★★★★★
Trigger warning: abuse
Modern slavery, abuse, and human rights violations are not something you would usually expect to be tackled in an evening of classical music. Yet Deidre Brenner, pianist and instigator of The Magdalene Songs, felt it was the perfect way to honour the women of the Magdalene laundries, a group of punitive institutions for ‘fallen women’ run by religious orders which from 1922 to 1996 incarcerated over 10,000 women and girls in the Republic of Ireland.
The performance is part of the Oxford International Song Festival, a champion of classical song for 24 years. This year’s theme was “Stories in Song”, with 67 performances covering music from around the world: The Magdalene Songs were perfectly placed here to give voice to the experience of a group of women institutionally silenced for well over a hundred years.
A sentence in a Magdalene laundry meant infinite detention with no legal basis. They provided numerous religious bodies, state agencies, and government departments in Ireland – including the President’s house – with laundry and needlework services without paying their workers. This system was well-known and well-integrated into Irish society. Women and girls as young as nine were brought to the laundries by police, clergy, orphanages, hospitals and abusive families, their ‘crimes’ ranging from unmarried motherhood and perceived promiscuity, to childhood abuse and mental illness.
The Magdalene Songs collection is an ongoing project by Deirdre Brenner in collaboration with many prominent female Irish composers, including Deirdre McKay, Rhona Clarke, Elaine Agnew, and Elaine Brennan. It was created in order to honour the victims of the Laundries by giving voice to their experiences in the hope of encouraging further dialogue about the human rights abuses committed by the Laundries.
I attended the pre-concert discussion, led by Deirdre Brenner and human rights lawyer Maeve O’Rourke, internationally recognised for her work interviewing the Magdalene laundry victims. “Every woman I ever interviewed thought they would die in there”, she tells us, describing the conditions faced by the victims.
The evening performance was captivating from the start. Set in the Holywell Music Room, each song put to music the words of testimonies from individual survivors interviewed as part of The Magdalene Oral History Project, which O’Rourke was a part of. Both Brenner and the mezzo-soprano, Lotte Betts-Dean, were dressed in green and black signaling the grief of Ireland, and after a brief introduction to the project and the Laundries, we were thrown into the testimonies.
Betts-Dean had just the right amount of storytelling ability to elevate the colloquial Irish dialect from the page, although it would have been more natural had she been Irish herself. Nonetheless, the words and music themselves were enough to convey the trauma. With dissonant, deliberately uncomfortable chords and melodies in the first few songs, the breathy voice of the mezzo-soprano sung testimonies of being “put…on the wooden table” in punishment, and individuals who “went in as a baby”, with just the right amount of anger and shame, avoiding the pitfall of overperformance.
From the third testimony it was anger that reigned, emphasised by traditional hymn-like chords being broken off, never-ending scales, and hand slams on the piano. Unconventional techniques, such as deliberately loud breathing and hitting and plucking the piano strings, rather than playing the keys, made the performance truly interesting as an exercise in translating trauma into musical terms.
The last two songs were the culmination of this project, the penultimate relying on just one sentence of testimony: “She denied she was my mother.” This one sentence was captivating, repeated and gradually building in long phrases. The dissonant harmonies vanished and were replaced by a return to traditional Irish sean-nós keening (a rhythmically free, expressive lament). The piano was reduced to a near-single line, weaving in and out of the melody and focusing our attention on the devastating words. The whole audience listened in tense silence, and a collective breath was let out at the end.
The silence was continued as the mezzo lit a candle, before concluding with the final song, ‘Litany to the Magdalene Dead’. The focus shifted back to the piano, as Betts-Dean recited in monotone the names of 72 of the 1,867 women known to have died in a laundry, arranged so that the initial of their last names spelled out ‘DOLOREM’: Latin for sorrow. The audience, reading along in their programs, looked like they were praying. Each woman’s name was chanted, along with the laundry and her date of death: they ranged from 1847 to 2015. The piano perfectly conveyed the poise and grace of the funeral atmosphere, and the final silence after Betts-Dean blew out the candle stretched for a few seconds before the first smatterings of applause grew to a standing ovation lasting five minutes. It was the perfect, dignified homage to those who were denied dignity during their lives.
The Magdalen laundries remain a polemical debate in Ireland. The 2013 investigation by the Irish government into them was focused only on the extent of state involvement, rather than the treatment of women, and worked with sealed religious documents which were given by the Orders on the condition that they would return undisclosed to the public.
Although the enquiry resulted in the establishment of a compensation scheme, with €32.8 million having been paid to over 800 victims by March 2022, the religious orders who ran the laundries have refused to contribute to this scheme.
We still don’t know the names of many of the women who were admitted into these institutions, or the truth of their experiences. I hope that The Magdalene Songs, as it continues to grow and move people, will encourage and inspire reparations campaigns for these systematic violations against human rights.
