Fritz Hart and the `Celtic Twilight' In Australia

Literary Review, Fall, 2001 by Peter Tregear

It took less than six years after the publication of John Millington Synge's last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, for it to appear as an opera, the first of what were to be many attempts to transform the playwright's evocation of Ireland's mythic past into a music drama. (1) This initial transformation was achieved not by an Irishman, however, but by an English-born immigrant to Australia, Fritz Hart (1878-1040). Hart's setting of Deirdre of the Sorrows was composed in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick between 1915 and 1016, and is one of ten extant operatic works by the composer using comparable literary sources. Indeed, within the previous twelve months Hart had already completed operas based upon the texts of Synge's Riders to the Sea and Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire. Most of these works, however, have remained unperformed--a fact troubling to anyone who pauses to consider the sheer magnitude of labour that they represent. Just what drove a composer, geographically so removed from the culture and landscape evoked by the literature he was setting, to devote so much creative energy to both a literature and a genre that, from the perspective of modern Australia, would seem to be predestined for obscurity?

Responding to this question points to aspects of the construction and reception of cultural memory in Australia, a country which because of its curious history and position has had to grapple from the beginning of white settlement with an uncomfortably strong awareness of the various processes of cultural construction, appropriation, and transplantation that have been at play. Perhaps as a response, popularly received cultural history in Australia stands out for its selectiveness. Australian art which appears overly indebted to European sources, for instance, is easily dismissed by that quintessentially Australian put-down, `cultural cringe.' Hart's operas are perhaps a good example as any of this tendency. The scores, settings of European literature in the most European of art forms, sit gathering dust in the archives of the State Library of Victoria without causing pause to ask how and why they came into being. They are relics that have been adjudged to have nothing to say about the modern Australian sensibility.

These settings of Synge, Yeats, and others are easier to comprehend in their Australian context, however, when considered against the literary phenomenon of Celticism that was their inspiration. Celticism was a movement which emerged in the late nineteenth century, and which was in part encouraged by the resurgence of political activism in Ireland. But Hart was no Irish nationalist. Rather, what attracted him was the extent to which these literary works might be read as a particularised expression of an aspect of Celticism that was not nearly so politically or geographically specific--a kind of late-romantic escapism. The `Celtic' literature that appealed to him evoked both universal mythical symbols and a specific manifestation of Arcadia to which to escape, a topos exemplified by Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), which described a place that was as much spiritual as physical. Crucially, this `Celtic' imagination was thought by those who were defining it to be under threat from the modern world and was thus also constructed as an opposition to, if not a threnody for, the spiritual and physical forms of modernity.

The success with which Celtic-inspired literature served as a vehicle for more generalised themes is understandable when we consider just how malleable was the concept of the Celt that lay behind it. Today we might best think of the Celt as the original European `Other,' a race first `invented' by the ancient Greeks, and only much more recently being invoked in Britain and Ireland as a home-grown example of Rousseau's `noble savage.' As the archaeologist Malcolm Chapman has observed, it is not the genetic lineage, culture, race, or language of the Celt which has remained constant over the intervening years, but rather the `continuity of symbolic opposition between a central defining power and its own fringes,' one `sustained, regardless of overwhelming changes in the cultural content involved.' (2) For artists not directly connected to Ireland or associated political causes, the imagined fringe-dwelling Celt could therefore serve as an attractive cipher for the anxiety they felt towards the `mainstream,' however that was defined. So it was that Celticism became characterised at the beginning of the twentieth century as essentially an anti-modernist fantasy about loss, and--by extension--an allegory of the artist him-or-herself who now felt similarly to be on the periphery of the modern world. And so it was that Celticism could also spread far beyond the shores of the Celtic nations.

For a British immigrant to Australia, Celticism must have been doubly attractive, not only a reminder of the physical world left behind, but also an expression of the unavoidable sense of living on the margins, something the `Celtic Fringe' shared with the fringes of the British Empire. Born in Brockley, South London, Hart had grown up in the capital of that Empire and had been thoroughly immersed in the musical life of late-Victorian London, the birthplace of the so-called `English Musical Renaissance.' A chorister at Westminster Abbey, he later enrolled at the Royal College of Music where his student colleagues included Vaughan Williams, Gustav Hoist, John Ireland, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and William Hurlstone. It was work as a professional conductor which had brought him to Melbourne in 1909, and there he found an undoubtedly lively musical culture, but one that was both economically and culturally insecure. Initially, though, Hart was attracted by the opportunities to explore some of the tentative experiments in original Australian literature that were already appearing--similar experiments in music were still some years away. By September 1909 he had already set three ballads by the local poet William Ogilvie for Chorus and Orchestra, and songs to words by Louis Esson soon followed. And in 1912, in an interview to the Melbourne Daily Telegraph he argued the case for supporting music education in Australia by declaring: `It seems to me an extraordinary thing that in these lands, when they get hold of a clever man, the first thing they do is to subscribe to send him Home, and keep him there.' His home in Australia might not have a capital `H,' but it was nonetheless a place with which he had committed to engage positively as a creative artist.