Saturday, March 13, 2010
CORK City libraries have, once again, performed a noteworthy public service, principally through the efforts of librarian Liam Ronayne and Kitty Buckley of the music library.
Not only have they mounted a splendid exhibition that celebrates the life and times of the late Aloys Fleischmann; they have produced a very beautiful booklet that places ‘The Prof’ in a family context, a family which has made a really significant contribution to the cultural life of Cork.
In his address at the launch of this booklet, historian John A Murphy drew attention to a poignant event that happened in 1978.
Aloys Fleischmann Jnr, son of a German father and a Cork-born mother of German extraction, was made a Freeman of the City of Cork.
That father, Aloys Snr, was a native of Dachau, a town associated with its notorious concentration camp where thousands of Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis. Conferring the honour on Prof Fleischmann was Gerald Goldberg. Then Lord Mayor of Cork, Goldberg was the son of immigrant Jews who fled to Ireland to escape pogroms in their native Baltic home. It is difficult to imagine a more public act of reconciliation between Jew and Gentile; nor such an act of friendship between two men whose lives were devoted to the city they served so selflessly.
This is a remarkable booklet, one that should be in the home of anybody who cares about the cultural life of the southern capital.
While the Fleischmanns have been principally associated with music, Aloys Jnr was also a keen patron of visual art and both he and his parents were great friends with many of the literary figures of their time — Seán Ó Faoláin, Daniel Corkery, etc — as well as militant republicans such as Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney. It is, thus, a valuable record of a time and a spirit, a spirit that has made the city what it is.
It is a little book packed with evocative photographs. Despite this brevity, it is remarkably detailed.
Composers Patrick Zuk and Seamus de Barra, both of whom graduated from Prof Fleischmann’s UCC classes and his eldest daughter, Ruth, have written affectionate portraits of family members such as Aloys Snr, Tilly and Aloys Jnr that are concise yet full of information.
Ruth’s husband, Rainer Wurgau, designed and laid out the publication, and Aloys Jnr’s grandson, Max Fleischmann, did a superb job of digitising the 131 photographs that add so much to it.
To me, growing up in Cork in the 1950s, Herr Fleischmann was a legend. Ruth’s affectionate portrait of her grandfather contrasts with my hearsay knowledge of the man who dismissed Italian opera before Aida as "certainly not Grand Opera". He emerges as a gentle soul with total commitment to his art.
Patrick Zuk fills in the large gaps in my knowledge of Tilly, whom I vividly remember as a teacher, revered and feared in almost equal measure by my UCC contemporaries.
The uncompromisingly high standards that she demanded of her students resulted in a succession of splendid piano teachers continuing where she left off.
Seamus de Barra’s masterly essay on their son, Aloys Jnr, concentrates on Fleischmann the composer — though it does not neglect the organiser, the scholar, the advocate for better music education, the ardent nationalist, or the pedagogue — and does so in honest, admiring, elegant prose.
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