Bloomsday 2026 – “Songs and Stories from Dublin” – A Joint Presentation by the James Joyce Association of Ottawa and the Ottawa Celtic Choir
Bloomsday came early to Ottawa this year – not on June 16 but June 13, a Saturday. But in fine Bloomsday tradition, people dressed up like it was June 1904.
In her welcoming remarks, the Chair of the James Joyce Association of Ottawa, Rosemary O’Brien, pointed out that this too was an auspicious date: June 13 happens to be the birthday of W.B. Yeats. The Director of The Ottawa Celtic Choir added that in 1988, the Dublin Millennium Commission proclaimed June 13 as “Molly Malone Day” in Dublin. Apparently a woman with that name had passed away on that date in 1699. It was not known whether she and her parents had been fish mongers, but surely such an occasion called for a song!
That was the queue for a wonderful evening of song and prose, using the works of James Joyce to unpack the rich treasures of musical references found throughout his writing. The audience joined with gusto in the singing of “Molly Malone.” Sharon Labelle then read the “Parable of the Plums” passage from the Aeolus episode of Ulysses. Two elderly ladies climb the Nelson monument where they eat plums, spitting the seeds onto the street below.
Over the course of the evening, the audience was treated to 15 songs and eight readings.
Often there was an obvious connection between the prose and the songs. The choral version of “The Lass of Aughrim,” for example, was followed by a scene from “The Dead” where Greta (Niamh O’Brien) tearfully tells her husband Gabriel Conroy (Dermot Guinnane) about Michael Furey who used to sing that song when they were teenagers. The scene is all the more poignant when you hear the pathos in the song.
Other songs were lifted directly from Joyce’s writing. The lyrics of “I Rush Into Your Arms” – a piece by Irish composer Shaun Davey – were taken from the closing passage of Finnegans Wake. Ellen MacIsaac arranged the piece for a women’s choir and, when augmented by the piano stylings of Sally Robinson, it evoked the River Liffey flowing into the Irish Sea.
“I Dreamt I Slept in Marble Halls” – a piece from an opera composed in 1843 – was quoted at length by Nora Pat Marshall in reading from “Clay”. In the Dubliners story, Maria makes the mistake of singing the first verse twice. Nora Pat said that she hoped that the choir would not make the same mistake. They didn’t.
The choir’s repertoire ranged from melancholy to rambunctious. Thomas Moore’s “The Last Rose of Summer” was paired with the Nausicaa description of Gertie McDowell, read by Mary Comerton. It was followed by a rollicking arrangement for choir of “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”
The programme had something for everyone from the Joyce afficionados to those who didn’t know Joyce’s writing, but were interested in the songs. And for those who could use a quick summary of a long book, Paula McCann soloed “The Ballad of Bloom and Stephen,” a song written by Dublin-based Joycean Andrew Basquille. The song managed to shrink the entire plot of Ulysses into 18 rhyming couplets, which began:
On the sixteenth of June, 1904, the Tower’s the place to be,
With stately, plump Buck Mulligan and the scrotum-tightening sea…”
So on the anniversary of the fish monger who cried, “Alive. Alive-oh!” we paid our tributes to the day that Joyce created in his fertile imagination. Joyce himself was an accomplished singer and he loved music of all kinds, slipping references into his writing as an important part of the rich tapestry that he wove with his words. Fifteen songs and eight readings: it was a wonderful way to mark Bloomsday!
