Cork Music Archive

Aloys Fleischmann was a Bavarian church musician and composer of about 400 works who emigrated to Cork in 1906, where he became organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne. He was a native of Dachau, a picturesque market town and artists’ colony near Munich where his father was a shoemaker. Aloys, an only child, had seven years of schooling; he was admitted at sixteen to the Royal Academy of Music in Munich for a preparatory course, and then studied church music, and composition under Josef Rheinberger.

After his appointment as organist and choirmaster to the parish church of St Jakob in Dachau, he put on a nativity play every year for which he arranged or composed the music, painter friends providing designs for costumes and scenery, the Munich court orchestra and choir supporting the local musicians, the undertaking financed by artisans, merchants and the town council. The plays were acclaimed in Munich, widely reviewed in Germany and even in New York. His remarkable career in Dachau came to an abrupt end in 1906. The previous year he had married Tilly Swertz of Cork, who had just graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in Munich. She had relatives in Dachau, as her father had previously been organist there before taking up a post in Cork in 1879. In 1906 he unexpectedly moved to Philadelphia, leaving a family of nine in Cork to be provided for. His son-in-law undertook the task.

Fleischmann had no English when he came to Cork and had to learn fast as he had to train a boys’ choir to replace the mixed one now no longer permitted under new Vatican rules. His wife gave piano recitals; he gave concerts with secular choirs. Fleischmann had not intended to remain in Cork once the Swertz children had finished their education. In the autumn of 1909 his wife went to Munich to give a concert and assess the prospect of their being able to return to Germany. Their only son Aloys was born there in April 1910. In July the family came back to Cork.

During the first world war Fleischmann was interned as an enemy alien. Then he taught for nearly twenty years in the School of Music and for nearly forty in the diocesan seminary, St Finbarr’s College Farranferris. He broadcast on the newly established national radio, occasionally on the BBC World Service and gave frequent recitals in the Honan Chapel of the university. He and his choir were known and respected throughout the city and beyond; he and his wife enjoyed the friendship of musicians such as Carl Hardebeck, Herbert Hughes, Richard Terry, Arnold Bax. He continued his work at the cathedral until he was eighty-one,

his German savings having become worthless and neither he or his wife having a pension. For two years he was an invalid in the Incurable Hospital, where he died on 3 January 1964. During the centenary celebrations of his son in 2010, the Lord Mayor of Dachau travelled to Cork with the Liedertafel Choir, which sang in the Cathedral on his 130th birthday. There was a Fleischmann Week in Dachau later that year.

Ruth Fleischmann