Entertainment

The extraordinary story of Pádraig Pearse and the English composer

 Sir Arnold Bax
 Sir Arnold Bax  Sir Arnold Bax

RTÉ Lyric fm

The Lyric Feature: ‘Bax, Ireland and 1916’

Friday 19 February 2016, 7 p.m.

It will come as a surprise to many but one of the first cultural resonses to the Easter Rising came from from an English composer, Arnold Bax.

Tomorrow evening (Friday), Aidan Thomson, a lecturer in Music at Queen’s University, is presenting The Lyric Feature on RTÉ Lyric fm in which he tells us the extraordinary story of Bax, an English composer who in 1916 wrote the only contemporary piece of classical music to commemorate the death of Pádraig Pearse. 

The piece, In Memoriam (originally In Memoriam Pádraig Pearse), will receive its Irish premiere on Friday night, played by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall in Dublin with the event being broadcast live on Lyric fm straight after the end of The Lyric Feature.

Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax, KCVO was born to a well-do-do family in London in 1883.

As a 19-year old, he read WB Yeats’s poem The Wanderings of Oisín, an experience which he claimed revealed to him his own ‘inner Celt’. This would lead to a long relationship between the composer and Ireland. 

He became a regular visitor and sometime resident of both Glencolumcille and Dublin and also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne. 

The high water mark of his Irish association was his work In Memoriam, Pádraig Pearse, written in 1916. 

In the succeeding years Bax's connection with Irish nationalism waned somewhat but he could still be regarded as a controversial appointee to the post of Master of the King's Music in 1941. 

He died in Cork in 1953. 

In Bax, Ireland and 1916, Aidan Thomson and guests will explore Bax's complex and unusual relationship with Ireland, Irishness and Patrick Pearse. Contributors include Roy Foster, Harry White, Graham Parlett, Maria McHale, Conor Caldwell, Gerald Dawe and Lewis Foreman.