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Joyce's Grand Operoar: Opera in "Finnegans Wake"
Matthew J. C. Hodgart and Ruth Bauerle
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, I997 357 pages, $49.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)
Even the casual reader of James Joyce - if such a being exists- must be struck by his frequent mentioning of music, particularly vocal music. In Dubliners, Joyce's first major publication, recognizing those references is sometimes crucial to understanding the stories gathered there. In "Clay," for example, knowing the words of the omitted verse of"I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls" allows a reader further insight into the character who mistakenly repeats the first verse. Likewise, the events of "The Boarding House" parallel some of the music hall songs sung by the landlady's daughter, and "The Dead" is fairly saturated with references to opera and singing. As Joyce's style became increasingly rarified, he continued to make musical allusions, nowhere more than in his daunting final novel, Finnegans Wake, the culmination of some seventeen years' work (1922-39).
The constant presence of music in Joyce's fiction grows out of his own love of singing. A member of a highly musical family (his parents were both distinguished amateur singers), Joyce was by all accounts a very talented performer himself. He studied voice seriously and was encouraged by professional musicians to make music his career. Joyce competed in the 1904 Feis Ceoil, an annual music festival in Dublin, and was, according to his biographer Richard Ellmann, assured of the gold medal until he refused to take part in the required sightreading portion of the event. The judge, Luigi Denza, urged Joyce to devote himself to singing, and Benedetto Palmieri, whom Ellmann calls the best voice teacher in Dublin, offered the young tenor three years of free study in return for a percentage of his earnings over the next ten years.l The winner of the tenor division the previous year was John McCormack, who was acquainted with Joyce and apparently encouraged him to pursue music as well.
The intersection of Joyce's love of music and his writing has often been commented on. One of the first critics to do so at any length was the late Matthew J. C. Hodgart, one of the authors of this volume. In 1959, with Mabel Worthington,...