This week’s blog post is guest written by Boston-based harpist and harp historian Nancy Hurrell, author of The Egan Irish Harps: Tradition, Patrons and Players (Four Courts Press, 2019). The Boston College Libraries helped support the volume’s publication through the Mary Stack McNiff endowment.
Visitors to Burns Library can be drawn to the many art treasures in the Irish Room, especially the harps on display. The two shamrock-covered Portable Irish Harps were made in Dublin in the 1820s by John Egan (fl. 1797-1829). In the early 1800s, this new harp model was pivotal to a continuing harp tradition in Ireland. Displayed side by side, the two harps provide a unique window into Egan’s work.
Visitors often ask, “What do the levers do?” The ivory knobs, called ditals, are key to this story. The ditals are linked by rods to a mechanism on the neck’s brass plate. When a dital is moved, the discs turn and the small ‘forks’ pinch the gut strings to raise the pitches by a semi-tone, thereby producing sharps and flats. In 1800s Ireland, the musical taste was for Italianate art music, as well as Irish airs, and both were playable on Egan’s harp model. Ireland’s venerable Gaelic harp, the country’s playable harp for centuries, was not idiomatic to continental art music and had become obsolete. The Gaelic harp, with wire strings and a fixed modal tuning, had been replaced in drawing rooms by newer instruments, the piano-forte and the French pedal harp. The inventor John Egan perceived a cultural need for a modernized Irish harp with chromatic capabilities, and these portable harps fitted with either ditals or ring stops (levers) revitalized the tradition of harping in Ireland.
Egan also understood the harp’s role as a symbol of national identity. Fusing old with new, his Portable Irish Harp model was formed in homage to Ireland’s oldest and most celebrated instrument, the ‘Brian Boru’ harp. With a bowed-pillar shape and small size, the Portable Irish Harp was touted in adverts as, “being the exact form as the beautiful antique Irish Harp in the Museum of Trinity College, Dublin.”
A small shamrock-adorned harp had potent patriotic associations, and Egan’s harps entered the marketplace alongside other nationalistic products like Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and Sydney Owenson’s (Lady Morgan) The Wild Irish Girl. The popular literary celebrities, Moore and Owenson, each owned and played Egan harps to enhance their public personas.
The library’s Egan harps were gifts from Dr. Frederick and Patricia Selch (the blue harp) and Heidi Nitze (the green harp). Constructed in slightly differing shapes, the earlier, slender Selch harp has a dramatic contour with an extended ‘head.’ This exquisite sculptural form was fashioned from carved and laminated sections of wood. Although visually pleasing, the design was ultimately problematic in that the angled string tension on some harps caused the head to bend out of line. In contrast, the Nitze harp has a noticeably thicker pillar and a more rounded head, reflecting the structural design changes later adopted. Both have splendid ornate neo-classical swirling acanthus decoration.
Looking inside each harp’s base reveals some additional design modifications. While the Selch base is finely carved and gilded, the Nitze harp base is very simply constructed, perhaps reflecting the firm’s need to streamline production. Inside the Selch harp is a stabilizing rod culminating with a ‘foot.’ When extended, this ingenious accessory steadied the harp held in the lap.
The harp inscriptions give further clues to the firm’s rise in commercial success and a need to accelerate harp production. The blue harp is inscribed, J. Egan, Inventor / Dawson St. / Dublin, with ‘inventor’ crediting Egan for his dital mechanism. The green harp’s inscription is: No. 2036 J. Egan 30 Dawson St Dublin / Harp Maker by Authority of the Royal Warrant to His Most Gracious Majesty George IVth & the Royal Family, with a royal crest. In 1821 John Egan was awarded the coveted royal warrant from George IV for excellence in his craft, and with this prestigious seal of approval, the demand for these highly desirable instruments increased in Ireland, England and on the Continent.
Decades later, the Portable Irish Harp was regarded as the template for Irish harp design. The shape and shamrock decoration became standard and was copied by succeeding generations of harp makers well into the twentieth century.
–Nancy Hurrell, Harpist and Harp Historian
Resources Consulted:
1.Egan Harp Collection (IMC.M182) John J. Burns Library, Boston College.
2. Hurrell, Nancy. The Egan Irish Harp. Massachusetts]: N. Hurrell, 2011.
3. Hurrell, Nancy. The Egan Irish Harps : Tradition, Patrons and Players. Dublin, Ireland ; Chicago, IL: Four Courts Press, 2019.
4. Thomas Moore Collection (MS.1986.156), John J. Burns Library, Boston College.
For more on the Harp Traditions of Ireland exhibits, see the digital version of this exhibit.
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