A biography of Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer (1882–1957)

I may subtitle this "James Joyce's Favourite Composer" to make it more marketable. But there are many more sides to Palmer than his personal connection to Joyce and his great cycle of Joyce songs. Since the early 1980s, Palmer is acknowledged as having been the first composer to set poems by James Joyce to music, even though these were carefully hidden during most of his lifetime. Joyce considered them "the best" of the many settings that he knew.

But Palmer was also an ambitious composer of Celticist operas, both in the Irish and English language. The composition of some of them coincided with the Irish Civil War and the early years of the Irish Freestate, in which opera was not a priority, be they Irish or not. Another obstacle was his failing health, and he was increasingly unable to work as his multiple sclerosis developed.

This will be a fascinating (I hope) account of a man fighting many odds concurrently, who adapted the scope and the style of his music to the demands of his time and who lived out in secret a musical career for which Ireland in the 1920s to 1950s was not yet prepared.

As of early 2025, I am gathering material (scores, reviews, other sources) but will not start writing before my Irish music history will have appeared.