WHEN Queen Elizabeth sat down to dinner in Dublin Castle last May, among the delicacies offered to her was an “Irish apple balsamic vinegar meringue”. But the novelties didn’t end with the food. The after-dinner entertainment also included some special treats, including that now rare musical dish: a male harp player.
It’s a strange turn of events that female harpers should have become the norm in Ireland, because for much of
Irish history, the reverse applied.
Indeed, when an earlier Elizabeth occupied the English throne, there was a male monopoly of the instrument. A situation whose end she helped hasten with an infamous order, after the Battle of Kinsale, to “hang the harpers, wherever found, and burn their instruments”.
Not that the Virgin Queen was consciously advancing the cause of musical feminism. Nor was her order motivated by an aversion to harp-playing in general. On the contrary, she kept Gaelic harpers in court. But players of the instrument had enjoyed a powerful role in Gaelic Ireland.
And as that Ireland disintegrated, the now itinerant harpers were presumed – probably with good reason – to be enemy spies.
They didn’t all hang, clearly. In fact the most famous of Irish harpers, O’Carolan, had yet to be born. But perhaps as much due to changing tastes as changing politics, the old-style harp – wire-strung and played by the fingernails – went into a long and near-terminal decline in the centuries after Kinsale.
The title “last of the great Irish harpers” was conferred in turn on a number of players, most commonly on Arthur O’Neill, one of 10 exponents of the ancient art rounded up for the famous Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. (The 10, interestingly, included a woman: Rose Mooney from Co Meath, who may have been the shape of things to come).
But it finally settled on Padraig Dall O Beirn, or Blind Patrick Byrne as he was later known. An indirect product of the short-lived Belfast-led revival, Byrne was himself born in the 1790s, in Monaghan.
It can be debated whether he was a true continuation of the tradition. In any case, he was widely described – by this newspaper among others – as the “the last of the great Irish harpers”. When he died in 1863, the title died with him.
BY THEN,in Britain and continental Europe, harp-playing had become a female affair. One big influence, at least in France, was Marie Antoinette.
Playing it herself, she set the vogue for other society women. But unlike the aristocratic habit of driving on the left-hand side of the road, harping continued to be fashionable even after the French Revolution, which helped create a new middle class for which possession of a harp – and harp-playing daughters – were considered to confer bourgeois respectability on a household.
Mind you, in some European countries – including Germany – the instrument used to be considered slightly indecent for women. After all, as with the cello, the player was required to sit astride it (anyone who has seen the ultra-sensual performances of brilliant English cellist Natalie Clein may understand what the Germans were worried about).
But the decadent French had no such concerns. And by the 20th century, they had set the tone for harping everywhere. So now from Boston to Bordeaux, via Bunratty Castle, if you see a harp played, it’s most likely by a woman.
Michael Rooney, the post-prandial harpist at last year’s royal dinner, is a throwback in more ways than one. Not only does he play the instrument (albeit a modern, more flexible version of the Celtic harp). He also composes for it, like O’Carolan.
In the event, it was to one of the latter’s compositions, Eleanor Plunkett, that the queen was treated in Dublin Castle. The piece in question is about the eponymous survivor of a Meath family, 30 members of which supposedly came to a gruesome end when they locked themselves into their castle against attackers and were killed with “boiling water”.
But perhaps better known is the story of O’Carolan truncating his composition in a huff after Ms Plunkett’s coachman had the temerity to suggest that he’d heard it somewhere before. Happily, no such slur has been uttered about any of Rooney’s original work.
It also happens that, like the last of the harping Mohicans, Rooney is from Monaghan. So he is in every way an apt choice to play at this year’s Feile Patrick Byrne, which starts later this week in Byrne’s home town of Carrickmacross.
The celebration begins on Thursday night with a lecture by Prof Terence Dooley, NUI Maynooth and will feature the usual instrumental workshops, concerts, and a céilí. This year, there will also be a guided Patrick Byrne-themed tour of the town, including a stop at the old harper’s grave, which is itself an essay in the complex history of Ireland.
Born poor, obscure, and Catholic, Byrne died well-off, famous, and Protestant. But his stately tomb lies in what is known locally as the pauper’s graveyard: where his (sadly somewhat defaced) epitaph notes that, among other claims to fame, Byrne was the harper by royal appointment to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria.
More details about Feile Patrick Byrne are at the Comhaltas website comhaltas.ie/