How odd and how right that Charles Acton should breathe his last just as a full-time, dedicated classical music radio service was about to breathe its first. No matter what his criticisms of the station might have been, he would have been the first to applaud its birth. Merely to have the great music of Western civilisation available in even small excerpts at all times to ordinary people everywhere must surely be an infinite improvement on our radio diet of hitherto, when the deliberately ephemeral melodies of popular culture were granted an almost total monopoly of the airwaves.
That this was so, that the classical music of Europe and the great music of Irish traditional culture should have been marooned in isolated and obscure programming ghettoes was surely a denial of the public service broadcasting remit of RTE. Nobody chafed at this disservice more than Charles, for he regarded great music as being as much the birthright of the humble pot-boy amidst his suds and saucepans as it was of the gentleman artist in his salon.
Melody within
For Charles loved music. He adored it. It filled his life and his soul, his heart and his hours; and there was hardly a passing moment in a single day when he was not rehearsing some melody within, when his mind was not toying with some score, when he was not preoccupied with something musical.
Charles Acton was never old. In his eighties he was a big pink cherub, all rubicund cheek and boyish cheer, with a metaphorical cry of "Oh how absolutely wizard!" on his lips. Yet despite his irrepressible and enchanting juvenility, he still bore the manner of his caste, and not lightly: he described his family as being Protestants in Wicklow for hundreds of years. But there are many kinds of Wicklow Protestants, and most of them are plain folk, hill farmers of modest means. The Actons were not hill farmers of modest means. They were imperially Irish, proud of their Irishness but equally proud of the role their tribe had played in the affairs of the world. False patronymic modesty is not a vice of which one would convincingly accuse Charles.
This is not to say he was vain or conceited. He was not. He was confident. He knew his mind, and he spoke it, perhaps more forthrightly than many people found comforting. It would be easy for those who did not understand his manner to think that he was being arrogant. He wasn't. He was being honest. In his world the mind existed that one should speak it. It was that simple.
So of course, in a culture in which dissembling is often seen as either a social courtesy or a safe refuge, he could rub people up the wrong way. Nobody who worked with Charles could ever say that it was plain sailing, especially as he belonged to an old world in which certain values of decorum should be respected at all times. I remember interrupting him and a colleague in conversation in the newsroom without as much emollient as the situation quite demanded, and was in an instant turned into a small spot of apologetic grease on the floor.
Enormous courtesy
On this occasion, he felt he had been provoked; and he responded briskly and without quarter. But it would be utterly wrong to give the impression that he was an imperious or haughty man. He wasn't. He was in himself simply a man of enormous courtesy and grave attentiveness. Manners were not an adornment to his daily intercourse; they were what made that intercourse possible.
This is what made Charles so fascinating; for that kind of attention to social decorum is so often accompanied by a cold and unflinching hauteur. Charles could not have been further removed from such frigidity. He was a deeply emotional man and was not shy about his deep and passionate affections, the greatest of which was for his wife, his companion, his friend, and his love, Carol. Charles & Carol. A single and singular singularity. May God guard her in these days and hours and the darker watches of the night.
But nearly as much as he loved Carol, he loved music. He wept with joy or with sadness when music moved his soul. He could so easily be sent into to great raptures by artistic beauty; and at the end of a concert his large form could often be seen overflowing in its seat, as he mopped the tears from his large round cheeks with an even larger white handkerchief. He was a perpetual little boy, with all the expansive exuberance, mischievous joy and simple, unvarnished emotions of such a creature.
Prime-time music
So he is gone, having found that peaceful death that he deserved, stealing away to the burial ground of his forefathers before anyone knew he had departed. A truly Carolingianly Actonian end, and as I write of it, I can hear Lyric Notes being presented by the hitherto shamefully underemployed Maire Nic Gearailt. It is good to hear her where she deserves to be, in a prime-time position where more people can hear her fine broadcasting qualities. And perhaps in time she can persuade her masters that we do not listen to such radio for halfhourly news bulletins, or breathlessly chatty phone-ins (not from her but others), but for music.
Music; full symphony or concerto, and not just slot-compatible, computer-selected items such as might be found in any supermarket. But of course, these things take time to get right. We should be patient; and maybe with the long-overdue arrival of Lyric FM, we are embarking upon a new chapter of music in Irish life. Let us hope so. To award the music of Western civilisation a proper place in Irish life would be a fitting tribute to the critic around whom music in Ireland revolved for the previous half-century: Charles Acton, gentleman.