James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin, and neither the place nor the date of his birth were unimportant when it comes to the central place that music had in his life, an observation which was repeated by everybody who knew him. Nor was the family into which he was born: his mother, Mary Jane (called May by relatives), came from a family with keen musical interest and for fourteen years had studied singing and piano in a Dublin school for girls, while his father, John Stanislaus, in his student days had devoted much of his time to dramatic performances where he liked to demonstrate his singing skills, something he gladly did to the end of his life. In a story often recounted by him, he claimed that after one of his performances (which probably took place in 1875) the famous Irish tenor Barton McGuckin had said that he had “the best tenor voice in Ireland.” As Eileen Vance, Joyce’s young playmate, recalled, in the Joyces’ household in Bray (just outside Dublin) she often heard May accompany John as he sang opera arias, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, and other popular songs and ballads. The children also participated in the singing (James was the oldest of ten siblings), and the voice of the six-year-old future writer was already good enough to allow him to participate with his parents in an amateur concert. However, he never became an accomplished pianist, although in the boarding school to which he was sent he took extracurricular piano lessons. As his friend C.P. Curran recalled, in later life Joyce accompanied his singing by playing the piano “by ear”, that is, by improvising in which he relied on a rudimentary knowledge of chord formation. The writer’s brother, Stanislaus, claims in his memoirs that in this way James created “pretty airs” to many popular Irish poems, by J.C. Mangan and W.B. Yeats among others. (The only composition of this kind which survives is Bid Adieu to a poem written by Joyce himself, which is included on this CD.)