Eight Irish Madrigals

The Eight Irish Madrigals come from my Third Bood of Madrigals.  There are seventeen madrigals altogether in the Third Book (for soprano, tenor, bass and lute) and the first nine were written for the Huddersfield Festival.  For a concert in Dublin I made new versions of four of these nine madrigals for two singers and strings (2 violas, cello and bass).  In addition , four new madrigals (from the remaining eight in the Third Bood of Madrigals) were written specially for Dublin where they were given their first performances.

Like my Second Book of Madrigals, the Third sets sonnets by Petrarch, but this time not in the original 14th century Italian but in Irish prose translations by J. M. Synge. I came across Synge's Petrarch poems in the University of Victoria library, part of a remarkable Synge collection. They were edited by one of Canada’s greatest poets Robin Skelton, who died in 1997 and to whose memory these madrigals are dedicated.

Although Synge first became interested in Petrarch when he visited Italy in 1896 it was not until early 1907, after he had met the American poetess Agnes Tobin and read her translations, that he began to work on his own versions. Part of his intention was to translate love poetry into English but the translations also served as an exercise in writing prose poetry of the kind that he could use in his last play Deirdre of the Sorrows which he wrote in parallel with the Petrarch translations. Both the play and the translations were incomplete at the time of his death in March 1909.

Petrarch’s sonnets are traditionally divided into two collections: "in vita di Madonna Laura" and "in morte di Madonna Laura", and Synge’s settings are entirely from the second group. During the time that he was writing them he became aware that he did not have long to live and the opening lines of the first poem show this: "Life is flying from me, not stopping an hour".

Only eight translations from Petrarch appeared in the edition of Synge’s Poems and Translations published two weeks after his death and Synge had given each a title in imitation of Petrarch. With the Collected Works in 1910 four more translations were included and these also had titles, but in a different hand to Synge's. Robin Skelton subsequently added titles to the remaining five, in the spirit of Synge, in his 1961 edition of Synge’s translations.

Setting Synge’s prose poetry was very different from setting Petrarch’s originals - in many ways harder ¬ but always immensely pleasurable, rewarding and challenging. Coincidentally, one sonnet which I set (in Italian) in the Second Book of Madrigals also appears in the Synge collection and therefore in both the Third Book and in the Irish Madrigals. Curiously, this is the penultimate madrigal in all three collections.

Gavin Bryars