Heaney’s diverse talents celebrated

By Joseph Hurley

THE SPOKEN WORD, A Celebration of Seaum Heaney. "The Poet and the Piper" and "Beowulf," at Alice Tully Hall, May 29-30; NEW VISIONS, "Diary of One Who Vanished," at John Jay College Theater, May 31 and June 1-2.

This past week at two Lincoln Center venues witnessed what was, in effect, a modest but energetic and imaginative festival dedicated to demonstrating the extraordinary versatility and productivity of Ireland’s Nobel Prize laureate Seamus Heaney.

On Tuesday evening, May 29, Alice Tully Hall was the scene of a two-hour program entitled "The Poet and the Piper," with the Derry-born Heaney sharing the stage with the celebrated musician Liam O’Flynn, a native of County Kildare.

The following evening, Heaney was alone on the same stage, reading from his well-received "New Verse Translation" of the Old English classic "Beowulf," a work mainly remembered, until now, for having been force-fed to generation after generation of students in high school literature classes.

On Thursday, and continuing through Saturday evening, the auditorium at John Jay College was the scene of the American debut of Czechoslovakian composer Leos Janacek’s song cycle, "Diary of One Who Vanished," for which Heaney had provided English versions of poems by Josef Kalda.

Janacek’s "Diary," in an intense production lasting barely 35 minutes, and directed by Deborah Warner, was performed by tenor Ian Bostridge and mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene, with Julius Drake appearing as musical director and pianist, achieving the latter feat from memory, without reference to a printed version of the difficult score.

All three events were presented as part of Lincoln Center’s "Great Performers" series, with the two Tully evenings bearing the subtitle "The Spoken Word," while the John Jay performances were slotted into the organization’s ongoing "New Visions" series, further designated "From the Homeland: A Festival of Czech Music."

The fact that all five evenings sold out would appear to testify to the depth and intensity of the city’s cultural audience’s continuing interest in Heaney, a name probably unknown to most New Yorkers until he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature six years ago.

The public’s interest in the poet from Northern Ireland is a result, at least in part, of Heaney’s astonishing productivity, and, to be sure, a response to the pellucid clarity and accessibility of his writing.

And there’s more than that. The poet’s warmth and informality on the platform has to be factored into any evaluation of his impact. Heaney has the seemingly effortless ability to convert even the most imposing auditorium into a kind of personal living room or study.

Take his first moments on the Alice Tully stage on the occasion of "The Poet and the Piper." With a wide smile, the casually dressed Heaney sauntered into view, accompanied by musician O’Flynn, with whom he has been appearing regularly for the last decade.

Taking a seat at stage left, the poet immediately overturned a glass of water that had been placed on a table near his chair, and then proceeded to mop up the mess with his handkerchief, after which he wiped his brow with the sopping fabric, all to the utter delight of the near-capacity audience that had gathered for the performance.

The wood-paneled environs of Alice Tully Hall, normally possessed of a certain austerity, immediately shrunk to a cozy, intimate dimension in which a world-famous literary figure could have a slight accident and cope with the situation at ease until an attendant could arrive with a towel and take over.

Heaney and O’Flynn alternated with words and music, with the poet leading off with "The Uileann Pipes," and eight-stanza work created for his appearances with the piper, who is quoted in the sixth verse as saying that "the only English rhyme for the word ‘uileann,’ from the Irish ‘uile,’ meaning ‘elbow,’ is the word ‘villain.’ "

The following evening, devoted to Heaney’s reworking of "Beowulf," an effort which won the poet Britain’s Whitbread Prize, marked the first occasion on which the poet had read from that work in New York.

Heaney attended the first of the three John Jay performances of "Diary of One Who Vanished" without a jacket, so when he was called up to the stage by conductor Drake and his singers, Bostridge and Philogene, he appeared, unselfconsciously, in his shirt-sleeves.

Leos Janacek first encountered the 22 brief poems which became "Diary of One Who Vanished" in 1916, when they appeared in the People’s Paper, a daily journal published in Brno, where the composer lived and taught. Published anonymously, "From the Pen of a Self-taught Man," only recently were they revealed as the work of Ozef, or Jozef, Kalda.

The verses tell the story of a haunted farmer’s son who falls in love with "a dark-eyed Gypsy," and learns the price that can be exacted by sexual infatuation.

As staged by Deborah Warner, last represented in New York by T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland," performed by Cork-born Fiona Shaw, "Diary of One Who Vanished" emerged as a painful tale of romantic involvement.

As the audience enters the full-lighted auditorium, tenor Ian Bostridge, by now something of a superstar on British concert stages, is already visible, lying underneath the piano at which Julius Drake is seated, going over musical phrases that, it develops, are part of the Janacek score.

The production beautifully paced and presented, could have made good use of supertitles, since both singers proved slightly lacking in the diction department, which is always regrettable, but perhaps particularly so when the words being sung are as compelling and as inventive as those provided for the occasion by Heaney.

"Diary of One Who Vanished" will be released on CD in the next few months. The work was first performed at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre on Oct. 15, 1999, and subsequently the Lyttleton Theatre of London’s Royal National Theatre on Nov. 4.

All in all, it was a great week at Lincoln Center for Heaney, the Nobel laureate who’s fond of reminding his hearers that he was "born on a farm in County Derry in 1939."