Joncus, Berta. 2017. 'From “Ellen a Roon” to “Aileen aroon”: Kitty Clive and the Irish Ballad'. In: The Irish and the London Stage: Identity, Culture, and Politics, 1680-1830. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland 17 - 18 February 2017. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

Stage song was a powerful means for eighteenth-century players to shape their public identity. In 1741 Kitty Clive, London’s most celebrated songstress, entertained Dublin audiences with her performance of “Aileen aroon an Irish Ballad” in its premiere stage performance in Gaelic. Enthusiasm for Clive’s song, first in Dublin and then in London, shows that “Aileen aroon” both hit musical taste and helped to shape it.

When Clive joined other Drury Lane principals for their 1741 summer season at Dublin’s Aungier Street Theatre, she was at the zenith of her career. Known as a Patriot soprano, Clive had since 1734 won support through roles that favoured her strengths as a performer and showcased Opposition protest to the Robert Walpole ministry. Her Irish-Catholic descent had until 1741 nowhere been publicly declared, nor was the crucial help she had received from Irish colleagues ever mentioned in print. Yet William Chetwood had facilitated her c1727 stage debut and appointment to Drury Lane, Charles Coffey had in 1731 created for her the role of Nell in The Devil to Pay, through which she catapulted to fame, and Charles Macklin’s persuasively Jewish Shylock had in 1741 enabled her to revamp her line in anti-Semitic heroines.

Clive’s visit to Dublin gave her an opportunity to stage her Irishness for the first time, and on her own terms. She performed her best-known roles, including Euphrosyne from Milton’s Comus, selected to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the decisive defeat of King James II and his Irish troops. Clive then announced in print that she was learning, in honour of her hosts, “the celebrated song, called Elen-a-Roon”, using the Anglicized name by which it was then known. Coffey had embedded the song thus titled in his ballad opera The Beggar’s Wedding (1729), facilitating its entry into London’s music market as an English-language common tune. For her Dublin performance in Gaelic, Clive refined the song through trills, variations and octave leaps typical of her stage airs, those of Comus in particular. Through her rendering of “Aileen aroon”, Clive tapped into a complex fantasy of Irishness rooted in music which had held a growing fascination for Irish writers and audiences from the 1720s onwards – though her “Irish ballad” was in fact styled after London galant music.

Clive’s “Irish ballad” was paradigmatic of her stage practice and its power over audiences. She had long used music to forge her persona on stage. In London, “Aileen aroon” became one of her signature tunes, through which she sold a new kind of Irishness – polite, sentimental, seemingly authentic – calibrated to audience taste. She then turned this sung personification of Irishness into a play character for audiences in Dublin (1763) and London (1765). In her Faithful Irish Woman, Clive created a spirited Irish woman whose financial rescue of her English fiancé displayed her loyalties to both countries.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Additional Information:	With music performance by Berta Joncus (soprano) and and David Adams (harpsichord)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Music
Dates:	Date Event 17 February 2017 Completed
Event Location:	Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Date range:	17 - 18 February 2017
Item ID:	35479
Date Deposited:	25 Mar 2024 15:50
Last Modified:	25 Mar 2024 18:19
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35479

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