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What counts, said Joyce, is what's behind the words and music of the score, ignore them both and you will find their very essence, which is more than words and music, though you can't define it if you're asked to do so, as new to you, each time you chant, as islands unexplored by Crusoe, a hero long ago created by Irish spirit, just like Joyce, who found the unanticipated, like meaning, may not have a voice. |
| Michael Seidel ("An Irish
Tenor Named Joyce Inspires a Musical") writes about a new musical, "James
Joyce's 'The Dead,'" which opens on October 28th at Playwrights Horizons,
in Clinton (The New York Times, October, 1, 1999). Joyce used to
love to sit down at the piano and play Irish music hall ballads late into
the night. His son Giorgio was a professional baritone and he himself
had a sweet, soaring tenor voice that enchanted French soldiers in Brittany
in 1939 when he sang the "Marseillaise". Otto Luening, who knew him in
Zurich during the First World War, recalls an occasion when Joyce hummed
a tenor aria from Gluck's "Orfeo" and was so absorbed that he went into
a trance in the middle of his rendition. "Word? Music" No:
it's what's behind," thinks Leopold Bloom in "Ulysses". Seidel points
out that love, sadness, ecstasy and all the things that we cannot define
but make us feel good and whole or feel bad and divided are behind the
words and music and are what counts.
© Gershon Hepner
10/1/99
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