The Kilkenny bloom that helped Thomas Moore hit the jackpot

Seamus Heaney described the lyricist’s Irish Melodies ‘as the music of what happened in the sentimental national heart’

Poetry in motion: Seamus Heaney was a fan of Thomas Moore

Poetry in motion: Seamus Heaney was a fan of Thomas Moore

The Dublin-born lyricist Thomas Moore

Poetry in motion: Seamus Heaney was a fan of Thomas Moore

George Hamilton

May 28 2022 05:00 AM

Next week, Ireland’s biggest gardening festival, Bloom, throws open its gates in the Phoenix Park, back in the rudest of health after its enforced two-year absence due to Covid. There will be many a rose on show, which might call to mind one of the most famous of Irish airs.

Indeed, not far away across the rooftops of Dublin’s northside, in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, you’ll find a descendant of the very blossom that inspired The Last Rose of Summer.

Thomas Moore was moved to compose his popular poem by a shrub in a Kilkenny garden that bore a single pink bloom. The flower in Glasnevin was propagated from a cutting taken from that plant.

Moore was born on this date in 1779 in Aungier Street in Dublin, where his father had a grocer’s shop. Bright and engaging, he became one of the first Catholics to study at Trinity College after the ban on their attendance was lifted in 1793.

There he became friends with Robert Emmet, and Moore too might have become involved with the United Irishmen in the uprising of 1798 were it not for the influence of his mother. He did, though, remain a committed nationalist.

The following year, armed with his degree, Moore left for London to study for the Bar. Hoping to make his way in the arts, he found himself a patron in the Earl of Moira and it was through him that he got a position in the maritime court in Bermuda.

The Dublin-born lyricist Thomas Moore

But life was too sedate on the archipelago, and he took himself off to explore the United States and Canada before deciding he would be better off back in London.

He had already written some poetry, without any great success. Encouraged by a publisher, he changed his focus and concentrated on producing lyrics in the style of the Romantics that could be set to traditional Irish airs. The music was written by the poet himself or by his friend and collaborator John Stevenson.

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With his Irish Melodies, Thomas Moore hit the jackpot. Ten 12-tune volumes appeared over a quarter of a century, bringing in an annual income of about €60,000 in today’s money, an indication of just how popular they were in England. They went down well in contemporary Ireland too.

As Seamus Heaney put it: “This was the music of what happened in the sentimental national heart” — The Last Rose of Summer, Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms, The Minstrel Boy, Oft in the Stilly Night.

The fact that these were songs to be performed informally, usually in front of a small gathering in a drawing room, gives them an intimacy that you won’t find in the German Lied or the French mélodie.

The fact that mélodie and not chanson is the term used is directly attributable to Moore.

His Irish Melodies struck a chord with the French composer Hector Berlioz (whose interest in all things Irish was sparked by his infatuation with an actress from Ennis, one Harriet Smithson). He set them as art songs accompanied by piano. Soon, they would be known as Berlioz’s Mélodies, and that became the term to describe all similar compositions.

George Hamilton presents ‘The Hamilton Scores’ on RTÉ lyric fm from 10am each Saturday and Sunday.

The Kilkenny bloom that helped Thomas Moore hit the jackpot

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