Introduction

3Although Boulogne-sur-Mer was frequently included in the activities of the O’Kellys, they spent their life and career mainly in Paris where the family moved to around 1835. After the premature death of their father, the brothers changed their name to O’Kelly, a change they justified as a correction when they collectively appeared at the État Civil in Boulogne in January 1859. By then, they had already used the name O’Kelly for about twelve years. The change of name is significant evidence of a reassertion of their Irish identity. It may have been calculated to smooth relationships in French society where being English could have been considered a disadvantage. Also, in British-occupied Ireland, the Anglicisation of Irish names was common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries. It therefore seems very likely that the Kellys had anglicized their name many years before in Ireland. InFrance however, there was no need for it, on the contrary. As O’Kelly it probably was easier to build positive relationships and thereby to distinguish oneself from the historic enemy. Thus, in the 1859 document at the État Civil, the change of name is described as a “rectification”. Their Irish consciousness is further underlined by the fact that the second and some members of the third generation remained Irish (i.e. in the days before Irish independence they had a British passport). Of course, another reason, apart from Irish consciousness, could have been that they avoided compulsory military service and being drafted into the various military conflicts of the period in question.

4This paper concentrates on Joseph O’Kelly, the best-known member of the family and without doubt the most talented and prolific composer. There are many ways of drawing a sketch of someone’s biography and for the present purpose I chose to concentrate on newspaper articles and reviews. Their advantage is that they usually reflect contemporary attitudes and assessments of printed music and public performances. And while most are focusing on Paris I am also including some Irish papers in case of any significant articles.

A brief outline of Joseph O’Kelly’s life

Early public reception

12Because Labourieu was also active as a music critic, the following 1853 eulogy of O’Kelly in Le Tintamarre may be a kind of atonement or recompense for his previous failure. This related to O’Kelly’s own performance of his opus 7, which is a piano fantasy on Schubert’s famous ‘Trout’ song:

• 18 In La Tintamarre, 9 January 1853. O’Kelly’s Fantaisie brillante sur une mélodie (La (...)

Rien de faux, de prétentieux, de psalmodique dans son jeu; ce n’est plus là le pianiste lymphatique, l’eunuque de l’harmonie à l’eau de rose, c’est l’homme de talent qui simplement s’inspire de là verité, sans emphase et sans contorsion18.

13But even without this ‘recompensating’ aspect, O’Kelly received positive reviews in his early years, and this included Hector Berlioz in the Journal des débats where he reviewed the publication of O’Kelly’s Album de la Légion d’Honneur, a collection of six songs to texts by Jules Montini, which were dedicated to the superintendent of the school of the Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis. In his own inimitable way he wonders whether the music would be fit for its target group, the teen-age girls at the school:

• 19 Hector Berlioz in Journal des débats, 17 April 1855, p. 3.

Les demoiselles de la maison de Saint-Denis ne sont ni des héroïnes de roman, ni de jeunes philosophes, ni des couturières, ni des sœurs de charité, ni des religieuses. Il s’agissait de trouver une poésie de seize ans, une musique de seize ans pour ces jeunes cantatrices de seize ans. MM. Montini et O’Kelly ont résolu le problème sans effort et même avec beaucoup de bonheur. Plusieurs morceaux de leur album charmeraient même des cantatrices de trente-deux ans. [...] Les accompagnements de ces six petites pièces sont en outre (et c’est un point important) d’une facilité telle que les jeunes pianistes de la maison de Saint-Denis elles-mêmes peuvent les exécuter sans hésitation19.

14Of course, a certain irony is unmistakable here, but Berlioz certainly acknowledged that O’Kelly’s unpretentious Album has its own inherent value.

On nous annonce de lui pour le 2 août prochain un poème lyrique qui aura nom : Paraguassù, et qui sera exécuté au Théâtre Lyrique au bénéfice de l’Association des musiciens. Paraguassù est un titre passablement bizarre : mais nous offrons de parier que la musique de M. O’Kelly sera correcte, facile, et pleine de naturel.

Operas and cantatas

17O’Kelly played a smart move in getting a performance there in August 1855 with his work Paraguassú. He chose a time when the theatre was actually closed for the summer and arranged the performance as a benefit for the Association des Artistes Musiciens. The disadvantage of this procedure, of course, was that he couldn’t get more than a single performance outside the regular programme, but the advantage was that he could justifiably claim to have a major work performed at the Théâtre Lyrique by the regular professional staff of the house, including a publication of the score with Choudens, altogether not a bad thing to have for an unknown 27-year-old composer.

18Paraguassú is a musical collaboration with the librettist, Jules de Villeneuve, who had spent several years in Brazil and who probably suggested the plot, an historical legend of 16th-century Brazil combined, of course, with a love story involving the heroine of the title and a Portuguese invader. Described as a ‘poème lyrique’, the work was more like a cantata, involving a speaker who explained the story, also with stage design and costumes, but no acting as in an opera. The work was dedicated to the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, which resulted in O’Kelly getting the national order of merit from Brazil four years later.

19Honours of this kind do not necessarily say anything about the quality of the music performed on that occasion. As it was, the musical press was critical, but polite, commending a few well-made melodies, but limiting any negative criticism with a reference to the beneficial character of the performance. There were four reviews, which may be summed up in the following excerpt from Le Ménestrel, written by the critic Jules Lovy:

• 22 Le Ménestrel, 5 August 1855, p. 3.

Quant à la musique, elle renferme quelques motifs agréables, notamment la barcarolle chantée par Dulaurens et Mme Deligne-Lauters. Nous ne relèverons pas les insuffisances musicales de cette oeuvre, que les auteurs ont exhibée dans de fort louables intentions, puisqu’elle a été représentée au profit de l’Association des artistes-musiciens22.

20Louis Dubreuilh in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris explained these shortcomings by wishing for more originality and local colour:

• 23 Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris, 5 August 1855, p. 247.

La troisième partie contenait encore quelques passages dignes d’être remarqués ; mais en général on aurait désiré dans les morceaux assez nombreux qui composent cette œuvre plus d’originalité, et, puisque la scène se passe au bord de la rivière des Amazones, un peu plus de couleur locale23.

21The harshest criticism came from L. Girard in the Revue de Paris who applauded the quality of the performance, but explicitly exempted the music from this assessment in quite direct language:

• 24 Revue de Paris, 1 October 1855, p. 156.

L’exécution de Paraguassú a donc été remarquable. Nous voudrions pouvoir en dire autant de l’œuvre-même, malheureusement la vérité nous oblige à dire que cette musique nous a paru banale, incolore, absolument dépourvue d’originalité24.

23Nevertheless, from the mid-1850s we can observe a kind of split perception of O’Kelly’s qualities as a composer. While reviews of his piano music and songs are usually positive, often very positive (see examples further below), he frequently met with severe negative criticism of his beloved genre, opera.

24And it must have been a beloved genre. Why else would he again and again write an opera in the face of the kind of criticism above (and below)? To be fair, there were favourable reviews of his operas as well, such as that of his 1859 operetta Stella which had first been performed in the course of a benefit concert for himself in an unnamed salon. Gustave Héquet wrote of this work in L’Illustration that it was not a bad way to start a career in the difficult area of dramatic music:

• 27 L’Illustration, 6 August 1855, p. 126.

M. O’Kelly n’en est encore qu’aux premiers pas dans cette difficile carrière de la composition dramatique : mais on ne saurait commencer mieux27.

25Frequently the critics simply seemed to forget that O’Kelly had written operas since 1849, such as in an announcement of a performance of L’Arracheuse de dents in January 1869 which was described as an operatic début:

• 28 Le Ménestrel, 27 December 1868, p. 30.

Le théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques va mettre prochainement en répétition un opéra-bouffe, que l’on dit de la plus excentrique originalité. Il est intitulé : L’arracheuse de dents. Le poëme est de M. Bernard Lopez, et la partition sera le début, au théâtre, d’un musicien avantageusement connu dans les concerts et les salons, M. Joseph O’Kelly28.

• 31 The Irish Times, 2 Aug. 1875, p. 3.

There is a prospect of some good music in connection with the celebration of the O’Connell Centenary. […] I note that a cantata specially written for the O’Connell Centenary by the Comte O’Neill de Tyrone, the music furnished by another Frenchman, by name “O’Kelly,” is to be performed at the Exhibition Palace on Saturday night, under the direction of Professor Glover. I have been looking over some of its numbers, and the music strikes me as being of a bright and tuneful character, which is pretty certain to catch the ordinary ear31.

28Unfortunately, the papers were not very eloquent about the musical celebration, compared to the social side, which took place on 7 August 1875. The Nation even quoted from another newspaper:

This concert, under the conductorship of Professor Glover, took place in the large concert hall of the Exhibition Palace, on Saturday night, and was attended by at least 3,000 persons, including the distinguished foreign guests. The number of performers was 500. The Daily Express says of it: – The grand national concert was held in the large concert hall of the Exhibition Palace, on Saturday evening. The hall was crowded, and the concert passed off with much success. The performance opened with a grand chorus, followed by selections from Professor Glover’s oratorio “Tara,” in which the principal characters were sustained by Mr. Richard Smith, Mr. B. McGuckin, Madame Gedge, and Mrs. Scott Fennell. […] Selections from the Centenary cantata composed by Viscount O’Neill de Tyrone were also given. Mr. Levey acted as leader, and Mr. Horan presided at the organ. The concert, which commenced at half-past seven o’clock, was not over until eleven o’clock, but notwithstanding its unusual length every one appeared to enjoy it very much.

30In France, the majority of reviews of his operas remained negative. A particularly bad example related to a work that probably had the widest exposure by being staged in the regular programme of the Opéra Comique in February 1879. It’s his sixth opera, called La Zingarella, to a libretto by Jules Adenis and Jules Montini. Of this work I found 23 reviews, with 17 from France, two each from Britain and the United States, and one each from Germany and Spain. Several of them again claimed that this opera was O’Kelly’s operatic debut. Looking at the character of the reviews, eight can be considered as positive, ten as negative, and the remaining five as more or less neutral by balancing positive and negative aspects.

31La Zingarella is an opera about an opera, describing the process through which the (historically real) composer Antonio Salieri came to writing the (totally fictitious) opera La Zingarella by finding inspiration in the singing of his beautiful and musical housemaid. Interesting though this concept may be, it failed to win the audience’s general approval and was taken off the schedule after but four performances.

32Some of the reviews could be described as outright polemical or, at least, intentionally negative. See, for example, Arnold Mortier’s ‘introduction’ of O’Kelly in Les Soirées Parisiennes, in which he alleged that his music was generally ignored by the public, that he was already an old man (at age 40!) and that hitherto he had composed nothing but songs:

• 33 Les Soirées Parisiennes de 1879, par un monsieur de l’orchestre (Arnold Mortier), Paris, E. (...)

M. O’Kelly, est le type du musicien modeste qui dépense son talent dans une foule de morceaux de piano et de compositions estimables connus des dilettanti, mais ignorés du public. C’est un élève d’Halévy; inutile d’ajouter que ce n’est plus un jeune homme. Professeur distingué, il donne des leçons de piano et d’harmonie et est, en outre, attaché à la maison Pleyel. Ses œuvres consistent surtout en albums de chant33.

34‘Bénédict’, writing in Le Figaro, agreed and suggested that O’Kelly should have resisted writing music to the libretto (by Jules Adenis and Jules Montini), which was probably deemed embarrassing by the author: “M. O’Kelly n’a pas su résister à la tentation d’écrire la musique de la Zingarella, et il en a été puni – en compagnie du public” – because he seemed to consider the music better than its text. But he, too, considered O’Kelly’s music old-fashioned:

• 35 This, and the foregoing quote by: Bénédict,“Opéra-Comique”, Le Figaro, 28 February 1879, p. (...)

A la lecture au piano, la partition de M. O’Kelly peut avoir les qualités estimables et correctes d’un homme qui a réfléchi sur son art et étudié l’art d’écrire auprès d’un maître. Il y a très certainement, dans les sept morceaux de ce petit acte qui a fait si prodigieusement bâiller, du savoir, de l’élégance, des phrases bien faites; mais il manque à tout cela la vie et le mouvement de l’art contemporain : il semble que le compositeur se soit endormi dans la bibliothèque du Conservatoire […]35.

35Among the more balanced ones, a review by Henri Heugel (writing as ‘H. Moreno’) described O’Kelly’s achievements quite fairly and was thoughtful about his talents as an operatic composer:

• 36 Le Ménestrel, 2 March 1879, p. 107.

De la musique de la Zingarella, j’aurai peu de chose à dire, n’en ayant entendu que la dernière moitié, écrite par un musicien, cela est incontestable, mais sans relief suffisant pour la scène. M. O’Kelly, élève distingué d’Halévy, a publié de bonnes mélodies et c’est de plus, je crois, un excellent professeur de piano. Son talent n’est donc pas en cause, mais pour aborder le théâtre, lors même qu’on est parfait musicien, il faut avoir ce que l’on appelle « la vocation ». Or, le compositeur de la petite partition de la Zingarella est-il né pour le théâtre ? Nous n’oserions l’affirmer36.

Positive reviews of piano music and songs

• 45 Journal des débats, 11 May 1869, p. 2.

Si le rêve de M. O’Kelly est d’entendre dire aux artistes que ses mélodies sont l’oeuvre d’un musicien instruit et toujours bien inspiré, je ne demande pas mieux que d’aider, pour ma part, à la réalisation de ce rêve45.

• 52 Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 2 July 1876, p. 214.

Ce sont cinq pages en tout, mais cinq pages suffisamment remplies, puis qu’elles sont d’un sentiment juste et que le développement y est conséquent avec la donnée52.

Obituaries and late assessments

41As a composer of piano music and songs as well as operas of a mixed reputation, Joseph O’Kelly did not belong to the most prominent composers of his time. Thus it cannot be expected that many papers devoted much time to his passing away. As it happened, we have many short notices of his death (in French, British and German papers), but only two that can be described as obituaries. As if to round off his Franco-Irish career, one appeared in France and the other in Ireland.

42The French obituary appeared in Le Ménestrel, written by the paper’s editor Henri Heugel – himself a publisher of some of O’Kelly’s songs. He summed up O’Kelly’s legacy by pointing both to his many popular song compositions and to his remarkable commitment to opera:

• 53 Henri Heugel, “Nécrologie”, Le Ménestrel, 11 January 1885, p. 47. The next short quote is f (...)

C’était un musicien distingué, qui laisse après lui un petit bagage de mélodies dont plusieurs eurent de la vogue. Nous en avons offert tout dernièrement à nos abonnés plusieurs d’un tour véritablement heureux. M. O’Kelly avait aussi tenté du théâtre, où il aurait pu à la longue réussir tout comme un autre. Mais on sait comme il est difficile aujourd’hui pour un compositeur d’enfoncer les portes de nos théâtres lyriques et d’apprendre la scène en s’y essayant53.

43Connected through their publishing partnership for a number of years, Heugel also knew O’Kelly personally and offered a glimpse into his personality:

C’était un homme doux et de mœurs aimables, qui ne laissera après lui que des regrets.

44O’Kelly’s long-time Irish friend in Paris, John Patrick Leonard, was the author of the obituary in the Irish newspaper The Nation. As mentioned before, Leonard managed the ‘Anciens Irlandais’ group of Irishmen in Paris; he was also the driving force behind O’Kelly’s membership in the Légion d’Honneur and had accompanied him to the O’Connell Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 1875. Their friendship allowed for a rare insight into O’Kelly’s private life, which was not without its tragic aspects. Whether these related to family fates or to backlashes in his musical career is not entirely clear from the following; indeed it could be a mixture of both. While musical failures can be deducted from the press excerpts quoted above (relating, in particular, to his opera La Zingarella), family-related aspects could include the loss of his first wife (1877), the death of his daughter at age 23 (1881) and that of his first son with his second wife just before his fourth birthday (1884).

[…] a more gentle and warm-hearted being never lived. […] [O’Kelly] was greatly esteemed by everyone. Modest and retiring, he won his way by real talent. Sensitive and kind-hearted, he was ill calculated to buffet the storms of life, of which he had his share. Like his great master Chopin, of whom he spoke to me with enthusiasm on his deathbed, he succumbed in the battle of life from feeling too deeply the “slings and arrows” of fortune.

• 54 John Patrick Leonard, “Death of an Eminent Franco-Irish Composer”, The Nation, 31 Dec. (...)

If the fond affection of those who surrounded his deathbed and the tender love of a mother could console him, they, with religion, must have made his last hours less sad and given him resignation to leave a world where sorrow dwells54.

Afterword

46Now, what are we to make of all this? Nearly every composer has had his ups and downs, had successes and failures, had to endure negative criticism even if a piece of work was in reality not as bad as it seemed to some critics. But why was Joseph O’Kelly so quickly and so completely forgotten? The study of contemporary newspaper criticism reveals that O’Kelly generally appears to have succeeded in the smaller forms of piano music and song and to have failed in larger works such as the majority of his operas. But there is more than the difference between handling large and small forms. Reasons must also be sought in the fierce competition between the very large number of composers active in Paris at the time, and for stylistic reasons. On the one hand, O’Kelly was sufficiently well known to have enjoyed regular performances of almost everything he wrote. He had a circle of performers who obviously liked his music. He doesn’t seem to have had any difficulty in finding publishers. And he was also acknowledged enough to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur.

47On the other hand however, competition wasn’t only fierce because of the quantity of composers, but also in terms of stylistic development. Contrary to today, in the 19th century music was marked by a strong belief in progress in terms of style, harmony, and expression. Particularly during O’Kelly’s lifetime, these shifts in style and public taste were so strong that, although his music had followers, it was not regarded as progressive. With regard to his opera La zingarella of 1879 some writers pointed out that he was of the “vieille école”. A year later he was included in Arthur Pougin’s edition of Fétis’s Biographie universelle, and seemingly under the impression of that infamous opera, he wrote:

• 56 François-Joseph Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la (...)

[…] il a publié […] un assez grand nombre de compositions qui sont écrites non sans goût, mais dans une forme qui est loin de cadrer avec les idées larges, la libre allure et le souffle nouveau qui distinguent la jeune école française56.

48It is a judgement that comes across as somewhat unfair with regard to his work as a whole. Besides, Pougin’s article is full of mistakes pertaining to biographical details as much as to O’Kelly’s list of works. Neither Pougin nor the majority of critics seemed to be really familiar with O’Kelly’s oeuvre, and no-one seemed to have bothered to talk to him and ask before publishing potentially damaging criticism. So we are left with reviews that are highly selective and coloured by personal opinion. But these reviews, including Pougin’s dictionary article, were carved in stone for posterity, certainly for the twentieth century which laid O’Kelly at rest.

49Today we are in a position that allows us to have a fresh look at the achievements of the O’Kellys in France. With an objective eye, it will be found that, although some of Joseph O’Kelly’s music is derivative and outmoded by the standards of their time, it is always tastefully written, melodious, and rewarding for both pianists and singers. Our modern understanding of the evanescence of style and taste can explain O’Kelly’s early neglect, but at the same time it also enables us to form a fresh assessment today.