Biography of Frederick May

Philip Graydon

May, Frederick (b Dublin, 9 Jun. 1911; d Dublin, 8 Sept. 1985). Composer, writer on music. The most original and least insular Irish composer of his generation, May pioneered an aesthetic wholly averse to the prevailing pursuit of a consciously national expression; through his embrace of the European avant-garde, he and his like-minded contemporaries, Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann, spearheaded Irish musical modernism.

As a student of the Royal Irish Academy of Music from 1923-29, May studied piano with Annie Lord and Michele Esposito, and harmony and composition with John F. Larchet. In 1931, May graduated from Trinity College Dublin with an external MusB degree, continuing his studies in London for an additional three years at the Royal College of Music with Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams, for whose music he developed an abiding passion. A travelling studentship secured him an opportunity to study with Alban Berg in Vienna in 1936, but the latter's death on 24 December 1935 saw May study there for a short period under Egon Wellesz. Returning to Ireland in 1936, he was appointed Director of Music at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. A formidable pianist and talented accompanist, May emerged as a trenchant critic of the infrastructural deficit and official apathy that seriously debilitated the growth of original Irish art music in the mid-twentieth century. In 1948, he co-founded the Music Association of Ireland with Boydell and Edgar Deale.

While his creative output was auspicious between 1936 and 1956, the continuing onset of otosclerosis made composition thereafter impossible. May's later life was continuously overshadowed by alcoholism and ill-health, both physical and psychological, though a brief resurgence of interest in his music in the mid-1970s attended the issue of a recording of his String Quartet in C minor and its subsequent publication. He was elected to Aosdána (Ireland's state-sponsored academy of letters and the fine arts) in 1982.

May's oeuvre, which includes orchestral, chamber and numerous undated vocal works, stands testament both to the originality of his vision and his determinedly cosmopolitan stance. His first major opus, the Scherzo for Orchestra (1933), already evinced an early understanding for colourful orchestration, though it was his next work, the String Quartet in C minor (1935-36), that later forged his reputation. Hailed in 1985 by Boydell as the 'first really significant composition by an Irish composer—certainly of the present century', the work was not premièred until 1948. Recalling the intense part-writing of Berg and the later Bridge, May's freely atonal quartet ends tranquilly in C sharp major, but its overall effect—including certain melodic turns-of-phrase suggestive of a personal 'Irish note''—is obscured by moments of dark introspection, precipitated by the composer's self-confessed realisation of his encroaching deafness. Returning to the orchestra, May produced the Symphonic Ballad (1936), the Spring Nocturne (1937) and the Lyric Movement for String Orchestra (c1939), while his largest and most ambitious composition, the expressionistic Songs from Prison for baritone and large orchestra, was completed in 1941. Based on Ernst Toller's Das Schwalbenbuch, this demanding song cycle relates how a political prisoner gains solace from watching swallows building their nest outside his cell-window. To him, they mark the impending spring and a glimpse of freedom, and though his happiness is cut short as the guards deliberately destroy the nest, his hope for spring remains. May completed just two more major works before deafness and despondency stultified his artistic voice for good. The first, the Suite of Irish Airs (1953), instances a polished but soulless effort in an idiom alien to that which he had actively espoused. The second, Sunlight and Shadow (1955), echoes the earlier Spring Nocturne in construction, though its greater concision and pensive tone point to the poignancy of its title as a telling précis of May's career and creativity.

(Philip Graydon, 2011. A version of this article from Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, Barra Boydell & Harry White eds [UCD Press])