O'Carolan · 1738
Carolan's Farewell to Music
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of March 1738, in the upstairs guest-bedroom at Alderford House, on the south shore of Lough Meelagh in County Roscommon, Turlough O'Carolan, sixty-seven years old, the Gaelic harper-composer of the early eighteenth century, in the fifty-second year of his blindness and the fifty-first of his itinerant career, lay on the bed in his last day, attended by his patroness Mary MacDermott Roe and her household, his daughter Marian, and his student-harper Charles Fanning, who had brought him to Alderford from Tempo two days earlier. He had been deteriorating in health since the previous Christmas at the Reynolds household at Letterfian. By the tradition recorded by Charles O'Conor of Belanagare (the eighteenth-century antiquarian who was Carolan's near-neighbour and is the principal contemporary source for his life), Carolan called for a cup of whiskey, drank it, was unable to swallow a second, and asked for his harp. He composed in the next half-hour, with Fanning writing down the notation, the piece he himself called Farewell to Music (Slán le Ceol). The composition is, by the musical consensus, the most accomplished of the late Carolan airs and the only piece in the Irish harp tradition to which the composer's own deathbed is the original setting. He died at about three in the afternoon.
A man who has spent his life making airs for other houses rarely composes one for his own. The harper goes from door to door; the airs take the names of the lintels he sleeps beneath. Only at the end, when the road has closed behind him and the last door is the door he will not walk back out of, does the question arrive: what is owed to the instrument itself, the thing that has been under the hand for fifty-one years and has never had its own tune?
THE HARPER AT SIXTY-SEVEN
Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin was born at Nobber in County Meath in 1670 to John O'Carolan and Brigid Ó Treasaigh, lost his sight to smallpox at eighteen, and was apprenticed to the harp at twenty-one under Mary MacDermott Roe of Alderford, the woman whose upstairs guest-bedroom he is dying in. For forty-six years he has gone from house to house across Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Cavan, Longford, Meath, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Galway, composing airs to the names of his hosts: the Burkes, the MacDermotts, the Powers, the Maguires, the Inchiquins, the O'Conors of Belanagare. By his daughter Marian's count he has made between two hundred and two hundred and twenty of them. The airs are, in the Gaelic order he was apprenticed into, the names of the houses; and the houses, in the Ireland of the Penal Laws of 1695-1829, are going. The airs will outlive the lintels they were written for. This he knows.
THE MORNING AT ALDERFORD
It is the twenty-fifth of March 1738. Pale March light off Lough Meelagh comes in through the upstairs window. He has been failing since Christmas at the Reynolds household at Letterfian, and his student-harper Charles Fanning, sixteen, brought him by cart from Tempo two days ago. He lies in a white linen shift on three bolsters from the Madam Roe collection. The heavy carved-oak harp Cormac Ó Conghaile of Granard made for him in 1693, thirty-six brass strings on the low-headed frame, leans against the foot of the bed. Marian, twenty-four, is at his right elbow. Fanning sits on a low stool by the window with a sheet of foolscap and a pencil sharpened for notation. Mary MacDermott Roe, sixty-two, the lady who gave him his apprenticeship and will see him out, stands at the door. The room is very quiet. He cannot see the light off the lake, but he has known it under the hand of every harper who has played here for forty-six years, and he knows how it falls on a March morning.
A HALF-HOUR IN D MINOR
He has time, he knows, for one more air. Not many: one. The question is whose name it goes under. He runs the list of the houses through, the way a harper runs a tuning: the Maguires of Tempo who fed him last week, the O'Conors of Belanagare who will write him down, the Roes of Alderford who are holding the cup. Each name carries its own modulation under his fingers; each is already written. He has made airs for Catholic houses and Protestant houses, for the uaisle and the small gentry, for weddings and for wakes, but he has not, in fifty-one years, made an air for the instrument itself, the thing that has been the man and not been the man. The harp is, in the tradition of the country, the man's voice when the man is silent. He has not given it back its own voice. Marian, he says, and his daughter bends close, cupán dí. She brings the plain whiskey from the buttery. He drinks it. He asks for a second. He cannot swallow it. He gives the cup back to her hand, which is steady. The decision now is not whether but to whom. To the Roes who are at the door; to Marian who is at the elbow; to the instrument. He turns his face toward the foot of the bed where the harp leans. Take the notation, he says to Fanning at the window. The piece is Slán le Ceol. Three-four time, in D minor, with the modulation through F to the closing in D major. The closing in D major. He has heard it for thirty seconds already, the modulation that has not been made before, the lifting at the end that is the door opening outward and not inward. Marian lifts the harp onto the bed across his knees. His left hand finds the bass course; his right hand finds the treble; and the half-hour begins.
THE COMPOSITION
He plays the air through. Fanning writes. He corrects. He plays it through again. Fanning writes. The standard Carolan method, the apprentice and the master, the notation taken down as the air comes out of the strings, the way he was taught at twenty-one. By Fanning's later deposition to Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, the composition takes about thirty-five minutes. The closing-coda is the modulation no harper had heard before. He plays the piece through twice complete. At twelve o'clock he sets the harp aside. He drinks half of a third small cup at one. He talks quietly with Marian and Madam Roe through the early afternoon. He dies at about three.
THE WAKE
The news goes out from Alderford by horse and by foot. In the wake-tradition of the country, between the twenty-fifth of March and the twenty-ninth, sixty harpers and pipers come in across the bog roads from every county he ever played in, the largest gathering of Irish-traditional musicians of the eighteenth century. They drink in the kitchen and they play in the upstairs room where the harp still leans at the foot of the bed. Each plays an air of his composition under his name; each is the name of a house. Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, his near-neighbour, writes the Memoirs of Carolan within ten years and sets down the deathbed scene for the record. Mary MacDermott Roe, who gave him his apprenticeship at twenty-one and saw him out at sixty-seven, walks behind the coffin to the Kilronan churchyard above the lake, where he is buried in the unmarked plot of her family. By his own instruction the harp goes into the ground with him. The tradition holds that the family later dug it up for the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration in 1788; the harp in the Castle Otway collection in the National Museum of Ireland is said to be it, though the provenance has never been formally proved.
THE AIR AFTER THE HARPER
Edward Bunting, in 1792 a young organist sent to take down the airs of the last harpers at the Belfast Harp Festival, transcribed Slán le Ceol from Denis O'Hampsey, the last of the men who had heard Carolan play, and printed it in his General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland in 1796. From that page it has not left the repertoire. Joan Rimmer and Ann Heymann, the careful modern scholars of the Irish harp, place it among the finest of the late airs. It is the closing-piece of every modern Irish-harp concert. It is the audition-piece for the harp scholarship at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The closing modulation, by every harper who has played it, is the part the audience holds its breath through.
The lintels Carolan wrote his airs for are mostly gone now. The Penal Laws of 1695-1829 set out to dismantle the public Catholic and Gaelic identity of the Irish, and the great houses of the uaisle fell, one by one, to confiscation, debt, and emigration. The names of the houses went when the houses went, as he had said they would. The airs stayed. And among them, written in the last half-hour of his life for the instrument that had been his voice for fifty-one years, the one air whose name is not the name of a house: the air the audience, two hundred and ninety years on, still holds its breath through, in three-four time, modulating through F to a closing in D major.
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