In his ‘Reminiscences of Auber’ (1871), Richard Wagner recalled he had occasionally met the elder composer over ices at the Café Tortoni back in 1860, at the time the revised Tannhäuser was in rehearsal at the Paris Opera. On one occasion, when Auber was asking after these preparations, Wagner explained to him something of the nature of the opera. Auber ‘gleefully rubbed his hands together’ and replied, ‘Ah, so there will be spectacle; it will be a success, then, never fear!’ Wagner recounts the anecdote with the irony of hindsight, of course, since the Paris Tannhäuser production of the following March (1861) turned out to be a legendary fiasco. Auber naively assumed that Tannhäuser was cut from the familiar cloth of Parisian grand opera, and that French audiences would respond favourably to such elements as the fleshy ballet-pantomime with its nymphs and satyrs, the procession of pilgrims through a ‘Romantic’ landscape of changing seasonal hues, the hunting party at the end of Act I, and the ceremonial entry of the Thuringian nobles to the song-contest at the court of Landgrave Hermann in Act II. It was by no means an unreasonable assumption. Granted, Wagner had updated the score (the opening ‘Bacchanale’ and the scene between Tannhäuser and Venus in Act I, particularly) with touches of the advanced chromaticism and the sequential-developmental style of Tristan und Isolde, quite at odds with the comfortable phraseology of much grand opera. But when Tannhäuser was originally composed, in 1845, Wagner's experience of French grand opera was still relatively fresh, and its impact still considerable.

It is a cliché to observe that opera, and perhaps in particular grand opera, is a composite venture, and that it is from this very hybridity that its strengths are fashioned. One need only peruse the range of ‘resources’ discussed in Part I of this Companion to see that grand opera generates a form of cultural force-field in which otherwise disparate skills are focused in the service of a particular production (and a particular product which hopes to exceed the proverbial sum of its parts). If this is true of performance arts in general, then to the theatrical arts here we must add the musical faculties of orchestration and singing. Indeed, it is hard to resist the sense that these faculties are at the core of a cultural product to which the visual and the textual contribute but which they do not dominate.

One can imagine how the story of the relationship between grand opera and its textual complement, the libretto, might be idealised as a harmonious marriage of equal partners; purely aesthetic criticism would explore how the libretto supports or underpins the project of staging a particular opera. It would, however, probably be a mistake to claim that it is largely in such textual frameworks where we find the most conspicuous innovations of grand opera, innovations which might lead us to recall, for more than purely historical reasons, the merits of an essentially nineteenth-century genre as the twenty-first begins.

ʿPastoralʾ has been defined in a variety of ways, and has been said to include the ʿantipastoralʾ, though some readers will wish to make a rigid distinction between the two, while recognising that both are intimately related. Traditionally, pastoral is a matter of rural life and shepherds, idyllic landscapes in which people corrupted by court and city life are changed and renewed. It suggests a healing antithesis to the corrupting influence of urban experience, but has been characterised simply as poetry of the countryside (however defined), and does not always envision an idealised and falsified, conflict-free zone, transcending the tensions of history, though it can do that, too. ʿAntipastoralʾ, on the other hand, suggests a poetics of undermining, in which pastoral conventions are deployed or alluded to, in order to suggest or declare the limitations of those conventions, or their downright falsity. If pastoral suggests that rural life offers freedom, antipastoral may proclaim it is a prison-house, and the farmers slaves. Historically, antipastoral has been associated with Goldsmithʾs The Deserted Village(1770) and George Crabbeʾs The Village (1783), with certain poems of John Clare, and with Stephen Duck who, in The Thresherʾs Labour (1736)wrote, ʿNo fountains murmur here, no Lambkins play, / No Linnets warble, and no Fields look gayʾ. A defining feature of such poetry has been its realistic treatment of labour, protest against idealising poetic traditions, and in some cases outcry against political conditions related to land enclosure.

In August 1970, Eavan Boland published a series of three articles in the Irish Timesentitled ʿThe Northern writersʾ crisis of conscienceʾ. In the concluding article, Boland asks: ʿhow . . . will writers in Northern Ireland articulate the crisis in progress outside and within them, the retrospect on communities it must force, the needs it imposes to reorder increasingly chaotic impressions?ʾ. How will writers cope, she continues, with ʿsuch intractable, yet urgent materialʾ? Criticism may since have become more circumspect in approaching these questions, but their underlying assumptions still prove contentious in reading contemporary Irish poetry. In effect, Boland implicitly assumes here that Northern writers are a distinct group; that they have responsibilities towards the Troubles which are not necessarily shared by their Southern counterparts; that individual anxieties and conflicts manifest the anxieties of the state; that writers are identifiable with, or speak from, a particular religious community; and that poetry will, in MacNeiceʾs phrase, ʿmake sense of the world . . . put shape on itʾ in 1930s generation style.

In a short, early lyric Michael Longley proposes a certain obstinacy, reticence and awkwardness as among the defining characteristics of his subject, 'Irish Poetry'. For Longley, Irish poetry issues forth not in glorious blossoms but 'tuberous clottings', 'a muddy/Accumulation' to be found in 'specializations of light', or, in Joycean style, 'dialects of silence' rather than the spoken word. When he imagines these elements combining in the poem's last lines, it is to form images of suffering: 'the bent spines, /The angular limbs of creatures'. The poem ends by conjuring 'the initial letter, the stance', but even this moment of self-assertion is coloured in 'lost minerals'. If Irish poetry in 2000 had fewer reasons for awkward introspection than it did in 1973, when Longley's poem appeared, its achievements in the intervening years had done much to foster a mood of buoyant well-being.

Ireland in 1999 appeared to be ending its trouble-strewn twentieth century as a remarkably prosperous, culturally confident and optimistic place. The Good Friday agreement of the previous year had moved the Northern Irish Peace Process further towards the cessation of the thirty years of violence that since 1969 had cost more than 3,500 lives. The new Northern Ireland Assembly met, briefly, for the first time. Capitalising on the benefits of a highly-educated workforce, the Irish embraced an increasingly globalised market. The Irish phenomenon of rapid growth based on foreign investment in new technologies mirrored the achievements of Asia, and the Irish economy became known as the 'Celtic Tiger'. To the world, though, Ireland still had the glamour of its ancient traditions, music and poetry. It represented a mix of authenticity and the intellectual and spiritual integrity of a cultural development which the popular stage hit of the 1990s, Riverdance,pictured stretching forwards from pre-history.

It is almost a truism of Irish literary history that the work of Austin Clarke (1896-1973), one of the Irish poets of the greatest range and achievement since Yeats, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Somehow it still hovers both in and out of the canon, frequently more honoured in the breach of oversight than in the observance of university syllabuses, summer schools, anthologies and bookshop poetry sections. Clarke was excluded by Yeats from his Faber Book of Modern Versein 1936; but while he was restored in most anthologies between The Oxford Book of Irish Versein 1958 and Patrick Crotty's Modern Irish Poetryof 1995, it was still possible for Yeats's snub to be repeated half a century later in (or out of) Paul Muldoon's Faber Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1986). Clarke remains in print, yet precariously; a Selected Poemsedited by Hugh Maxton, which was published in 1991, is still available, but the only Collectedis the 1974 edition prepared by Liam Miller of Dolmen Press with the poet himself. The contrast with, say, Patrick Kavanagh (for whom complete and selected poems are currently, and recently, in print), is marked.

Modernism and Ireland

Notwithstanding Joyceʾs representation of the Irish capital in Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake,Dublin is not generally perceived as having been a vibrantly productive location of avant-garde experimentation, as were Paris, Berlin, London and New York. While the Irish Literary Revival is arguably a strand in the knotted skein of early modernism, in the eyes of writers as dissimilar as Thomas MacDonagh and Samuel Beckett its Celticism appeared remote from the dissonant tones and epistemological preoccupations of the historical avant-garde. In Literature in Ireland(1916), MacDonagh had proposed that it was not the Revivalʾs ʿCeltic Noteʾ, but poetry written in the ʿIrish Modeʾ - a style that preserved in English some of the sound-patterns of Gaelic verse - that was to some extent comparable in its disjunctive effects to Italian Futurism. In the light of this thesis, MacDonagh's translations might be profitably read alongside those of Ezra Pound - an admirer of Literature in Ireland -whose revolutionary ʿtranslationsʾ from Chinese poetry, Cathay, had appeared the year before MacDonaghʾs critical book. But MacDonaghʾs poetic and critical career was brutally truncated in 1916, when he was executed for his part in the Easter Rising; and it was to be in the poetry of his successor as lecturer in English at University College Dublin, Austin Clarke, that the Irish Mode was most rewardingly developed during the 1920s.

If, as Seamus Heaney says, quoting Borges, 'poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on pages', then we might recognise that the issues involved in the depiction of violence may differ from reader to reader or, more generally, from one national readership - in this case Irish, British, or American and other Anglophone readers - to another. We know readers have registered their approval of Heaney's poetry in the sales figures of Waterstone's, Barnes & Noble's, and other booksellers, and this popularity has been confirmed by most of the prizes. Yet reviewers who might represent these readerships have differed widely in their responses to what the Swedish Academy praised as Heaney's 'analysis of the violence in Northern Ireland'.