Popular music plays in early Peterborough
Local journalist James McCarroll shared his love of O’Carolan and Rossini
It seems strange to put the names of Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) and Turlough O’Carolan (16701738) together. Still, their fame as composers united them despite their different nationalities, time periods, skills, and outputs. For me, however, they come together through the mind and the public performances of a young Irishman, James McCarroll (1814-92), who became the most important and able of Peterborough’s newspaper editors and writers in the 1840s. My biography of McCarroll will be published in January 2019 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Culture often travels along neglected pathways in a remote northern colony like Canada, and the writing of James McCarroll provides one such interesting byway. Besides being a writer, editor and poet, he was an accomplished musician who performed on his flute in many places across what we now call Ontario.
Rossini and O’Carolan were masters of melody. Rossini was one of the most famous of the 19th-century Italian composers of opera, a richly talented and egotistical bon vivant who lived in Paris in his later years and held rather famous musical soirees at his home. By contrast, O’Carolan (or “Carolan” as McCarroll knew him) was the best known of the early “harpers” of Ireland. He was a blind troupadour who carried his flute, Irish harp, and dulcimer with him as he travelled on horseback from great house to great house, from community to community, in rural Connaught. He was a musical pioneer who mostly performed alone. The county of Leitrim, which is a part of Connaught, was home to both Carolan and McCarroll.
I did not know, until quite late in my research into James McCarroll’s life, that he loved ‘the Italian school’ of the 19th
century, preferring “the soft, dreamy echoes of balmy, darkeyed Italy” to the popular German offerings. In that spirit he wrote in Watson’s Art Journal, “I am no stranger to the melodic charms of Mozart, Schubert and Bartholdy [Felix Mendelssshon], but I am still inclined to the opinion that not one of them has ever sympathized with pure and simple melody so largely as Rossini, Bellini or Donizetti.”
I also didn’t know much about Rossini, let alone O’Carolan, when I began to research James McCarroll’s musical favorites. Opera was hugely popular in the nineteenth century and, as afficiandos know, Rossini was a prolific composer whose successes included The Barber of Seville, William Tell (with its extraordinary overture), Tancredi, and Cinderella. Later in Paris he favoured shorter but very melodic pieces which he gathered in volumes he called his Peches de Viellesse (‘Sins of Old Age’). I suspect that McCarroll played some of these along a Rossini aria or two when he performed in public in places like Toronto and Hamilton in the 1860s.
Carolan’s music has been played and recorded in recent
years by leading Celtic groups like The Dubliners and The Chieftains, and soloists like James Galway. In his time he played from memory and without a written score. However, admiring contemporaries wrote scores for his songs and thus they have endured. Check out U-Tube and you will find several to listen to. Among them (he wrote over 200 pieces) are Carolan’s Dream, Carolan’s Concerto, Sheebeg and Sheemore, Captain Kane, Blind Mary, and Fanny Power.
But all this is a lead-in to a magical set of experiences for me on Sept. 22. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that, on that very day, I would be able to attend a LAMP production of a Rossini opera in the afternoon in Lunenburg and an evening of Turlough O’Carolan’s delicate compositions in Mahone Bay. I immediately rearranged my schedule. The Canada of today is an amazing place, increasingly attuned to a widening range of cultural opportunities.
The Rossini opera, The Italian Girl in Algiers, (L’Italiana in Algeri) was part of LAMP’s nowannual celebration of Rossini’s music in Lunenburg. An institution still in its infancy LAMP (the Lunenburg Academy of Music
Performance, is dedicated to high-level musical execution. In fact, despite inevitable monetary challenges, it has thus far been able to deliver on its promises. One of LAMP’s goals under Artistic Director Bert Wathen is to make Lunenburg a centre for Rossini studies and performance in North America.
This year LAMP offered an Opening Night Gala of famous Rossini arias sung by the young artists of the Rossini Academy. A second evening, called Rossini in Paris reconstructed one of his soirees while drawing on pieces from His Sins of Old Age. That evening included Walter Delahunt as Camille Saint-Saens performing his famous Danse Macabre. I attended the soiree and enjoyed both the musical performances and Bill Carr’s dramatic impersonation of the great man himself.
The opera was sung rather than acted though there was a modicum of costuming and movement in LAMP’s limited performance space. I found most of the singing by the young cast exhilarating. LAMP’s facilities are located on the third floor of the old Lunenburg Academy, one of the town’s most famous landmarks.
That evening we drove to Saint John’s Lutheran Church in Mahone Bay (one of the famous three churches there) for the Turlough O’Carolan concert. It was sparcely attended, but highly educational. Billed as “Harp & Soul,” it was performed by Saeed (Foroughi) as part of his Nova Scotia tour. Saeed’s musicianship is outstanding. He had been in Canada for 30 years, performing Persian music (with The Rumi Ensemble) and has more recently taken up the Celtic legacy of Turlough O’Carolan. His skill on the Irish flute, the harp, and the hammer dulcimer helped the audience to appreciate Carolan’s musicianship and gentle versatility. Saeed shared with us his own heart-felt appreciation of Carolan’s melancholy strains.
What a rare musical day for me. I came away having enriched my sense of James McCarroll’s musical background and having enjoyed the opportunity to muse upon the melodic achievements of both Rossini and Carolan. A number of commentators would later call McCarroll “a Mozart of the backwoods.”
When McCarroll and his father first arrived in Upper Canada from County Leitrim in 1831, they waited a year before trying to set up a music school in the Cobourg area. There was then no newspaper in Peterborough and there were likely few responses. Imagine the thinness of the population then. Their advertisement, which appeared in the Cobourg Star in February 1832, promised “the sublime studies of such spirits as Carolin [sic], Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, etc.” McCarroll’s Irish roots and early musical training are reflected in this list. Predictably, the music school did not take hold for lack of customers. But father and son proudly promised to teach the music of their countryman, Turlough Carolan, to Upper-Canadian settlers within their reach. They knew him to be an important composer whose work needed to be celebrated and passed on. McCarroll would later add Rossini to his special list.