Greg DalyPatrick Cassidy tells Greg Daly about finding your own voice while respecting tradition
“A movie is a massive collaboration,” says Patrick Cassidy, “I suppose that’s why I like doing the other projects on the side. They’re my own thing.”
It may seem a strange comment from the man who gave us the unforgettable Vide Cor Meum sequence from Ridley Scott’s 2001 Hannibal or the haunting strains that accompanied Brendan Gleeson through his modern Passion in John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, but it’s clear that personal projects matter deeply to the Mayo-born composer.
“I don’t just want to be a film composer – I want to be more than that,” he says, continuing, “you can get into a trap and just be a working film composer”.
“On a movie you’re essentially working for someone else, and you’re trying to do what the director needs for his movie or wants for his movie,” he explains, “whereas when I’m writing a Mass or the opera I’m my own boss and I write what I want to write”.
Patrick was born in Claremorris in 1956 just two years after the 75th anniversary of the apparitions at Knock, seven miles away. It was a time, he says, when Knock Shrine was really taking off, and his pharmacist father was kept busy whether working as a steward at the shrine or guiding the strap stewards in helping invalids off the train in Claremorris so they could be brought to Knock.
“He’d been a nurse in the army during the Emergency,” Patrick explains, “so he knew how they should be carried etc., and he used to teach all of the helpers how to do it properly.”
Knock
The family left Knock when Patrick was five, first going to West Cork, from where his mother hailed, and then to Shannon where he grew up, being educated by the Christian Brothers in Ennis. He went to piano lessons in the area, being taught by a Dutch lady, one Mrs Vermeer, whose husband worked at the local Dutch piano factory – “it was a very cosmopolitan town when we moved to it first”, he says.
Coming from a musical family – “my father played the violin, but all my relations are musicians on my father’s side”, he says – Patrick unsurprisingly went on to study other such instruments as flute and harp, but rather than doing music at third level he took a degree in Maths, before drifting back into music anyway, as he puts it.
Patrick’s debut album, Cruit, featured his settings of pieces by the 18th-century blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan, but it was 1991’s The Children of Lir that earned him his reputation as one of Ireland’s leading composers. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and Choir, it held the number one spot in Ireland’s Classical chart for a year and led in turn to his being commissioned a few years later to write Famine Remembrance, which was premiered at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Since then, of course, Patrick’s gone on to make a name in cinema, with his setting of Dante’s Vide Cor Meum in Hannibal’s Florence sequence being followed by his work appearing in such films as Veronica Guerin, Kingdom of Heaven, King Arthur, and of course Calvary.
Right now he’s working on the soundtrack for a three-part PBS documentary on the 1916 Rising to be narrated by Liam Neeson. Every job, he says, is different, though typically it involves him being sent the film without music, so that he can “write to the picture”.
Soundtracks can be approached in different ways, depending on the film, he explains. “Take giving a theme to characters – for a particular kind of movie that might be the way to do it,” he says, continuing, “Then you might have a movie where you’ll need a different theme for different situations. That’s another way to do it.”
In Calvary, he says, his main themes included a “very spiritual theme, that was kind of the priest’s inner voice, and I’d a kind of leitmotif when he was going around the village doing his stuff and meeting people”.
None of the film’s themes related to the “scoundrels” Brendan Gleeson’s Fr James encounters, he says: “All the themes revolved around him, and they were for different situations, rather than for different characters.”
Describing Calvary as a “joy” to work on, because it was such a strong film, Patrick says he’s been “lucky” in this respect. “My last two projects have been 1916 and Calvary, and they’re both the sort of projects I can at least have some empathy towards the subject matter, so it’s made it easy for me to write,” he says, continuing, “They’re both great projects. I thought Calvary was an amazing movie, an incredible movie, so hopefully the next movie will be as good!”
In the meantime, though, Patrick’s busy working on his first opera, based on Dante’s life and Divine Comedy. It seems a natural subject for him, given how his take on Vide Cor Meum – with which the opera opens – introduced his work to a massive global audience. “I’ve been working on it for about three years, and expect it will be produced in the next year,” he says, pointing out that “helped by the hit aria”, there’s “a strong possibility that it might be in Ireland and in New York”. Describing meetings in the latter, he says “everybody’s interested in the Dante opera”.
With the opera’s entire libretto drawn from Dante’s own words, he explains how its overture is set at the battle of Campaldino, a 1289 clash between the pro-papal Guelphs and the Ghibelline supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor, in which the young Dante fought on the Guelph side.
Following the battle Dante meets his muse Beatrice for the first time, with the first act of the opera being based around his first major work, La Vita Nuova¸ culminating in his writing his first poem – Vide Cor Meum – and his exile from Florence.
The opera’s second act, then, is built around The Divine Comedy, with the poet finding himself lost in a forest with his path blocked by dangerous beasts. The Roman poet Virgil, a cult figure in the Medieval mind for his supposed prediction of the birth of Christ, appears, claiming to have been sent by Beatrice, and guides Dante through Hell, and up onto the mountain of Purgatory. Eventually, as each of the seven deadly sins is wiped away on the mountain’s terraces, Dante passed through a cleansing wall of flames and is reunited with Beatrice in Paradise.
The opera is almost finished, Patrick thinks, but he wants to go over it once more in his Los Angeles base where he lives with his brother Frank, just 400 miles from where another brother and sister live in San Francisco. “I’m going to do one more pass at it, maybe for a couple of months,” he says, continuing, “It’s two hours long, but there’s a few areas that I want to have another look at before I really sign off on it.”
After lots of preparatory reading he’s been immersed in Dante for some time. “I’ve been reading Dante, rather than reading about Dante,” he says, explaining that he initially read a lot of books about Dante and that it’s important to read commentary because of “Florentine politics and all manner of little things that happened in the Middle Ages”.
Popular image
The more he reads about the Middle Ages, the more he realises how clouded our popular image of the period is, he says, pointing out that great things happened then, and that the period as a whole wasn’t as dark as people tend to think. “The High Middle Ages was a great flowering, even before the Renaissance,” he says.
Anyone lucky enough to have been in Knock when New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan opened this year’s national novena will have had a foretaste of the opera, Patrick adds, as his Ave Maria was played there.
“I wrote my Ave Maria independently,” he explains, “but it’s made its way into my Dante opera as well”.
Distinctively written as a duet, with the traditional words augmented by Our Lady’s description of herself as the handmaid of the Lord, Patrick’s Ave Maria features in the ‘Purgatory’ section of the opera. “On the Terrace of the Proud, Dante sees statues depicting humility, and sees the scene of the Annunciation,” he says, explaining that “for Dante, Our Lady’s response to the angel Gabriel is the ultimate sign of humility.
“He says that the statues are so lifelike that you can actually see the words in the aspect of the statues, and you can almost see the angel’s ‘Ave’ coming from his lips, and you can hear Our Lady saying ‘Ecce ancilla Dei’ as well,” Patrick continues, “So I decided to put it into the opera, so that’s the extra bit in the middle.”
Patrick originally wrote his Ave Maria when he was asked to compose a piece for Florida’s Ave Maria University, which had commissioned a sculpture of the Annunciation for the university’s church. At the time he had already been working on a Mass as part of a return to classical music – five years ago he had “decided to write a big, full-scale classical Mass on the 19th-century model” – and so he also offered the Mass to the university for a nominal fee, just enough “so I could keep a roof over my head during the period”.
Recorded in London with the London Symphony Orchestra, Patrick says his Mass is “about an hour long and is a very classical Mass, in a sense like one of the big Masses of the 19th Century, except it’s different because it’s modern.
“The orchestration is maybe more cinematic in a sense,” he continues, explaining that “it’s big – it’s a big orchestra, a very big choir”.
Although his Mass is modern and almost cinematic, Patrick stresses that it’s also deeply traditional, having basically the same libretto as Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Mozart’s unfinished Great Mass in C Minor. “I think when you’re writing something like a Mass, you have to stay within a framework that’s been dictated by tradition,” he says, adding, “That’s very important, I think, rather than just going off and doing your own thing.”
Not, that is, that he downplays the importance of composers working in a way that’s true to themselves, but he clearly sees integrity and authenticity as things that don’t exist in a vacuum.
“I think for a composer one of the most important things is to find your own voice, and I think if you’ve found your own voice you will approach these things in your own way,” he says, continuing, “Say, for instance, for the Mass and for Ave Maria, obviously the starting point is to listen to everybody else’s Mass and everybody else’s Ave Maria, and then go away and do your own thing.
Original
“Trying to do something original and keeping true to the tradition is kind of contradictory, but it has to be done,” he continues, stressing that “it is important to pay homage to the tradition”, explaining how even working on his 1916 soundtrack he’s mindful of Seán Ó Riada’s iconic work on 1959’s Mise Éire.
“It’s very much in my mind what he did at the time,” Patrick says, explaining that “I think an awareness is so important, but it’s important to be aware and to be influenced, but without kind of copying.”
Sometimes maintaining that balance is difficult, Patrick adds. “It’s hard to write an Ave Maria and not plagiarise Schubert because it’s a really, really famous piece and people expect an Ave Maria to be like it,” he says, before saying that it can be done for all that. “I went off and did something completely different,” he says.
In preparing to write his Mass, Patrick listened carefully to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, a “brilliant Mass” which Patrick also finds “kind of funny because he just can’t get away from the four-movement structure”, Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor, of which he says, “it’s a shame it’s unfinished, but it’s a magnificent Mass”, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which he believes is “beautiful” and “an amazing Mass”, all the more remarkable for being composed by “a guy who wasn’t Catholic!”
“My favourite music is choral music, and I think the highest choral music is liturgical music,” he says, explaining that he likes all sorts of choral music, including Gregorian chant and Renaissance Polyphonic music, regarding it all as a continuum with one type of chant growing out of another. If he has a favourite, it’s the Baroque period, he adds, which he sees as “the culmination of it all, especially in Bach’s music which is just perfect, I think”.
Bach’s music is, he says, “a mature taste for me – the more I listen, the more I like it,” continuing, “He’s definitely my favourite composer. There’s nobody who even comes close to him, in my opinion. He’s out there by himself.”
Praising the Mass in B Minor, Patrick explains that “Context and language and everything dictate the music, and Bach wanted to write a Mass clearly – it was his own pet project, I believe.
“I don’t think it was something that was commissioned, it was his own project and was never performed during his lifetime, as far as I know,” he adds.
The danger, unfortunately, is that a similar fate may befall Patrick’s own work, albeit for very different reasons, as it’s become embroiled in a legal quagmire which has prevented it from being shared and heard. “Now it’s in limbo,” he says, continuing, “it’s a shame to have written a Mass and I can’t perform it and can’t release it. It’s an awful pity. It’s been three years since it’s been recorded.”
Patrick’s not given up hope of regaining the rights to his Mass, though in the meantime his focus is firmly on Dante. “My main thing at the moment is the opera, but as for my next movie project I’m not sure – we’ll see what happens!”