Love is in the air as Claudia chooses wedding songs and appears in tale of one of Cork's great romances
Claudia Rose Long and Cormac Smith in Scéalta Grá na hÉireann on TG4.
For Claudia Rose Long, a wedding has got to be all about the music. Chatting excitedly about her wedding plans from her home near Manchester, the 23-year-old singer, who has performed at her fair share of ceremonies during her teens in her native Cork, is already listing musical choices for her big day with soccer star Seani Maguire, set for June 2022.
“I’ve always loved love stories and weddings and stuff, and I think that’s from being around them so much,” Long says. “For me, it’s not the ceremony as much as the music that’s important. I think you can tell the story of the couple with the music.” So what does the singer have lined up for her own big day? “My grandmother used to sing This Is My Song by Engelbert Humperdinck, and I love Benedictus, which I first heard in Cork School of Music. So I have those two, but I just want the whole day to be filled with music, so we’re both making playlists.
“We have very different taste in music, so I don’t know how that’s going to go! He wants more Irish traditional and I want all this R&B and rap. It’s going to be a big mix.” Long, who first caught the public’s eye in UK singing reality show The Voice when she was in her teens in 2015, got engaged to her footballer sweetheart Sean Maguire in December 2019.
The Ireland and Preston striker surprised Long with a romantic Christmas proposal surrounded by family members.
“Little did I know they were all in cahoots with each other, planning the whole engagement,” Long says. “We went for a walk in a big forest park near where we live. I never thought he’d propose like that: I thought it might be a dinner or something. In the middle of the forest, he had a photographer waiting to capture the whole moment so I could look back on it. It was really simple, and nothing like I’d ever imagined.”
The young couple met five years ago, when Maguire moved to Cork for his football career, Long, who grew up in Ballyphehane, explains.
“He was 21, and he was asking his friends if there were any girls around. My name came up, so he added me on Facebook and Twitter and then just slid into my DMs,” she says with a laugh. “He says he didn’t, but I’m like, ‘don’t lie, you did'.”
A thoroughly modern romance, then, and one that Long freely admits doesn’t have a great deal in common with another great love story that’s been occupying her thoughts: the tragic tale of Irish star-crossed lovers Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and her husband Art Ó Laoghaire.
Long is starring, and singing, in an episode of TG4’s Scéalta Grá na hÉireann, based on the story of Ní Chonaill’s passionate love affair and elopement with the dashing Corkman Ó Laoghaire, whose murder led to her composing the famous lament Caoineadh Art Ó Laoghaire.
Long says she was very moved by the tale. “When the producer told me about the lament I felt a connection to it straight away. Thankfully, I haven’t had a lot of experience of grief and keening over someone, but I’ve sung a lot of songs that were ahead of my years. I felt a connection because she too expressed everything through music. And I just loved the story. I feel it’s this really great, passionate romance.”
The role involved a reimagining of what the famous poem would have sounded like in its original song form, and something of a stylistic departure for the singer.
“You couldn’t hear a lot of people sing the lament, so the only way to learn it was to be sent the lyrics and translation, and then I worked with musicologist Nóirín Ní Riain who sang the original Sean Nós style version of it,” Long says.
“I’d never dipped my toes in Irish traditional style. Irish singing has a lot of ornamentation; you learn from ear, and then you interpret it. But once I did it, I actually loved it. When my family heard it, they loved it and they said, maybe that’s where your career is leading to: these are your roots. I feel like I found something that I didn’t even know I could do with my voice”.
- Scéalta Grá na hÉireann is on Wednesday, Feb 3, at 8.30pm on TG4
