arrival in Dublin in 1882, when he took up a teaching post at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, until his enforced retirement due to ill health in 1928.
A dynamic, excitable workaholic, Esposito was piano teacher, conductor, solo performer, chamber music player, educationalist, entrepreneur, father of two Russo-Italian Sinn Feiners and - a fact that has received little recognition until now - a composer of stature whose piano work is featured on a new Chandos CD release by Miceal O'Rourke (Chan 9675).
In those 46 years, Esposito founded and nurtured an Irish school of pianism and piano teaching which is evident to this day. Almost every Irish pianist of significance in that time studied with and passed on his teaching skills to their own pupils, such as Rhona Marshall, who was his special protege.
More than that, Esposito single-handedly established the recital series for the RDS in 1886, playing in almost every season himself, both solo and with such outstanding visitors as the Brodsky Quartet, as well as a quartet of RIAM professors. He also established the Academy's nationwide Local Centre Examination system (today it examines over 30,000 students nationally) and this saw him tramping the length and breadth of the country to raise the standards of teaching in the largely convent-run musical centres.
Spurred on by the tremendous success of visits by the Halle Orchestra, in 1899 Esposito persuaded a number of wealthy citizens to subvent the Dublin Orchestral Society, Ireland's first fully professional orchestra on co-operative lines, which gave many Dubliners their first exposure to regular seasons of classical music. They took place in the hall of the Royal University which has since become the NCH and also in the Antient Concert Rooms, then Dublin's most fashionable venue, which is now in a state of near dereliction in Pearse Street. The Orchestra continued until 1914, after which the wind and brass players, drawn largely from the army bands, went abroad to play a different tune.
As if to take up the slack, Esposito then established a music publishing enterprise, CE Editions, of whom the `C' was Sir Stanley Cochrane, founder of Cantrell and Cochrane, musical benefactor and builder of a still extant opera house at his home in Woodbrook, Bray. CE Editions went through a lot of Cochrane's money and Esposito's time and patience until it folded with his death in 1929.
All this left Esposito with little time for composition during his earlier years in Dublin - which accounts for a 17-year hiatus between his opus 32 (1882) and opus 33 (1899). With only two exceptions, the 23 pieces chosen by Miceal O'Rourke for this disc date from the later period, when Esposito's work had settled into a rhythm encompassing all these achievements. Perhaps the most rewarding and significant are the three ballades, op. 59, dating from 1907 and two selections from his last published works, the Irish Sketch Book op 71, designed as teaching pieces for his students, and the preludes op. 72 composed between 1910 and 1929.
Esposito's skill as a composer and as a teacher were recognised in his lifetime by Sir Hamilton Harty, who, while never a student of Esposito, regarded him as his mentor and submitted all his own compositions to him for approval. The Italian's involvement in the Literary Revival made him a signal figure with his cantata Deirdre (words by T W Rolleston) and the operas The Post-bag (words by Alfred Percival Graves) and Douglas Hyde's The Tinker and the Fairy, which was first performed in 1902 in George Moore's garden (today the site of the RHA Gallagher Gallery) with Hyde and Sinead de Valera in the title roles.
Esposito was also planning an opera collaboration with Moore on the Deirdre theme, work which, if it had come to fruition, would have been a significant foil for the burgeoning cultural nationalism of the period.
In the late 1920s Esposito was trying to revive the Dublin Orchestral Society when he suddenly collapsed during a rehearsal in 1928. His illness, which was obviously very serious, stunned musical Dublin. No one seemed able to conceive of activity without him, even though at 73, it must have been clear that he could not go on for ever.
Deprived of activity, Esposito seems to have crumpled. He retreated to Florence, where he had been preceded by his Russian wife Vera Klebnikova and all but one of his children - daughters Nina and Vera, and son Mario. Vera, an actress, had been the custodian of the guns, and told the story to Eamon de Valera when she visited him in the 1950s.
The third daughter, Bianca, stayed on with her father, housekeeping for him at their last residence, St. Ronan's on Sandford Road, as well as teaching Italian to the opera students at the RIAM and at the Berlitz School, where one of her students was Samuel Beckett. Beckett also became a friend of Mario's, a prodigious classical scholar who pioneered the study of Hiberno-Latin.
Mario left the country in 1922 under a considerable cloud, after an exercise in 1919 as a Sinn Fein agent, instructed by Count Plunkett and Michael Collins, went badly wrong. In Italy he worked in the Florentine museums service, and was involved in the Italian resistance during the second World War. When he died in the early 1970s, his own and his father's manuscripts seem to have been destroyed, thus drawing a veil over much of Michele Esposito's compositional technique.
Luckily the published work, including string quartets and the Irish Symphony, is accessible, but the two piano concertos and much else still remain to be pieced together. In this timely recording, however, Miceal O'Rourke has revealed much of his fascinating piano work.
Richard Pine is the co-author of To Talent Alone: the Royal Irish Academy of Music, 1848-1998.
