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.
It is a quarter past eleven on the morning of the twenty-fifth of March 1738, in the upstairs guest-bedroom of Alderford House on the south shore of Lough Meelagh in north County Roscommon, in pale March light off the lake. He is sixty-seven years old. He is Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, born at Nobber in County Meath in 1670 to John O'Carolan and a Brigid Ó Treasaigh, blind from eighteen (smallpox), apprenticed to the harp at twenty-one under the patronage of Mary MacDermott Roe (the lady whose house he is, this morning, dying in), an itinerant harper-composer of the Irish-Gaelic harp tradition for the past forty-six years.
He is in the white linen shift of an invalid, propped on three bolsters of the Madam Roe (the lady's grandmother) collection, with the heavy carved-oak harp of his old apprenticeship leaning against the foot of the bed (the harp made for him in 1693 by the harp-maker Cormac Ó Conghaile of Granard, with the thirty-six brass strings of the eighteenth-century Irish low-headed Bunting harp design). His daughter Marian, twenty-four, is at his right elbow. His student-harper Charles Fanning, sixteen, is on a low stool by the window with a sheet of foolscap and a pencil. Mary MacDermott Roe, the lady of the house, sixty-two, is at the door.
He thinks: the Christmas at Letterfian I knew was the last.
He thinks: I have been at Alderford forty-six years on and off. Madam Roe gave me my apprenticeship. Madam Roe will see me out.
He thinks: the harp on the foot of the bed is the harp Cormac made me at twenty-three. The harp is, in the tradition of the country, the instrument of the man and not the man of the instrument.
He thinks: I have made, by Marian's count, between two hundred and two hundred and twenty airs. I have made airs for the Catholic and Protestant houses of Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Cavan, Longford, Meath, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Galway. The airs are the names of the houses. The names of the houses will go when the houses go. The airs will stay.
He thinks: I have not made an air for the harp itself. I have made airs for the Burkes and the MacDermotts and the Powers and the Maguires and the Inchiquins and the O'Conors of Belanagare. I have not made an air for the instrument of the country.
He thinks: I will make one this morning.
He says, by Charles O'Conor's Memoirs of Carolan of 1748 (the primary source written within a decade), to Marian: Marian, bring me a cup. I will drink to the music I have made and to the music I have not made. Cupán dí. Marian brings the cup of plain whiskey from the buttery. He drinks it. He asks for a second. He cannot, this time, swallow it. He gives it back to her.
He says, to Fanning at the window: take the notation. The piece is Slán le Ceol. The form is the air with the closing-coda. Three-four time, in D minor, with the modulation through F to the closing in D major.
Marian lifts the harp onto the bed across his knees. He composes the air in the standard Carolan method (the harper plays the air through, the apprentice writes the notation, the harper corrects). The composition takes, by Fanning's later deposition to O'Conor of Belanagare, about thirty-five minutes. The closing-coda is, by every harper since who has played the piece, the most affecting modulation in the Carolan repertoire.
He plays the piece through twice. He sets the harp aside at twelve o'clock. He drinks half of a third small cup of whiskey at one. He talks quietly with Marian and Madam Roe through the early afternoon. He dies at about three.
Turlough O'Carolan's funeral was held at Alderford House between the twenty-fifth of March and the twenty-ninth of March 1738, in the wake-tradition of the country. By O'Conor's tradition, sixty harpers and pipers attended the wake, the largest gathering of Irish-traditional musicians of the eighteenth century. He is buried in the Kilronan churchyard above Alderford, in the unmarked plot of the MacDermott Roe family. The harp on his bed was buried, by his own instruction in his last words, with him; the tradition of Irish music holds that the harp was, in fact, dug up by the family for a memorial concert at his fiftieth-anniversary commemoration in 1788 and that the harp is the one in the Castle Otway collection today, in the National Museum of Ireland, although the provenance has not been formally proved.
Carolan's Farewell to Music has been continuously in the Irish-traditional harp repertoire since the publication of Edward Bunting's General Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland in 1796 (where Bunting transcribed it from Denis O'Hampsey, the last of the harpers who had heard Carolan play). It is, by every careful musical assessment of the Irish-harp canon (Joan Rimmer, Ann Heymann), one of the finest of the late Carolan compositions, the closing-piece of every modern Irish-harp concert, and the audition-piece for the harp scholarship at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The closing modulation, by every harper, is the part of the piece the audience holds its breath through.