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A LOYS F LEISCHMANN ' S B ALLET M USIC
BY
S ÉAMAS DE B ARRA (1998)
From the outset Aloys Fleischmann's ambition as a composer was to find an authentic
voice for aspects of the Irish experience which had never before been articulated in music.
Strongly critical however of the narrow parochialism that bedevilled so much of Irish life,
including Irish musical life, in the years following independence, he was also concerned to
compose out of an understanding of what it meant to be an Irish composer in a larger
European context. He reconciled these aims in a deeply imaginative musical response to the
country's manifold literary heritage and, initially, in the successful evolution of an idiom
which, allowing the accent of traditional music to sound naturally, is yet sophisticated
enough to sustain complex structures. His early works, with their unforced and spacious
accommodation of dignified nationalist sentiment, were certainly of sufficient resonance
and persuasiveness to bring him to national prominence as a composer of serious intent and
significant achievement. Fleischmann was, consequently, a natural choice to receive in 1944
a commission for a work to celebrate the Thomas Davis centenary, and in response he
produced what is arguably one of his finest compositions. It was also the occasion of his
first collaboration with Joan Denise Moriarty.
The commissioned work, a setting of Thomas Davis' patriotic poem Clare's Dragoons,
and based on the vigorous martial air traditionally associated with it, was written for
baritone solo, chorus, orchestra and, curiously, war pipes. This unusual and original addition
to otherwise standard performing forces is due to his having seen Joan Denise Moriarty, a
champion piper, hold her audience in thrall by a display of virtuosity at a concert of Gaelic
music held at University College Cork in July 1938. Fleischmann was sufficiently
impressed that now, seven years later, he invited Miss Moriarty to perform his new work
which had developed around the idea of an integral part for her instrument. In agreeing, so
the story goes, she seized the opportunity to overcome one of her greatest handicaps – the
difficulty of providing adequate music for the ballet group she had been training. There and
then she struck a bargain: ‘I will,’ she told him, ‘if your orchestra will play for my ballets’.1
The first performance of Clare's Dragoon's in Dublin in September 1945 took place
before an invited audience consisting of the President, Taoiseach, cabinet, Senate, Dáil,
judiciary and civil service. Fleischmann described it as being ‘probably the most Philistine
audience ever assembled in Dublin, most of whom had never been at an orchestral concert
before, so that a less receptive audience could hardly be imagined.’2 The performance in
Cork shortly afterwards however was a triumphant success, the march of the piper through
the auditorium to the platform to join the other performers at the climactic final restatement
of the tune being a genuine coup de theatre. In due course the Cork Ballet Group, as it was
now called, presented its first production with the assistance of the Cork Symphony
Orchestra under Aloys Fleischmann. This was in June 1947, for one night only, but it was
the beginning of an association that was to last for almost fifty years. For Aloys
Fleischmann the collaboration with Joan Denise Moriarty, both in establishing amateur
ballet in Cork and subsequently in setting up the professional companies, was
unquestionably a major creative stimulus and the works he wrote for the Cork company
were to occupy his principal compositional energies for the next decade.
For a composer whose declared aim was ‘to delve into the hidden Ireland, and to create
an idiom which would express in music some of the essence of this rich untapped literary
tradition’,3 this collaboration presented a unique opportunity to bring music into direct
contact with the root of things Irish, as embodied in the country's myths, legends and folk
tales, by presenting them in ballet form. For nationalist composers the immediate appeal of
the theatre had always been very attractive, and opera was the great vehicle for nationalism
in music in the nineteenth century. In this country, however, where the chances of having an
opera produced were remote, even if a composer was foolhardy enough to write one, the
chances of having a ballet produced were, up to now, virtually non-existent. But, unlikely as
it must have seemed, the scarcely imaginable possibility of Cork having a ballet company of
its own had become a reality due to the presence in the city of this remarkable woman.
Fleischmann wrote five ballets for Joan Denise Moriarty, and the direct exploration of
various aspects of the Irish experience in three of the four he composed for the Cork
company culminated in his final ballet score, the Táin, written for the Irish Ballet Company
in 1981. Based on the Táin Bó Cuailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley], the twelfth century
account of the exploits of Cuchulainn and Queen Medb, it was in many ways the climax of
his composing career. Not only was it his most ambitious score in terms of length and
organisation, but the opportunity to engage the greatest of the ancient sagas in this way
enabled him to produce a late triumphant example of his personal response to the problem
of shaping a distinctly Irish utterance.
Apart from compositional considerations, Fleischmann's involvement with the emergent
ballet group was completely consonant with his decision to put his energies at the service of
the cultural life of Cork on returning to the city in 1934 to fill the vacant chair of music at
University College Cork. This was the local focus of his concern for the musical and
cultural well-being of the country as a whole, and it had his unreserved commitment. That
the standard of performance and production by the Cork Symphony Orchestra and the Cork
Ballet Group might be variable he accepted as inevitable in any such amateur enterprise. If,
in his support for and defence of these and other provincial cultural activities, he sometimes
appeared vulnerable to the charge of being insufficiently discriminating it is because for him
and for his committed contemporaries, in attempting to overcome the country's pervasive
cultural inertia, any enterprise, no matter how tentative, was clearly better than nothing. ‘No
people who are trying to do anything at all should meet with mere discouragement in this
land of ruin and weed’, wrote Micheál Mac Liammóir in his diary for 1955.4 Fleischmann
would have agreed, and realising fully the fragility of such endeavours, he was fiercely
protective. Dependant on local talent and local resources, both he and Joan Denise Moriarty
were prepared to acknowledge the necessity of small beginnings. Nevertheless, with the
Cork Symphony Orchestra in its second decade, the Cork Orchestral Society only slightly
younger, a vital and expanding music department at the university and now the Cork Ballet
Group, all locally rooted but outward looking, it must have seemed in 1947 that the
prospects for the musical life of the city were good.
It was a sweet irony too that Cork, whose philistine attitude to the ballet had been
affectionately satirised by Seán Ó Faoláin in his play She Had to Do Something, should
now, of all things, boast a ballet company of its own. Ó Faoláin's play, produced at the
Abbey Theatre in 1939 and based on a visit of the Anna Pavlova Ballet Company to the city
in 1931 ‘which resulted in denunciations from several pulpits, empty houses, and the
frustration of a small minority who hailed this sudden bonanza in an otherwise barren
season’,5 may have held Cork up to gentle ridicule for the amusement of Dublin audiences,
but it now appeared as if Cork would have the last laugh.
The response to the first production was so enthusiastic that Moriarty and Fleischmann
were encouraged to present a full week of ballet the following summer. The advance
publicity sounds a distinct note of justifiable pride: ‘For the first time in the history of Cork
Theatre a local company will give a series of ballet performances with full symphony
orchestra and choir, lavishly dressed and staged’, and goes on roundly to assert that ‘no
similar ambitious venture has ever been staged in this country’. As well as a revival of
Elizabeth Maconchy's Puck Fair, first performed in Dublin in 1941 with choreography by
Cepta Cullen, and now re-choreographed by Joan Denise Moriarty, the programme also
included a new ballet specially written for this production by Fleischmann himself. The
Golden Bell of Ko, the first of the Fleischmann ballet scores, is also curiously one of the
very few works of his not in some way related to specifically Irish subject matter, based as it
is on a Chinese legend.
It is clear from this score that Fleischmann had a natural flair for the ballet: the music
shows a talent for the vivid and colourful depiction of character and incident, and a precise,
well focused response to the demands of the scenario, from quirky humour to tender pathos.
He made no concessions to the amateur status of either the dancers or the orchestra, and it is
a difficult score both in the elusive irregularities of its phrase structure and in the technical
demands of its orchestration. Nor did he make any concessions to what would undoubtedly
have been an inexperienced audience still unfamiliar with Bartok and Stravinsky. The often
angular melodic lines, the pungent harmonies and ambivalent tonality, while tame today,
must have sounded startling in Cork in 1948. It proved to be Fleischmann's most popular
ballet however, and was twice revived by the company, first in 1953 and subsequently in
1973 when it was also presented in Dublin.
Fleischmann composed his second ballet score, An Cóitín Dearg [The Red Petticoat], in
1950-51 to a scenario by Micheál Mac Liammóir, who also designed the décor and the
costumes for the first production. The initial idea for this ballet goes back at least to 1942
when Mac Liammóir published the greater part of the scenario – the conclusion was
teasingly omitted – in the September issue of The Bell for that year. Under the title ‘Design
for a Ballet’ it was presented as work in progress, together with a commentary, in the form
of letters to Mac Liammóir, from Cepta Cullen who was to choreograph it, and from
Michael Bowles who was to compose the music.6 But this particular version never appears
to have been written. Fleischmann, who subscribed to The Bell and was an occasional
contributor, had obviously read and liked the scenario and corresponded with Mac
Liammóir as early as 1946 with a view to composing a score himself. The ballet had already
been produced: Mac Liammóir refers to an existing score by Tyrell Pine, although he makes
no allusion at all to any music by Michael Bowles. Nevertheless, he tells Fleischmann to
‘please go ahead’, and adds ‘I look forward so much to hearing your music and am very
proud to think that an idea of mine should make you want to write it’.7 Although Mac
Liammóir evidently had no objection to two versions, Fleischmann shelved the project for
the time being.
Mac Liammóir, who clearly held Fleischmann's abilities as a composer in high esteem,
not only welcomed the idea of their collaboration but saw no reason why it should
necessarily be restricted to the ballet. Fleischmann recounted to the present writer how Mac
Liammóir and Hilton Edwards invited him to dinner around this time and how, as the
climax of the evening, Mac Liammóir produced a copy of his play Diarmuid agus Gráinne
with the suggestion that Fleischmann consider it as the basis for an opera. The fly-leaf was
ceremoniously inscribed: ‘Dom' charaid Aloys Fleischmann le dóchas! Micheál Mac
Liammóir, Baile Atha Cliatha, 1946’ [to my friend Aloys Fleischmann, with hope! Micheál
Mac Liammóir, Dublin, 1946], and the book duly presented. But Fleischmann demurred and
the opera was never written. In fact there is no evidence that he ever seriously entertained
the idea. It is true that the legend of Diarmuid and Gráinne may be too uncomfortably close
to that of Tristan and Isolde to encourage the attentions of a prospective composer, but the
very poor chances of production were, in all likelihood, the real deterrent. The ballet
however was written, a production being guaranteed, and was presented as part of the
programme for the Cork Ballet Group's fourth season in May 1951.
The fact that the first and third acts are set in Connemara and the second in New York
gave Fleischmann the rare opportunity pointedly to contrast a popular style, sophisticated
and cosmopolitan, with a style based on the idioms of folk music. Briefly, Colm and Nora,
the hero and heroine, are frustrated in the tentative beginnings for their love for one another.
Lacking the courage to confront their circumstances, Nora leaves for New York and Colm,
dejected, follows her. Although enjoying material success in this shallow and affluent
milieu they are however unhappy, and they return home. Clothed in their elegant finery,
they meet again and, significantly, fail to recognise one another; but Colm changes back
into his báinín, Nora into her red petticoat, and as Mac Liammóir puts it: ‘nuair a fhilleas
siad ar an tsimplíoch is dual dóibh annsin aithníonn siad a chéile agus an grá atá eatorra
arís’8 [when they return to the simplicity that is natural to them they then recognise one
another again and the love that is between them]. The old story, in the other words, of
gaining the world and losing your soul.
Apart from the many splendid opportunities it afforded the composer, this scenario must
have been particularly resonant for Fleischmann whose entire philosophy of the value,
indeed the necessity, of native rootedness it reflects. This intense sense of personal
rootedness shaped the evolution of his distinctive style, and it informs the outer acts of An
Cóitín Dearg in their confident depiction of the imaginative and intellectual conditions
necessary, not to be sure for an idyllic, but for an authentic life. Jazz, on the other hand, as
many of his students could testify, represented decadence, and in the central act of the ballet
he unabashedly employs popular idioms to convey the empty lives of those for whom there
is ‘nothing in the world but their money and their pleasures’.9 Over-simple equations
perhaps and if, together with others made in this work, they appear today to be in some
respects questionable, there is no doubt that for Fleischmann, as his career demonstrates,
they were fundamentally valid.
The Irish Independent, writing that ‘the most successful feature of the ballet was Aloys
Fleischmann's attractive score’, nevertheless thought the popular idiom a little stiffly
handled and suggested that ‘perhaps his Jazz might be described as academic ragtime.’
Reading this unlikely reference to jazz from the austere pen of Aloys Fleischmann evidently
startled some people, among them Alfred O'Rahilly, President of UCC, who, not having
seen the ballet, was unaware of the ironic context. His assistant, conveying his
congratulations on the success of the production, adds: ‘The President says that he is
delighted that, according to the Irish Independent, you are coming more close to the level of
his musical appreciation. He says, however, that he does not believe it.’10
It is a measure of the confidence that Fleischmann and Moriarty had in the standards
attained by the Cork Ballet Company (as it had become in 1954), and in the role it now
played in Irish cultural life, that they felt it appropriate to issue an invitation to the President
of Ireland to attend the 1955 season. The invitation was accepted and Seán T. O'Kelly and
his wife travelled to Cork for a Gala Performance. The main attraction was undoubtedly the
first complete staging in Cork of Coppélia, but the most significant was the premier of
Fleischmann's new ballet Macha Ruadh [Red(-haired) Macha].
In the opinion of the press this was the most memorable ballet season to date, and Macha
Ruadh was singled out as the most successful new work yet presented. Fleischmann's score,
with its brash, clashing sounds, as of ancient weaponry, is particularly evocative of the
legendary past in which the ballet is set, and is a splendid example of the noble, heroic
mode he excelled in, even if he later allowed himself to view the work as a sort of
preliminary sketch for the Táin.11
The story of the warrior queen who vanquished her enemies and established Eamain
Macha, seat of the High Kings and ancient capital of Ireland for six hundred years is a
fascinating choice of subject. Considering the focus of national attention presidential
patronage would bring and the timely opportunity this offered for a significant public
statement, one is increasingly persuaded that the sub-text of Macha Ruadh amounts to
something like a manifesto. Authorship of the scenario is uncredited but it was probably
written by Fleischmann and Moriarty in collaboration and the fact that they decided on and
adapted this particular tale, relatively obscure, indeed unmentioned in the more popular
surveys of Gaelic literature and generally omitted from the anthologies of Gaelic legends,12
is surely not fortuitous. A courageous woman, striving against the odds, who, ultimately
victorious through sheer force of personality, establishes a great tradition! Even if one
cannot say with certainty that this was deliberate and conscious self-mythologising it is
unlikely that a discerning audience could have failed to draw the parallel, especially as Joan
Denise Moriarty herself danced the title role. At the end of the ballet as Cimbáeth, Macha's
triumphant adversary, approaches to slay her, he suddenly grows irresolute and falters,
quelled by her beauty and noble bearing. Kneeling, he submits completely and pays homage
to her as his queen. On one level at least, I suggest, this is a confident symbolic projection
beyond present struggles to the eventual recognition of the value of Fleischmann and
Moriarty's work, and the acceptance of the ballet as a vital and intrinsic part of the cultural
life of the country.
Acknowledging the cynics, the preface to the programme booklet for the Gala
Performance offers a summing up of this moment of confident stock-taking: ‘Any nation
working with its heritage of music and dance forms can make a contribution to the art of
ballet, and while it may be easy to dismiss with a smile Ireland's chances of ever influencing
this art, let us realise at least that in this production of Macha Ruadh, music and movement,
costuming and decor have been conceived and wedded together to tell a story that is taken
from the traditional history of our country, and that those responsible for the creation and
execution of this ballet and its music are all men and women of Ireland.’13
Fleischmann, now also director of the Cork International Choral Festival which had been
founded in 1954, had the idea of introducing the folk dances of different countries to vary
the festival's otherwise choral programmes. Experimenting with this attractive juxtaposition,
which proved very popular with audiences, he composed a short choral dance suite in 1956
to unite Irish traditional dancing with choral singing. Based on the rhythms of jig, reel and
hornpipe, Na Tri Captaeni Loinge [The Three Sea Captains] for unaccompanied choir was
sung at that year's festival by Cór Cois Laoi, conducted by Pilib O Laoighre, and danced by
the Lehane sisters. In his final score for the Cork Ballet Company he developed this idea
further. Bata na bPlanndála [The Planting Stick], also described as a choral dance suite, and
scored for mixed-voice choir and chamber ensemble of flute, harp, percussion and string
quartet, was written for the Folk Dance Group, a division of the Cork Ballet Company
which specialised in the steps and patters of Irish dancing. It is an imaginative recreation of
one of the occupational mime dances common in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and is based on the rhythmic movements used while planting potatoes with a
special stick. There is no narrative structure: Bata na bPlanndála simply presents scenes of
the work in the fields and the return home at the end of the day.
The new work was given at the 1957 Festival, again by Cór Cois Laoi, and this time
conducted by Fleischmann himself. Although slight, it is an attractive score in which there
is a direct, uncomplicated and wholly appropriate return to folk music as a source of
inspiration. Fleischmann discovered and uses one authentic planting-stick tune, and while
the rest of the melodic material is original it is modelled on the patters of folk song. He
handles and develops this material with great skill, especially in construction transitions and
shaping the climaxes, and the manner in which he avoids the pitfalls of over-sophistication
and maintains the work's essential simplicity, without sacrificing interest, is remarkably
ingenious.
There is a gap of more than twenty years between Bata na bPlanndála and Fleischmann's
next, and final, ballet score. In the meantime, after one unsuccessful attempt at establishing
a professional company, the Irish Ballet Company had been formed, for which Joan Denise
Moriarty had created the enormously successful Playboy of the Western World in 1978.
While this was playing to great acclaim in London and New York she was planning the
company's next big venture: a ballet version of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, for which Aloys
Fleischmann was to compose the music.
Like many of his contemporaries Fleischmann, a composer of an essentially conservative
cast of mind, experienced a sort of crisis of artistic conscience around the middle decades of
the century. Unsympathetic to the more outlandish developments of the avant garde, he
nevertheless became increasingly defensive about his own music, about his early works in
particular, and it is not unlikely that the change in his style evident from the seventies
onward is due, partly at least, to intimidation together with a feeling that he was behind the
times. After all, criticism and commentary was almost entirely and favourably preoccupied
with serialism, integral-serialism, aleatoricism, electronic music, and so on. Greater figures
than Fleischmann, Copland comes to mind, began to question themselves under this
intellectual barrage. Nevertheless the holding centre of his artistic personality was secure,
occasionally self-deprecating though he might be, and there was a clear limit to how much
recent technical innovation it could, or needed to, accommodate.
Before the premier of the Táin however he took the unprecedented step of publishing an
apologia of sorts, as if to forestall the kind of criticism he expected the score to provoke.
‘Over the past few years it has become clear that there is one kind of music which is almost
certain to evoke an enthusiastic response, namely music written in an idiom which is at first
hearing virtually incomprehensible. Though idiom is important, one would have thought
that the more vital factors, factors needing examination and assessment, would be the range,
variety and depth of the ideas, the validity of the structures, and above all, whatever the
idiom, whether the music speaks with a distinctive voice’.14 This is at once a plea for
relevant appraisal and a tacit acknowledgement that he is unlikely to get it. Yet one of the
most remarkable features of the Táin, which accommodates his expanded idiom yet
astonishingly allows the seamless incorporation of much of the earlier Macha Ruadh, is its
demonstration of the consistency of Fleischmann's distinctive voice, and in this it mirrors
the consistency of purpose underlying his entire career.
The Táin was staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October 1981 and was an
outstanding success. It is not that the reviewers considered it flawless, but the achievement
was generously acknowledged and it was regretted that there were no immediate plans to
stage the work outside the country. In the light of subsequent developments the opinion of
the Daily Telegraph that ‘the ballet has already established itself as the finest achievement
of the Irish Ballet Company’, and that ‘it should take its place permanently in the
repertoire’15 sounds a little hollow, but it was unquestionably a fitting climax to the long
collaboration between composer and choreographer.
Unfortunately circumstances prevented Joan Denise Moriarty from bequeathing the
tradition of dance she strove to create and struggled hard to maintain. The victory of Macha
Ruadh was not, alas, to be hers, whatever triumphs there were in the course of the battle. In
Fleischmann's case most of the institutions he founded and fostered still exist and, above all
of course, he left the enduring legacy of his compositions. It is a sobering thought however
that forty years and more ago Cork could see the creation and production of a series of
ballets that could not now be staged anywhere in the country. Apart from anything else, this
means that, there being no chance of experiencing the music in the context for which it was
written, a final assessment of the effectiveness of Fleischmann's contribution to the ballet is
impossible, at least for the time being. It is sad to think that of so much work so little should
endure. Something of great value has been lost, and one concludes this survey realising, if
one did not realise it before, just what an impoverishment were the deaths of Joan Denise
Moriarty and Aloys Fleischmann.
This essay was first published in Joan Denise Moriarty: Founder of Irish National Ballet, ed.
Ruth Fleischmann, Cork (Mercier Press) 1998
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9
This account is taken from Joseph Gilmore, ‘The Cork Ballet Company’, Threshold, Vol.1, Autumn 1957.
Aloys Fleischmann, typescript on Ballet in Cork, pp. 14-15, The Fleischmann Papers, University College Cork
Archive.
Aloys Fleischmann: script for radio broadcast (?), MS, n.d. (probably for weekly series Composers at Work
broadcast by Radio Eireann in 1957)
Micheál Mac Liammóir, Each Actor On His Ass, London, 1961, p. 11.
Aloys Fleischmann, ‘Seán O Faoláin – A Personal Memoir’, The Cork Review, Seán Dunne ed., Cork 1991, p.
93.
Micheál Mac Liammóir et al.: ‘Design for a Ballet’, The Bell, Vol.4 No.6, September 1942, pp. 394-403.
Letter from Micheál Mac Liammóir to Aloys Fleischmann, 15 July, 1946, The Fleischmann Papers, UCC
Archive.
From the programme booklet for the first performance.
Micheál Mac Liammóir, ‘Design for a Ballet’, The Bell, Vol.4 No.6, September 1942, p. 339.
10
Letter from Kathleen O'Flaherty, assistant to the President of UCC, to Aloys Fleischmann, 1 June, 1951 (The
Fleischmann Papers, UCC Archive).
11
Aloys Fleischmann: ‘Ballet in Cork’, Music Ireland, Vol.2, No.10, November 1987, p. 15.
12
The legend is not discussed, for example, either by Douglas Hyde or Aodh de Blácam, and is not included in
the collections of P.W. Joyce or Lady Gregory.
13
14
15
This Preface is unsigned, but it is not unlikely that Fleischmann himself is the author.
Aloys Fleischmann, ‘On Writing Music for Ballet’, Soundpost, No.4, October/November 1981, p. 11.
Fernau Hall: ‘Dublin Festival – The Táin’, Daily Telegraph, 8 October 1981.