Arthur Duff (1939): "W.B. Yeats"

Arthur Duff (1953): "F.R. Higgins"

Lennox Robinson (1956): "Arthur Duff "

Jim McHale (1963): "Arthur Duff "

Kevin Roche (1999): "A Gentle Musician"

Arthur Duff wrote the following broadcast in 1939 about his association with W.B.Yeats.

During the time I was associated with W.B. Yeats - in the mid 1930's - writing music for some of his plays in the Abbey Theatre, and helping him with his two volumes of Broadsides. One ballad sheet came from his sisters Cuala Press every month for two years - 24 sheets, each one having two forms, two coloured illustrations many done by his brother Jack B. Yeats, and two tunes for the poems, all chosen by himself, F.R Higgins, Lady Dorothy Wellesley and myself - which we worked on together.

I was never quite sure how much Yeats knew or pretended not to know about music. He said himself that he was not musical, but that he had the poets exact time sense, and only the vaguest sense of pitch. Yet he got the greatest pleasure from certain combinations of singing, acting, speaking, drum, gong, flute, string, provided the words kept their natural passionate rhythm.

Rhythm was his strong point and I had a lively respect for his judgement. Every tune - he always used the word tune - every tune had to be played over to him many times, tasting it, sampling it, singing - of its character. We would sit in the darkest theatre, with only the little orchestra light over the upright piano, I at the piano, Yeats a few feet behind me in the front row of the stalls. I would strum out the tune, and I would hear the low voice of the poet speaking the words and testing if the speed of his speech fitted the speed of my notes. Sometimes he would move on too quickly for me or slow up and I would have to adjust my tune to suit his speech rhythm. But we usually hit it off pretty well, because I worked him as ruthlessly as he worked me. I never attempted to write a note for a line of his until I had made him recite every line a dozen times. And hearing him chant in that monotone of his I rarely left him without some line coming into my head. Maybe having played a new tune for him he would be silent and I would be afraid to ask him what he thought because I knew his silence meant that he was not satisfied, but when I detected a certain suppressed excitement and a quick movement of his head I knew he was pleased and expectant, and he would take me to the Kildare St. Club for a cup of tea and a crumpet.


The following is a broadcast by Arthur Duff given on 5th May 1953. He talks about meeting F.R. Higgins in Lennox Robinson’s house in 1933. It was their first meeting.

About the year 1933 I meet F.R. Higgins in Lennox Robinson’s house in Dalky where many of our circle often came together for talk and music. Lennox had a pianola and after supper he and I strummed and sang folk songs and Fred had a powerful pair of lungs when he cared to use them. And with the tunes we made that night our friendship began and it only ended when his heavy coffin was carried into the church.

Yeats was considering the possibility of publishing a set of Broadsides from his Cuala Press. There was to be a poem, a design done by an Irish artist and a tune. Higgins was to assist Yeats as editor and I was to make the music and use the traditional airs. These beautiful sheets eventually came out in a limited edition, one every month for two years, and our work on them threw us frequently together. The first set appeared in 1935 and included Higgins’ The Spanish Lady - ‘As my lady was in her daisy garden the soft tide rose by her garden wall’ – and his version of the Lowlands of Holland and The Song for the Clattergowns which was in the one play he wrote, The Deuce of Jacks, produced at the Abbey Theatre. In this volume also are poems by Yeats and Pádraic Colum and translations from the Irish by Frank 0’Connor, all with their tunes. Yeats delighted in these things. He had heard the ballad singers in fairs and markets crying out their pointed words in dramatic passion to catch and hold the ears of the passing crowd. And he wanted the song of Irish poets sung among Irish people and at convivial meetings of the Irish Academy of Letters. He had no melodic ear but appreciated music with a strong rhythm and was nervous of modern composers and concert singers. Higgins with his clean sense of a tune and his interest in the older musical scales - the Irish gapped scale - was a great assistance to Yeats in working together and wielding words to Gaelic tunes.

Twelve years since the death of F.R, Higgins. Twelve years since the night we followed his coffin slowly and sadly through the wintry streets of Dublin past the darkened Abbey Theatre, where the blinds were down for beloved man and poet. Through the narrow and dimly-lighted way by Jervis Street to the old church of St. Mary. There he was to rest until the morning, the morning that would send him on his last journey to Laracore. Laracore that place in his most lovely Meath. And such a funeral procession it was that bleak January night in 1941. I am sorry to say that it has been my lot to be present at two other such funerals where the same scene of sorrow, the same sad faces, as we stood waiting at churches for two of Fred Higgins, friends, the Abbey actor F.J. McCormack and more recently that beloved man and writer M.J. MacManus coming his long journey from Donegal to the grounds of Glasnevin. Those three funerals will always stay in my thoughts joined together.

At the time Higgins was working in Toms, the Dublin printing house in Crow Street and I still feel after all these years the tingle of anticipation at coming into his company and how Fred would say, ‘come on lets adjourn to the Bodega and see who’s there’, knowing by the clock the excellent company to be found in that underground tavern. It was in such company that Higgins was at his best with a pint of draught Guinness in front of him and his big shoulders shaking with mirth at some reminisce of Brinsley MacNamara’s or a swift retort from Seumas 0’Sullivan. He was a merry fellow and he strode the streets like the big Meath man he was with enormous black hat on his head.

On the day his last book Rap of Brightness was published he and I and a friend lunched together, it was his forty-fourth birthday but he was saying farewell to his years and silently to us. And eight months later his journey ended in Laracore . He was a warm man who gave himself to his friends who filled wherever he might be with a great spirit...


The following is a tribute broadcast, to Arthur Duff presented by Lennox Robinson and broadcast by RÉ on 27th September 1956

We Irish have always been extraordinary rich in our poets, our story-tellers and our painters but we have been curiously poor in our composers of music but I am not forgetting our very extensive folk-music - perhaps the richest in Europe - nor Thomas Moore and his melodies based on our folk-music. I am thinking of Ireland's contribution to the non folk-music. We can indeed go back to Shakespere' s day and claim exquisite John Dowland but then follows a very bleak, blank period until we reach our generation of Stanford and Hamilton Harty, John Larchet, Moeran, Frederick May and one or two others. But they are so few that we must lament that one of the most original, the most unique of this small band of composers has now left us.

Arthur Duff although as a person could mix with and be a friend of any man or women in any class of life was, in his music remote, fastidious. People generally look like what they create, that jowl of Beethoven created the great symphonies and that brooding brow the posthumous, magical string quartets and somehow the Brahms' beard fits big, blustering Brahms. And so Arthur Duff s delicate physique exactly matched his sensitive music. I never felt he was quite at home playing a Steinway grand, his delicate long fingers - has one ever seen such long delicate fingers? - should be playing a spinet or a harpsichord or conducting the music of Charles the Second's court at Whitehall. I think his musical loves rarely extended beyond the middle - or even the beginning of the eighteenth century. He loved the Beggars' Opera and other music of that genre. He loved our anonymous folk-tunes.

He did not leave a heavy amount of luggage behind him but he left some very precious parcels; we shall examine some of them in a few minutes' time and their contents will once more stir our admiration and move us to think of dear Arthur Duff with tenderness and tears.


Jim McHale produced this programme entitled Music of the Nation on 6th October 1963.

We present Music of the Nation our Sunday night programme of Irish music. This evening our programme is devoted to the work of a man, to whom all who love the music of our nation are indebted, the Dublin composer Arthur Duff. His death seven years ago when his music had taken on the full richness of his maturity as an artist was a grievous blow both to those who knew him and loved him as a friend and to the far greater number who knew him only through his work...

He was a Dublin man by birth through his education at the RIAM and TCD and by reason of his sympathy and friendship. He was an urban man, certainly an urbane man - though his gracious ways were utterly free from that bland synthesisum that sometimes passes for banality. Though he was an urban man he still had a sense of landscape. Dublin did not leave him unappreciative of the Irish countryside. This can be seen in Meath Pastoral (to Brinsley MacNamara). He intended this work as an act of thanksgiving for the deliverance of this country from invasion in 1940. For Arthur Duff was a man of deep and unobtrusive patriotism. He loved Ireland and cared for her freedom...


On Friday 12th March 1999 'A GENTLE MUSICIAN' was broadcast from FM3 by Kevin Roache.

Kevin Roche recalls the life and music of Dr. Arthur Duff, the Dublin-born composer and conductor, to mark the centenary of his birth.

Arthur Knox Duff was born on the 13th of March 1899, the son of John William Duff, an Accountant who came from County Offaly; and of his wife Annie, a native of County Dublin. They were a comfortably-off Church of Ireland family, and Annie devoted herself entirely to the vocation of being wife and home-maker, and mother to Arthur and his elder sister Violet. Arthur showed an early aptitude for music and he was duly enrolled at the Roya1 Academy of Music, Westland Row, where he studied piano and organ. He was a nervous boy who, every day, dreaded going to school. But going to the Academy was a different matter. Music lessons were a pleasant meeting between a gifted pupil and teachers who were also friends. For the rest of his life Arthur carried in his head the image of those kindly men, Mr. Wilson and Dr. Marchant, who became his "musical uncles", as he called them.

When young Arthur was sufficiently advanced in his keyboard studies, Mr. Wilson chose him as his deputy organist at the Unitarian church in St. Stephen's Green. And Dr. Marchant entrusted him with the mighty organ in St. Patrick's Cathedral, to play at the less demanding week-day morning services. This soon led to accompanying Evensong at Trinity College Chapel. And later, when Arthur had set his heart on entering Trinity, Dr. Marcbant helped him secure a grant which enabled him to pay the fees. At the age of 18, Arthur began his studies at Trinity, reading Arts and Divinity. For some reason he didn't sit the final examination in Divinity, but be did complete his Arts Degree, and by 1922 he was also a Bachelor of Music.

1922 was, of course, the very year in which the first Government of the newly-founded Saorstát Eireann took office. Within a year, they had set up an Army School of Music, and had invited two distinguished German musicians, Colonel Fritz Brase and Captain Frederick Sauerzweig, to get it organised and running. Bandsmen were recruited, rehearsal accommodation was found and the very first student conductor arrived in 1924, none other than Arthur Duff, Bachelor of Arts and of Music. A year later, he was Lieutenant Arthur Duff. So it was in the army that he got his first taste and experience of conducting, which included rehearsals almost every day, as well as public concerts and ceremonial functions. But I think I have to say that Arthur was not really cut out to be a military man. He never got used to wearing the uniform, and he actually disliked Military Band Music.

In any event, the training of young bandsmen proceeded apace, and by 1925 Colonel Brase was in a position to form a second Army band. For some months, it was based in Dublin, but was then transferred permanently to Cork in April 1926, as the Army No. 2 Band, later to be renamed the Band of the Southern Command. And Lieutenant Arthur Duff was appointed its first conductor. Just a few weeks before his assignment to that post came the launching of 2RN, Ireland's new broadcasting service, later to develop into Radio Éireann. A year after that, in April 1927, a Radio Station was opened in Cork, and Arthur and the Band gained their first experience of broadcasting, taking part in several programmes from Sunday's Well, where a disused female gaol had been converted into a radio studio.

Arthur was by no means a loner. He enjoyed the conviviality of the social round in Cork, made many new friendships, and settled in very well. But I come now to a short chapter in his life which must have held out every prospect of happiness but which came to a close all too soon. As an Army Officer and Band Conductor, Arthur took part in many ceremonial functions and was often on the guest list for diplomatic receptions. On one such occasion, probably at the United States Consulate in Merrion Square in Dublin, Arthur met and fell in love with Frances Emma Ferris, the daughter of Cornelius Ferris, who was the United States Consul General and therefore the senior ranking U.S. Diplomat in the Irish Free State. There was no American Embassy here at the time. Frances Emma must have been a very attractive girl, and Arthur probably cut quite a dash in his handsome officer's uniform. Obviously they were attracted to one another, became engaged, and were married on the 6th of November 1929 in that same Unitarian Church where Arthur had played the organ in his student days. Their one and only daughter was born the following October and was christened Sylvia.

There were several developments now, in fairly quick succession. First, Frances' father retired from his post as U.S. Consul some time in 1930, and he and his wife returned home to the States. Also in 1930, Arthur was recalled by Colonel Fritz Brase to Dublin and in the following year - astonishingly - he resigned his Army commission. It was a courageous thing to do, in all the circumstances, and one wonders whether he got fed up with uniforms and parades and military band music. But there is also reason to believe that he and Colonel Brase, who was a strict disciplinarian in the Prussian mould, did not always see eye to eye. Finally and very sadly, Arthur's wife Frances, left Ireland with their 14-month-old baby in December 1931 to return to her parents' home in America, and Arthur never saw his little daughter again.

Perhaps it is idle to speculate about these events, but it is probable that Frances, having been accustomed to a life of comfort and ease, must have found that married life on an Irish Lieutenants income - let alone that of an unemployed ex-Lieutenant - was a big change from the diplomatic social round. She probably regarded Arthur's resignation from the Army as an act of madness. And doubtless she also felt a bit deserted when her parents retired and left Ireland. It is good to know that she and Arthur kept up quite a friendly correspondence for a few years, but a permanent separation was inevitable. Frances did pay one more visit to Dublin almost twenty years later, perhaps with a view to a possible reunion, but by that time - 1950 - Arthur's health was already failing, and no reunion took place. To look back, it is obvious that the departure of his wife and baby in 1931 must have been a shattering blow to Arthur, and his life was "changed utterly", to use Yeats' phrase.

The astonishing thing is that, in spite of all these trials and tribulations, Arthur Duff now entered into the most creative period of his career. He went back to live with his mother and his sister Violet in Monkstown and began to earn a living as an organist in various churches in Dublin and Bray. He joined the Leinster Society of Organists, of which he later became Vice-President. For a time, he was a Director of the Abbey Theatre Orchestra in succession to Dr. John F. Larchet. He joined the Arts Club, where he made many new friendships in the fields of theatre, painting and poetry. AND be began to compose!

His Ballet The Drinking Horn, was produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1933. He wrote incidental music for Denis Johnston's play, A Bride for the Unicorn as well as for the five plays by W.B. Yeats. He was the Editor, along with Yeats and F.R. Higgins, of two volumes of Broadsides, which were published by the Cuala Press, the firm originally founded by two of Yeats's sisters. Arthur wrote a play called Cadenza in Black which was successfully produced by Lord Longford's Company at the Gate Theatre in 1937, and was later broadcast in a radio adaptation.

In that same year also, 1937, Arthur Duff joined the broadcasting service, in the role of Studio Control Officer. "Studio Control" - or "Balance and Control", as it came to be called - was intended to ensure that the musical sound which reached the listener at home was as close as possible to the actual sound in the studio. Maurice Gorham, in his book, Fifty Years of Irish Broadcasting, describes Arthur as a man of immense charm, a musician of rare sensitivity and of all-round gifts, and a most useful accession to the station's small staff.

It was during these years too that Arthur began to compose the music by which he is best remembered today. He liked most of all to write for strings, sometimes with piano or harp. When he did add some wind instruments, it was usually a matter of a small woodwind group, and the closest he came to using brass was to add just a pair of horns. Invariably, he respected every note of the melody, especially when it was modal or in a minor key, and his beautiful harmony was always true to both the sentiment and the tonality of the tune - no vulgar chromaticism or violent discords. Between 1940 and 1944, his Suite For Strings, Music For Strings, and A Meath Pastoral were premiered by the Dublin String Orchestra under Terry O'Connor. All of these are small-scale pieces, but in character they are at one with Arthur's own sensitive disposition. The titles of some of the individual movements give you some idea of the composer's sometimes melancholy nostalgia, his love of Irish folklore and of Dublin and its neighbouring counties. I'm thinking of titles such as Twilight in Templeogue, Windy Gap, Fishamble Street 1742, On the Bridge at Clash, Tir na n-Og, and many others.

Mention of Fishamble Street 1742 prompts me to pinpoint the year 1942. That was the year in which Arthur Duff achieved his Doctorate in Music at Trinity College, Dublin. He was one of a very select few who succeeded in obtaining that great distinction by examination. 1942 also marks the year in which I myself first met Arthur. In April of that year, all of musical Dublin celebrated the bicentenary of that first performance of Handel's Messiah at Fishamble Street. The celebrations included performances of Messiah itself, but also of a vast range of Handel's music in its many forms. As a student cellist at the time, I found myself taking part in several of the orchestral and chamber music events, one of which was a rather select gathering in a large private house in Sandymount. In the months following, I was lucky enough to be invited again by our host of that occasion to several Sunday evening gramophone recitals at his home. The guests included some very distinguished people. There was Margaret Burke Sheridan, our greatest operatic diva of the 1920's and 30's; Captain Michael Bowles, then at the peak of his popularity as organiser and conductor of public concerts by the Radio Éireann Orchestra; and Brian O Nualláin, alias Flann O'Brien, alias Myles na gCopaleen, whose company I enjoyed immensely.

But my most enduring memory of those Sunday evenings was the gramophone recital presented by the newly conferred Doctor Arthur Duff. He introduced his programme by talking about his own taste in music, which he described as "eclectic". He savoured this word "eclectic", repeated it, and told us what he meant by it in a musical context. It meant, he said, that he was very "choosy" in what he considered to be the best music, and that he had selected certain "gods" among the great composers. These gods were the only composers who really mattered to him. He told us who his gods were, and although I can't remember all of them, they included the great English Madrigalists; then Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart; Schubert and Grieg; Delius and Peter Warlock; Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax and E.J. Moeran. In other words, a few from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and some from our own century, but very little from the 1800s. No Mendelssohn or Schumann, Brahms or Tchaikowsky.

I wish I had time to play some of Arthur's eclectic choice of music which he presented to us that evening, or indeed to play some of Arthur's own music, but that will have to await another occasion. But I do want to mention one moment which I found most moving that evening. Arthur's recital included Vaughan William's setting of the poem, "On Bredon Hill", from A.E. Housman' s cycle, "A Shropshire Lad". I have a vivid memory of Arthur reading that poem with great feeling. He was almost in tears as he came to those last two lines: "0 noisy bells, be dumb; I bear you, I will come". Of course, I knew nothing of Arthur's personal or family life at the time, but in the light of what I know now, I sometimes wonder whether his tears on that occasion were because he somehow identified with that Shropshire lad whose loved one had stolen away one early morning, and left him to answer those noisy bells and go to church alone.

I got to know Arthur Duff very well during the next decade or so. He was promoted to Assistant Music Director in Radio Eireann in 1945. In the summer of 1948, I became a member of the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra and played under Arthur's conductorship several times. His style in the rostrum was to speak quietly, rarely raising his voice or showing annoyance, and using minimal gestures and body language. One of the excellent results of this was that if he did suddenly make a really big gesture, looking for a dramatic accent or a fortissimo from the orchestra, the players were so startled that they produced a huge sound in response. I remember contrasting this at the time with a guest conductor (who shall be nameless), a very tall man with long arms, who conducted with big circular movements like a windmill, even when the music was soft. The result was that when he wanted a real forte, he had nothing left to convey the idea to the musicians.

In 1952, when I became Manager of the Symphony Orchestra, I moved to the Henry Street headquarters of Radio Éireann, where Arthur shared an office with Rhoda Coghill. They had known one another since childhood when, at the age of 8 or 10, Rhoda had won first prize and Arthur second prize, in Junior Piano Feis Ceoil competition. Rhoda became Radio Éireann's Official Accompanist for many years and is still happily with us, into her nineties and as alert as ever. In 1953, we were joined by Sean 0 Riada as Assistant Music Director, with whom I shared an office for three years or so. All of us were working under Fachtna ó hAnnracháin, who was Music Director.

Arthur and Seán Ó Riada soon became close friends, sharing, as they did, an interest in musical composition and also in Greek verse, believe it or not; not to mention their enjoyment of the occasional convivial glass in one of the local hostelries. It was during these last few years of his short life that Arthur produced an orchestral Suite from the music of his Ballet of 20 years before, The Drinking Horn. He also wrote a great number of stylish arrangements of Irish airs and dances, for broadcast performances by the Radio Eireann Light Orchestra. Sadly, these have been neglected for many years, probably because they have never been published.

In spite of all this activity, it was clear that Arthur was in very poor health. His condition deteriorated rapidly in 1956, and he passed away peacefully on the 23rd of September in that year. All of Dublin's musical, theatrical and literary fraternities attended the funeral. The headstone over his grave in Mount Jerome cemetery reads: "Resting where no shadows fall".

Before I close, I would like to say that I am indebted to a young music student named Evin O'Meara, from Monasterevin, for sharing with me the results of his research into Arthur Duff s life and work, which Evin has been studying for a thesis for his Music Education Degree at Trinity College, Dublin.

And I have a postscript to add: During the fourteen years or so that I knew Arthur Duff, I honestly didn't know whether he was a bachelor or had ever been married. Doubtless his contemporaries death, I received a letter bearing a Belgian postmark, which began: "Dear Mr. Roche, I am Sylvia Duff Knight, Arthur Duff s daughter". To say that I was bowled over was the understatement of the year. To be brief, Sylvia Duff Knight, prompted by her musician daughter, wanted to find out all she could about her father, and had written first, to the late Colonel J.M. Doyle, a former Director of the Army School of Music, who gave her the names and addresses of several former friends and colleagues of Arthur's. She then wrote to all of us, and in the following year she came to Dublin, called to see each of us in turn, and collected all the reminiscences and information she could about her late father. She and her husband, Fred Knight, a retired Brigadier-General in the U.S. Army, recently celebrated their Golden Jubilee. They live in Florida and have two daughters, both married with children; one living in Atlanta, Georgia, and the other in Adelaide, Australia. The Australian daughter is the musical one who inspired Sylvia to research her father's life and work. So Arthur Duff has a daughter, two grand-daughters, and four great-grandchildren, and his musical heritage lives on in faraway Australia.