Blooms of Dublin | |
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![]() First edition (publ. Hutchinson) | |
Written by | Anthony Burgess |
Blooms of Dublin is a musical play or operetta in two acts with music and text by Anthony Burgess. The work, nearly three hours long, was first performed (in a concert version) for the Dublin Joyce Centenary in 1982 by the RTE Singers and RTE Concert Orchestra and broadcast on BBC and RTE radio. [1] It was produced by John Tydeman and Michael Heffernan. [2]
The operetta is based on James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses . [3] [4] It was published in book form in 1986. [5] The texts of some of the songs also appear in the novels Earthly Powers (1980) and The End of World News (1982).
Burgess provides a very free interpretation of Joyce’s text, with his own changes and interpolations, all set to original music that blends opera with Gilbert and Sullivan and music hall styles. [6] The number “Copulation without population” in Act Two is an example – it’s set in the style of a humorous, bawdy music hall romp and features a chorus of drunks and prostitutes - but it has little to do with the corresponding passage from Ulysses. [7] Burgess said that his aim was to make Ulysses more accessible. “The score is, I think, the kind of thing Joyce might have envisaged…he was the great master of the ordinary, and my music is ordinary enough. I had felt for some time that he might have had demotic musicals in mind ….”. [8]
The piece received mixed reviews. Hans Keller called it "a pathetic pastiche" in which "senseless tonal and rhythmic antics...take the place of even the most elementary invention." [9] Aside from one repeat broadcast in 1983 it has not been revived, and has never been staged. [10] A BBC archived recording exists.
Other works that Burgess wrote or adapted as stage musicals include A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music (1987) and (with music by Michael J. Lewis) Cyrano , a new musical which ran for 49 performances on Broadway in May 1973. [11] [12]
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was a British writer and composer.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement".
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place on a Thursday in 1904, the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
PiotrZak is the name of a fictional Polish composer whose alleged composition Mobile for Tape and Percussion was broadcast twice on the BBC Third Programme on 5 June 1961 in a performance supposedly played by "Claude Tessier" and "Anton Schmidt". In fact, the composer and the performers were pseudonyms of BBC producers Hans Keller and Susan Bradshaw, who concocted the deliberately unmusical percussive piece as a hoax. According to Bradshaw, "It was a serious hoax to set people thinking that fake music can be indistinguishable from the genuine." The success of the hoax, however, is open to question. While Mobile for Tape and Percussion was reviewed seriously by several critics, all of the reviews were roundly negative, with the piece being almost instantly identified as a "non-musical" studio prank.
Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the 1922 novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The wife of main character Leopold Bloom, she roughly corresponds to Penelope in the Odyssey. The major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not. Molly is having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan. Molly, whose given name is Marion, was born in Gibraltar on 8 September 1870, the daughter of Major Tweedy, an Irish military officer, and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of Spanish descent. Molly and Leopold were married on 8 October 1888. She is the mother of Milly Bloom, who, at the age of 15, has left home to study photography. She is also the mother of Rudy Bloom, who died at the age of 11 days. In Dublin, Molly is an opera singer of some renown.
Milo Donal O'Shea was an Irish actor. He was twice nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performances in Staircase (1968) and Mass Appeal (1982).
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. The play is a fictionalisation following the broad outlines of Cyrano de Bergerac's life.
Hans (Heinrich) Keller was an Austrian-born British musician and writer, who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as being a commentator on such disparate fields as psychoanalysis and football. In the late 1950s, he invented the method of "wordless functional analysis", in which a musical composition is analysed in musical sound alone, without any words being heard or read. He worked full-time for the BBC between 1959 and 1979.
Fionnghuala Manon "Fionnula" Flanagan is an Irish stage, television, and film actress. Flanagan is known for her roles in the films James Joyce's Women (1985), Some Mother's Son (1996), Waking Ned (1998), The Others (2001), Four Brothers (2005), Yes Man (2008), The Guard (2011) and Song of the Sea (2014). She is also known for her recurring role as Eloise Hawking in the series Lost (2007–2010). Notable stage productions she has performed in include Ulysses in Nighttown and The Ferryman, both of which earned her Tony Award nominations for Best Featured Actress in a Play.
Friday Night Is Music Night is a long-running live BBC radio concert programme featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra, broadcast from 1953 to 2023 on the BBC Light Programme and its successor BBC Radio 2, moving to BBC Radio 3 from April 2024.
This is a list of works by the English writer Anthony Burgess.
David Brophy is an Irish conductor.
The Ulysses broadcast began on 16 June 1982 (Bloomsday) when the Irish state broadcaster, RTÉ Radio, transmitted an uninterrupted 30-hour dramatised radio performance, by 33 actors of the RTÉ Players, of the entire text of James Joyce's epic 1922 novel, Ulysses, to commemorate the centenary of the author's birth. The broadcast began at 6.30 am and continued until midday the next day. It was carried by live relay internationally, and it won a Jacob's Broadcasting Award in recognition of its achievement.
Hope Temple, born as Alice Maude Davis was an Irish songwriter and composer. She was also known as Mrs André Messager.
The Gardiner Street Gospel Choir is a Gospel music choir based in the Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier Church on Gardiner Street in Dublin, Ireland. The award-winning choir is made up of volunteers who perform at services, and on other stages around Ireland.
Christopher T. Casson was an English-born actor who became a citizen of Ireland in 1946. His work included stage, screen, radio and television roles. His portrayal of a Church of Ireland canon in the long-running series The Riordans made him known nationwide.
Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems is a posthumous collection of the short poetry written by Anthony Burgess. Compiled and edited by Kevin Jackson, who also provided a short introduction to the text, the book purports to collect most if not all of the poems published under the names F. X. Enderby, John Burgess Wilson, or Anthony Burgess, as well as selections from longer verse works by Burgess.
Anthony Burgess and James Joyce: Blooms of Dublin , The International Anthony Burgess Foundation Podcast