Ricorso, Act III of “Finnegans Wake,” an Operoar composed and conducted by Martin Pearlman (review)

The creation of ALP is, to begin with, an admittedly personal statement of preference, the most appealingly musical of the characters in Finnegans Wake; her voice and the voices that surround her blend the work’s historico-mythical complexity with an unparalleled show of Joyce’s lyrical genius. Joyce seems to have favored her as well: it was the final three pages of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”—FW 196–216 (I.VIII)—that he chose to record on a wax cylinder for Charles K. Ogden in 1929, an act that, in itself, adds another level of aural complexity to a field already rife with potential.¹ A quick glance at Joyce’s text yields at least five separate types of evoked sound: simple noises—”And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?” (FW 215.29–30); human body sounds—“I hurd thum sigh” and “Mutter snores” (FW 213.16, 213.30); musical instruments—“Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez!” (FW 213.18–19); cries that echo, or refer to, classical music—“Allalivial, allalluvial!” and “O, my back, my back, my bach!” (FW 213.32, 213.17); and even interesting kinds of silence—“Subdue your noise, you hamble creature!” and “It all but husheth the lethest zswound” (FW 214.31–32, 214.09–10).

ALP’s concluding monologue in Book IV is a little less scattered, representing the character herself in more stabilized terms but without sacrificing any of her attendant musicality (FW 593–628). “It’s simply clearer [than much of the text],” says Martin Pearlman in explaining why he chose to use ALP’s final monologue as a basis for his composition Ricorso, Act III of “Finnegans Wake”: An Operoar, which premiered in Boston in March of 2014.

In 2012, Pearlman—the founder, conductor, and music director of the period-instrument orchestra Boston Baroque—brought his initial “Finnegans Wake”: An Operoar to audiences as part of the “New Directions” series. In that performance, the famous “riverrun” opening was delivered by Adam Harvey to the nuanced accompaniment of seven musicians, including extensive percussion components. Act II, surprisingly, has yet to be written; instead, Pearlman chose to leap over most of the book in order to create Act III, which gave us a female vocalist—the actress Paula Plum—performing as the elderly ALP.² As before, the speaker was accompanied by musical textures of Pearlman’s own devising.

As befits so flowing a text, the Wake has inspired various artists since Joyce’s day, a notable example being Éamonn O’Doherty, whose bronze monument “Anna Livia” once graced Dublin’s O’Connell Street. It is now to be found in Croppies Memorial Park, where it presides over a still pool.³ Noting this, Pearlman began his performance with a brief commentary on Wake-related musical works, following each example with a snippet on tape. Samuel Barber’s 1947 Nuvoletta for Soprano and Piano, Opus 25 was mentioned,⁴ as well as a lesser-known jazz piece, Bitter Ending, by André Hodeir, which also utilizes lines from ALP.⁵ Perhaps a more apposite touchstone for Operoar, though, is John Cage’s Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on “Finnegans Wake,”⁶ which Pearlman did acknowledge but only in passing. Cage was fascinated by the Wake and regarded it as a wellspring of sound, rather than just a text to be interpreted. In his creation, specific rules are applied to the book as a whole, generating a long word-collage that itself constitutes a stand-alone piece entitled Writing for the Second Time Through “Finnegans Wake.”⁷ Those words then form an element in the sound barrage that follows.

Pearlman’s Operoar shares Cage’s appreciation for the Wake as an origin or source but takes a more compositionally conservative approach, eschewing aleatory elements, separating the speaker and the instrumentation absolutely...