Thomas Moore, At the Mid-hour of Night

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was not exactly a composer. He was a poet, a singer, and an Irish nationalist. Published arrangements of Scottish songs had become popular in English salons in the late 18^th century (arranged by Haydn and Beethoven among others). Moore was recruited in 1807 by the publisher John Power to do something similar with Irish traditional materials. Moore found Irish tunes in previously published collections and occasionally from his own research or recollections, and outfitted them with new words. Moore’s versions characteristically slowed the traditional tunes down and his new lyrics often traded on Irish national themes and nostalgia for the past, both historical and personal. The new songs were given piano arrangments by Sir John Stevenson, and Moore sang them with great success in London salons. They were published in a series of collections entitled Moore’s Irish Melodies beginning in 1807 and continuing until 1834. These collections were immensely popular in their day and were reprinted again and again in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Many of the songs – “The harp that once through Tara’s halls,” “The minstrel boy to the war has gone,” “Tis the last rose of summer,” and many more – passed back into oral transmission, now with Moore’s words, as “traditional” Irish songs.

“At the Mid-hour of Night” in its original version was a quick triple-meter tune, entitled in Gaelic “O Maire Dhlis” (Oh, Molly, my dear). The original lyrics were:

O Molly my dear, I hear you're getting a man.

It would make my heart ache to see your wedding go on.

For fear of a fall, recall your senses in time,

For in spite of them all, sweet charming Molly, you're mine!

Moore found this version in an unpublished collection of songs that Edward Bunting had notated from the singing of Irish harpers beginning in the 1790s. Moore’s new lyrics went:

At the mid-hour of night,

When stars are weeping, I fly

To the lone vale we lov’d

When life shined warm in thine eye.

And I think that if spirits

Could steal from the regions of air,

To revisit past scenes of delight,

Thou wilt come to me there,

And tell me our love

Is remember’d ev’n in the sky.

Bunting was furious about the plagiarism, but there was little he could do, since Moore’s words were new and Bunting had taken the tune from a traditional musician in the first place.