By Ralph P. Locke

A success in 1890s London and New York, the engaging Irish comic opera Shamus O’Brien finally gets its world-premiere recording

Shamus O’Brien, Charles Villiers Stanford

Gemma Ni Bhriain (Nora, singing), Anna Brady (Nora, speaking), Ami Hewitt (Kitty), Joseph Doody (Captain Trevor), Andrew Gavin (Mike Murphy), Brendan Collins (Shamus O’Brien), Rory Dunne (Father O’Flynn).

Opera Bohemia Voices, Scottish Opera Orchestra, cond. David Parry.

Retrospect Opera 11 [2 CDs] 2 hours 19 minutes.

For a complex of historical reasons, there have been few operas written by Irish composers. Perhaps the most prominent Irish-born composer who specialized in opera was Michael William Balfe, whose works were highly regarded in many countries during his lifetime. Indeed, some are gradually being revived and recorded.

But one opera by an Irishman — a work that is Irish to its core, and a delight from start to finish — has just been recorded for the first time: Shamus O’Brien, by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). Stanford (I’ll deal with his Irish origin in a moment) was, until recently, a mere name to many of us: a supposedly stodgy composer, often mentioned in the same breath as English-born composer Hubert Parry (1818-1948). The unadventurous style of these two (so goes the standard account) helped prepare the ground in Great Britain for stronger and more distinctive spirits, such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten.

We were wrong, as recordings (often the first, or the first adequate ones) have been revealing. In recent years, music and record critics have enthusiastically observed that Stanford could write cogently and engagingly, though, yes, in well-established styles indebted to the Mendelssohn-Brahms lineage. I use “styles” in the plural, because his works tend not to have a signature “sound.” This is true of many fine composers of his era, and could even be thought an asset, not a flaw (or, in today’s vocabulary, a feature, not a bug). If we are now discovering the merits of many long-forgotten works by, say, Donizetti, the young Verdi, Louise Farrenc, Edward Loder, Bruch, Raff, Saint-Saëns, Messager, d’Indy, Marie Jaëll, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, we can likewise open our ears to Stanford and be surprised and refreshed.

The present recording of Shamus is the first-ever (aside from the somewhat familiar overture) of a work that Stanford called a “romantic comic opera.” It comes to us thanks to the devoted efforts and contributions of a small crowd of admirers of pre-modern British opera (that is: from before, say, Britten, Tippett, and Walton), under the auspices of an organization called Retrospect Opera. The score was prepared by one of Retrospect’s five Trustees: Valerie Langfield. The conductor, David Parry, is well known to opera enthusiasts for his dozens of fine, indeed history-making recordings for the Opera Rara label of works by Rossini, Donizetti, and Offenbach.

Charles Villiers Stanford in 1921.

If you know Stanford from his string quartets, symphonies, or sacred works, Shamus O’Brien will come as a bit of a shock. He wrote it specifically to try his hand at light opera, after three serious operas had experienced only moderate success — and mainly in Germany. (Of the three , the one that is most often mentioned today —The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan — was performed in Hannover in 1881. Four excerpts are available on Naxos.)

Shamus O’Brien was followed by three more operas, including a Much Ado About Nothing, and by six Irish Rhapsodies for orchestra (some with solo violin or cello). For reliable information on these and other works, I recommend the excellent books on Stanford by Jeremy Dibble and by Paul Rodmell, each of whom contributed an essay to the booklet here. (Dibble’s book has just been re-released in a revised version.)

Stanford was born in Dublin to a middle-ranking Protestant (Anglo-Irish) family and, though he was educated in England and Germany, he retained a great affection for the land of his birth. He was, politically, a Unionist, meaning that he was utterly opposed to Ireland’s becoming a separate nation. But the opera also shows his admiration for the spirit of the Irish, including their resistance to the cruelty of the British authorities. (The potato famine of 1845-52, though triggered by a blight, was greatly worsened by inaction on the part of absentee landlords and the Whig government.)

Shamus O’Brien is a comic opera steeped in Irish lore and lingo. The four excellent booklet-essays give rich explanations of the opera’s plot and its allusions to Irish culture. They emphasize how closely Stanford and his librettist, the playwright and future novelist George Henry Jessop (1852-1915), modeled the work on other successful light operas and operettas: for example, those of Auber or, more recently, Offenbach, Sidney Jones, Alfred Cellier (see my enthusiastic review of Richard Bonynge’s recording of Dorothy), or André Messager.

The plot is set in the months just after the British suppression of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. The beloved, witty, charismatic Shamus O’Brien is being sought by British soldiers (with the handsome, snooty Captain Trevor at their head). The dastardly Mike Murphy, a peasant farmer, informs on Shamus in return for a promise by the British soldiers of 100 guineas. Though the essays don’t mention the fact, I would guess that Stanford and Jessop modeled Mike on the evil Kaspar from Weber’s Der Freischütz. Indeed, the endings of the two works are quite similar: here, too, a shot rings out, and there is a moment before the audience realizes that it is the bad guy whom the bullet has found, allowing the work to have a happy ending of sorts. (More precisely, here the nervy Shamus runs away, perhaps never to be caught by the British.)

King Baggott and Vivian Prescott in the 1912 silent film Shamus O’Brien.

Shamus O’Brien ran for a remarkable 80 performances in London, nearly all of them conducted by the renowned Henry Wood, and went on tour throughout England and Ireland, then played in New York (50 performances!) and Chicago. Stanford later composed recitatives for the work, but Wood commented that they lacked the “jollity and fun” (a good description!) of the spoken dialogues. The present recording wisely uses the original version, and the singers are all Irish, with the appropriate exception of Joseph Doody as the English captain. They all do a splendid job with the various accents and suit their tone of voices to character and situation. Perhaps the funniest moment is when Captain Trevor has his men search Shamus’s house, and the bold fellow comes out in disguise as a supposed village simpleton. Shamus’s wife Nora explains: “Sure, he’s the best fool we have. God help us!” Shamus (jabbering all the while) then leads the soldiers on a wild-goose chase in search of himself.

Some of the numbers evoke the strophic romance with refrain, such as the song, early on, for the opera’s main soprano role, Kitty (Nora’s sister), who is attracted to Captain Trevor, or relatively straightforward choruses for the townspeople (“They’ll as soon catch a weasel as Shamus”). There’s an effective bantering duet for Kitty and the Captain that could stand well in a concert of operatic excerpts, and the Act 1 finale maintains nice continuity despite consisting mainly of a series of statements by one character and then another, plus some insertions for a jig or reel to be danced by couples from the town, and two songs: one sung by Nora (who is a rather soulful mezzo-soprano), about her fears that the Banshee’s recent cries foretell Shamus’s death, and the other for Shamus after he reappears, telling of how he (while still disguised as the fool) hoodwinked the soldiers, then gave them the slip so he could get back home safely.

Two numbers incorporate folk songs, and some others use short melodic figures that are recognizable from well-known tunes (such as the jig known in the US as “The Irish Washerwoman”). A Banshee (soprano) is heard keening, in prediction of Shamus’s imminent (but, in the end, averted) demise. Her voice is a little wobbly, but maybe this adds to the creepiness.

In the middle of the celebratory Act 1 finale (just before Shamus reappears and sheds his fool’s disguise), there’s one minute of extremely appealing music from a skillful player of the uillean pipes (which are somewhat like Scottish bagpipes, but with an elbow-pumped bellows). In this recording at least, the pipes feature a recurring pitch — the seventh degree — that is intentionally somewhat “flat,” while the orchestra accompanies in its usual tuning.

Other numbers glory in what we might call an international comic-opera style, such as the testy duet between Captain Trevor and the vile Mike Murphy, who is intent on revealing Shamus’s whereabouts to the captain, thinking that this way he will finally be rid of Shamus and thus (so he fancies) have Shamus’s wife Nora for himself. By contrast, some numbers approach serious opera, such as most of the end of Act 2, in which Shamus is put on trial for having taken up arms again King George III in 1798, and Nora and the kindly Father O’Flynn eloquently beg mercy for this fine farmer and devoted family man.

Baritone Brendan Collins in Northern Ireland Opera’s 2023 production of Tosca. Photo: Neil Harrison

The vocal performances are highly accomplished. The two baritones (Shamus and Father O’Flynn) wobble a bit on some long notes, as does the mezzo (and the latter also doesn’t hit all pitches squarely), but otherwise the singing is clear and firm (including the two main tenors: the Captain and Mike), and everybody puts the words across effectively, whether singing or speaking. Still, with so many dialect expressions, I needed to consult the printed libretto more than I do when a work is in standard English. (Nora’s spoken dialogue is handled expertly by Anna Brady, who is herself a young mezzo.)

The most impressive of the singers is soprano Ami Hewitt, as Kitty. I hope to hear her in other roles. David Parry shows his habitual expertise, keeping things trim and clear, and moving the work along at what feel like perfect tempos. (Parry shares some of his further insights about the work at the website run by music critic Robert Hugill.)

Bravo to Retrospect Opera for bringing us a major, once-successful but long-forgotten work by one of Britain’s savviest composers! Other recent projects include Fête Galante by Ethel Smyth. For more information or to contribute to the good cause, go to www.retrospectopera.org.uk. The recording is available there and also from some (but not all) of the more usual classical-music CD dealers. (To preview any track, click here.) One small complaint: the synopsis is too brief; it should have mentioned all the musical numbers and indicated the track for each, for the sake of people who are not following the printed libretto closely.

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.