"The Italian method" and the "Italian gesture." Musico-literary considerations on W.B. Yeats, Italian music and Italian composers

Abstract

The presence and influence of Italian music were pervasive in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. As Derek B. Scott has suggested, in the first half of the eighteenth century, even Irish traditional music "had been coming to terms with the Italian style" because "the itinerant harpers encountered the popular Italian music in the important Anglo-Irish establishments, especially in Dublin": thus, "it is possible that Turlough O'Carolan, the best known of the harpers, met Geminiani in one of the ascendancy houses where the Italian usually stayed. Certainly, it was in these venues where the harper encountered the music of Corelli and Vivaldi." However, already around the last decade of the eighteenth century, while pondering on "Irish national and cultural identity" and presenting "perhaps the most articulate expression of the identification of Ireland with music among eighteenth-century writers", the Irish antiquarian and intellectual Joseph Cooper Walker ( c. 17 62-1810) reacted precisely against this Italian domination of Dublin's musical taste and gave an indirectly paradigmatic definition of Italian music as a byproduct of English rule: in actual fact, he: firmly blamed the English for the spread to Ireland of Italian music, which 'began to reign with despotic sway' in London, from whence 'its influence spread so wide, that it reached these shores. Our musical state became refined and our sweet melodies and native musicians fell into disrepute'.