Aloys Fleischmann Junior

Aloys Fleischmann was at the centre of classical music in Cork for over fifty years. He was a composer, professor of music, conductor, scholar, and provider of music for his city. An Irishman of German origin, he grew up in two cultures during a decisive period of the country's development: many friends of his musician parents such as the MacSwineys, MacCurtains, McDonnells of Bandon were directly involved in creating this new Ireland. He spent two years doing postgraduate studies in Germany in the early 1930s; his experience of the ominous political and of the rich cultural life of Munich strengthened his desire to return to Ireland and to help create a more vigorous and specifically Irish cultural life in the small city in which he was brought up. In his seventy compositions he sought to create an art music inspired both by Ireland’s cultural heritage and that of Europe.

His life was governed by the determination to make classical and Irish traditional music an intrinsic part of Irish cultural life and available to people from all walks of life. He campaigned to have the authorities give music a fixed place in the school programme; he designed the course of studies in the Music department of University College Cork to produce music teachers with a wide general and practical knowledge of their subject, and in 1935 set up the Music Teachers’ Association. The Cork Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1934 to give amateurs an opportunity to perform the great works and the public a chance to hear them performed live; in 1938 he established the Orchestral Society to bring musicians of national and international repute to Cork. In 1954 came the Cork International Choral Festival to provide local choirs, particularly in rural areas, a forum in which to perform and to measure themselves against the best from at home and abroad. His orchestra provided the music for Joan Moriarty’s Cork Ballet Company for forty-six years; he chaired the Cork Sculpture Park from 1961-89; he was a member of the Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Society, the Irish Commission to UNESCO, and a founding member of Aosdána, the association of Irish artists.

His Music in Ireland of 1952 has been said to mark the beginning of Irish musicology; his forty-year project Sources of Irish Traditional Music, published posthumously in New York, was launched by the President of Ireland in 1999. The man whose people came from Dachau was granted the Freedom of the City by Cork’s first Jewish Lord Mayor, Gerald Goldberg; in 2010, the centenary of Fleischmann’s birth, a year of commemorative events under the auspices of Cork City Council was opened by President McAleese.

Ruth Fleischmann