"A Singer Born". Tracce musico-letterarie in Joyce and Yeats: una ricognizione comparativa

After some instances of the Irish musico-literary (i. e. plurimedial) corpus, this essay offers some comparative and interdisciplinary examples of Joyce’s and Yeats’s musicoliterary ideas and practices. These examples confirm that both were “singers born”. However, what they sang about were two very different Irelands, epitomized by means of diverse (and complementary) musical instruments, artistic protagonists, compositional grammars. Joyce’s Ireland was the European and bourgeois Land of Belcanto, but it embodied an intellectually expanded idea of the Italian belcanto-capable, for instance, of including non-Italian operatic contributions. Yeats’s Ireland was the Land of Song: the land of the “peasant who has his folk-songs and his music”, whose apparently “orally handed-down” theories, compositional processes and performative practices were very often elaborated by Yeats with the help of contemporary professional composers and performers.