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Count John McCormack

1884–1945

 

In the summer of 1932, at the climax of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, John McCormack sand the 'Panis Angelicus' at an outdoor mass in the Phoenix Park, before an immense million-person audience, and a further radio and cinema audience worldwide.  This great religious gathering, in retrospect, represented the high point of the influence of the Catholic Church in modern Ireland.  For McCormack, too, Ireland's greatest tenor, this was indeed the summit of his career.

      McCormack had been born in Athlone, a provincial market and barracks town in County Westmeath on 14th June 1884.  His parents were Scottish in origin, his father working in the local woollen mills, the largest employer in the town.  His father was perhaps not the most encouraging person.  McCormack recalled later that 'My father told me I would never amount to anything in this world'.

      The family was not well off, but John was a bright child.  He was educated at the Marist Fathers school in Athlone, and later won a scholarship to Summerhill College in Sligo, also run by the Marists.  Singing and music was a feature of his home life and the remarkable qualities of his voice were recognized very early.  But his ideas of a career lay elsewhere.  At first he thought he might become a priest, but he was also good at languages and maths.  He just failed to earn a scholarship to the Royal College of Science, and turned to the Civil Service instead.

      A friend in Dublin brought him to the attention of Vincent O'Brien, who was then in charge of the famous Palestrina choir at the Catholic Pro-Cathedral.  Having sung at small concerts locally, in 1902 he won the gold medal for tenors at the Feis Ceóil in Dublin, winning a scholarship to study for a year in Italy and in 1903 he studied there with Vincenzo Sabatini.

      Back in Dublin, on one occasion in the summer of 1904 he shared the platform with JAMES  JOYCE [25], who was given higher billing!  (This earned McCormack a passing reference in Ulysses as a singing partner of Mrs Bloom.)  McCormack was now studying with Vincent O'Brien.  His singing with the Palestrina Choir at services made his name, and was followed by a tour of the United States.  He sang with the choir at the St Louis Exposition in Missouri in 1904.  Along with J.C. Doyle, he was now recognized as a leading figure in Irish music.

      McCormack made his operatic debut at Covent Garden in London in Cavalleria Rusticana.  Further operatic engagements followed over the next few years, in New York, Chicago, and Boston, with an Australian tour in 1911.

      He left the opera stage two years later, beginning a second career as concert singer.  These popular personal appearances were enhanced by recordings, which brought him even wider and greater fame.  In all, he made 561 recordings, some of which have been reissued in more recent years.  He sang not only with such operatic luminaries as Nellie Melba, Geraldine Farran, and Luisa Tettrazini, but also with popular crooners like Bing Crosby.  Some professional opera singers disdained his move to the concert hall, and his even more appalling penchant for ballads and sentimental Irish songs, but these were an essential element of his appeal to the mass audience he commanded.

      In 1914 he applied for United States citizenship, which was granted in 1919.  This and his support of the cause of Irish independence annoyed some early British admirers.  However, this did not seem to affect his general popularity when he returned to England in the 1920s, and during World War II he injured his health by singing at Red Cross concerts, at one of which he collapsed.

      An ardent Catholic, he was involved in charity work in several countries, and in recognition of these endeavours he was created a Papal Count in 1928.  As an even greater honour, the title was made hereditary, devolving in turn on his son, Cyril.

      In England he had lived in style in a mansion called Esher Place.  During the 1930s he and his family lived in an Irish Gothic mansion, Moore Abbey at Monasterevan in Kildare, where he could indulge his very Irish fondness for horse racing.  It was all a great contrast to his youthful poverty in Athlone, about which he retained a certain sensitivity to the end of his life.

      In his last years he lived in a house at Booterstown, looking out over Dublin Bay towards Howth Head.  There he died on 16th September 1945.  His wife, formerly Lily Foley, whom he had met at that Feis Ceóil in 1902 and married in 1906, and by whom he had two children (another was adopted), wrote the story of their life together in her autobiography I Hear You Calling Me.  This had been the title of the song which had been a very great favourite with concert audiences throughout his career, but which had a special resonance for her, recalling as it did the very early days of their happy marriage before the Great War.  To many, Count McCormack remains one of the greatest figures not only of Irish but of world music.  The folk museum in his native Athlone is not the only collection where recordings of his truly powerful yet lyric tenor voice are still treasured.