Thomas Moore (28 May 1779-25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies.
Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or squib, writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
Married to a Protestant actress and hailed as Anacreon Moore after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore did not profess religious piety. Yet in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation Moore was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics.
Longer prose works reveal more radical sympathies. The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald depicts the United Irish leader as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform.
Complementing Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Memoirs of Captain Rock is a saga, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of Whiteboyism.
Today, however, Moore is remembered almost alone either for his Irish Melodies, typically The Minstrel Boy and The Last Rose of Summer or, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the loss of the memoirs of his friend Lord Byron.
More information: Poetry Foundation
Thomas Moore was born to Anastasia Codd from Wexford and John Moore from Kerry over his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin, He had two younger sisters, Kate and Ellen.
Moore showed an early interest in music and performance, staging musical plays with his friends and entertaining hope of being an actor.
In Dublin he attended Samuel Whyte's co-educational English grammar school, where he was schooled in Latin and Greek and became fluent in French and Italian. By age fourteen he had had one of his poems published in a new literary magazine called the Anthologia Hibernica, Irish Anthology.
Samuel Whyte had taught Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish playwright and English Whig politician, of whom Moore later was to write a biography.
In the early years of his career, Moore's work was largely generic, and had he died at this point he would likely not have been considered an Irish poet.
From 1806 to 1807, Moore dramatically changed his style of writing and focus. Following a request by the publishers James and William Power, he wrote lyrics to a series of Irish tunes in the manner of Haydn's settings of British folksongs, with Sir John Andrew Stevenson as arranger of the music.
The principal source for the tunes was Edward Bunting's A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1797) to which Moore had been introduced at Trinity by Edward Hudson. The Melodies were published in ten volumes, together with a supplement, over 26 years between 1808 and 1834. The musical arrangements of the last volumes, following Stevenson's death in 1833, were by Henry Bishop.
More information: All Poetry
The Melodies were an immediate success, The Last Rose of Summer, The Minstrel Boy, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms and Oft in the Stilly Night becoming immensely popular. There were parodies in England, but translations into German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and French, and settings by Hector Berlioz guaranteed a large European audience. In the United States, The Last Rose of Summer alone sold more than a million copies.
Byron said he knew them all by rote and by heart; setting them above epics and Moore above all other poets for his peculiarity of talent, or rather talents, -poetry, music, voice, all his own-. They were also praised by Sir Walter Scott who conceded that neither he nor Byron could attain Moore's power of adapting words to music.
Moore was in no doubt that the Irish Melodies would be the only work of my pen […] whose fame, thanks to the sweet music in which it is embalmed, may boast a chance of prolonging its existence to a day much beyond our own.
The ultra-Tory The Anti-Jacobin Review, Monthly Political and Literary Censor discerned in Moore's Melodies something more than innocuous drawing-room ballads: several of them were composed in a very disordered state of society, if not in open rebellion. They are the melancholy ravings of the disappointed rebel, or his ill-educated offspring.
Moore was providing texts to what he described as our national music, and his lyrics did often reflect an unmistakable intimation of dispossession and loss in the music itself.
In the late 1840s, and as the catastrophe of the Great Famine overtook Ireland, Moore's powers began to fail. He was reduced ultimately to senility, which came suddenly in December 1849.
Moore died on February 25, 1852, preceded by all his children and by most of his friends and companions.
More information: Biblioteca Virtual Universal
Humility, that low, sweet root,
from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
Thomas Moore
No comments:
Post a Comment