Page 196 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2023. Glasbena društva v dolgem 19. stoletju: med ljubiteljsko in profesionalno kulturo ▪︎ Music societies in the long 19th century: Between amateur and professional culture. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 6
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glasbena društva v dolgem 19. stoletju: med ljubiteljsko in profesionalno kulturo
of cultural life in Dublin, when the Irish capital thought of itself as the sec-
ond city of the empire:
The Act of Union […] caused a general exodus of the landed gen
try from their town houses. Before 1800 there were 270 Peers and
300 Commoners of the Irish Parliament residing in the city; twenty
years later only 34 Peers and 5 Commoners remained.1
Aristocratic patronage was now only in very marginal ways available
in Dublin. However, with regard to music the rise of the middle classes to
some extent compensated for that as Barra Boydell points out: “Following
the Act of Union […] Dublin declined as a social centre. However, the rise in
amateur music-making ensured that musical activity continued to develop.”2
Catholic Emancipation
For centuries the British had suppressed Catholicism in Ireland – Catho-
lics could neither worship freely in public nor inherit property, enrol in a
university, vote or sit in parliament. Since the late eighteenth century this
discrimination had been eased gradually, yet the Catholic Emancipation
Act from 1829 was the symbolic high point of this development. It granted
Catholics the right to be elected to Westminster (they had already been giv-
en the vote in 1793).
The Great Famine
From 1845 to 1852 Ireland experienced several years of famine since the po-
tato – the main food of the poor in particular – was affected by the pota-
to blight and the harvest failed. Ireland had then eight million inhabitants;
it is estimated that of those one million died of starvation while at least an-
other million emigrated.3 This traumatic experience is still a key element
of Irish identity to this day. Today about 6.5 million people live in Ireland
(North and South), making it one of the few European regions in which the
population is smaller today than it was in 1845. The famine hit the West and
the South of the country particularly hard, and with it the main remaining
1 Brian MacGiolla Phadraig, “Dublin One Hundred Years Ago,” Dublin Historical Re
cord 23, no. 2/3 (Dec. 1969), 62; https://www.jstor.org/stable/30087166.
2 Barra Boydell and Adrian Scahill, “Dublin,” in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ire
land, vol. 1, eds. Harry White and Barra Boydell (Dublin: University College Dublin
Press, 2013), 319.
3 Cormac Ó Gráda, The Irish Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
194
of cultural life in Dublin, when the Irish capital thought of itself as the sec-
ond city of the empire:
The Act of Union […] caused a general exodus of the landed gen
try from their town houses. Before 1800 there were 270 Peers and
300 Commoners of the Irish Parliament residing in the city; twenty
years later only 34 Peers and 5 Commoners remained.1
Aristocratic patronage was now only in very marginal ways available
in Dublin. However, with regard to music the rise of the middle classes to
some extent compensated for that as Barra Boydell points out: “Following
the Act of Union […] Dublin declined as a social centre. However, the rise in
amateur music-making ensured that musical activity continued to develop.”2
Catholic Emancipation
For centuries the British had suppressed Catholicism in Ireland – Catho-
lics could neither worship freely in public nor inherit property, enrol in a
university, vote or sit in parliament. Since the late eighteenth century this
discrimination had been eased gradually, yet the Catholic Emancipation
Act from 1829 was the symbolic high point of this development. It granted
Catholics the right to be elected to Westminster (they had already been giv-
en the vote in 1793).
The Great Famine
From 1845 to 1852 Ireland experienced several years of famine since the po-
tato – the main food of the poor in particular – was affected by the pota-
to blight and the harvest failed. Ireland had then eight million inhabitants;
it is estimated that of those one million died of starvation while at least an-
other million emigrated.3 This traumatic experience is still a key element
of Irish identity to this day. Today about 6.5 million people live in Ireland
(North and South), making it one of the few European regions in which the
population is smaller today than it was in 1845. The famine hit the West and
the South of the country particularly hard, and with it the main remaining
1 Brian MacGiolla Phadraig, “Dublin One Hundred Years Ago,” Dublin Historical Re
cord 23, no. 2/3 (Dec. 1969), 62; https://www.jstor.org/stable/30087166.
2 Barra Boydell and Adrian Scahill, “Dublin,” in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ire
land, vol. 1, eds. Harry White and Barra Boydell (Dublin: University College Dublin
Press, 2013), 319.
3 Cormac Ó Gráda, The Irish Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
194
