ERIN catalogue reaches 1000

The ERIN catalogue now records over 1000 musical scores that are related to Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, his National Airs, or his Irish Melodies. The 1000th object to be entered in the catalogue is the ‘Lalla Rookh Nocturne’ for solo piano by one Antoine Schafer. This appears in an anthology of sheet music for piano held at the British Library. This type of work, inspired by Moore’s creative output but having no direct connection in its content to him, offers the most distant kind of relationship captured by the ERIN catalogue. Other recent additions include several of Cesare Pugni’s arrangements for solo piano of pieces from his own ballet Lalla Rookh — choreographed by Jules Perrot, this was performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, in 1846 (see the blog and OMEKA collection dedicated to Lalla Rookh for further). William Lovell Phillips’s piano arrangements of Lalla Rookh, entitled Pearls of the East, are also a recent addition to the catalogue. Their dedicatee, Lady Sydney Morgan (d. 1846), was a prominent author whose well-regarded “Irish national tales” would have cultivated a readership for Moore’s work. Concluding the recent additions of pianoforte music to catalogue ERIN are two arrangements of vocal works by the Bohemian-born composer Wilhelm Kuhe (1823-1912). The first, ‘O ma maîtresse’, is derived from Félicien David’s opéra comique, Lalla Roukh (Paris, 1862); the second, a ‘Fantasia on airs from Frederic Clay’s Lalla-Rookh’ was drawn from Clay’s cantata as performed at the Brighton Festival in 1871. This was the first of several such annual musical events organised by Kuhe himself.

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