Marble Halls: A Song History

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"I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls" is an aria from The Bohemian Girl, the most successful opera by the Dublin-born composer Michael William Balfe (1808–1870).[1] Alfred Bunn wrote the libretto, loosely drawn from Cervantes's tale La gitanilla, and the opera opened at the Drury Lane Theatre in London on 27 November 1843.[2] After the premiere it ran for more than a hundred nights.[3] Stagings followed in 1844 in Dublin, New York and Philadelphia, and translated versions later reached Vienna, Trieste and Rouen.[2] Britannica singles out this song as one of two ballads from the opera that went on to appear in many arrangements.[1]

A packed theatre auditorium with tiers of boxes facing a lit stage

Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, Drury Lane Theatre, hand-colored etching and aquatint, 1808. Drury Lane Theatre, where The Bohemian Girl opened in 1843; this view shows the earlier theatre on the site.

Chappell first issued the sheet music in London around December 1843, and about twenty years later a publisher in Macon, Georgia, was selling an edition that credited the singer Mrs. Seguin.[4] Writers kept returning to it; James Joyce placed the opera in his Dubliners story "Eveline" and gave the song itself to a character in "Clay," and it also surfaces in work by Booth Tarkington and Willa Cather.[5] Laurel and Hardy made their own version of the opera in 1936, and Enya's arrangement from her 1991 album Shepherd Moons was heard in Martin Scorsese's 1993 film The Age of Innocence.[5] Linda Brockinton, a National Dulcimer Champion, includes it in Simply Dulcimer, her collection of fingerstyle arrangements for mountain dulcimer of mostly Scottish and Irish pieces.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Marble Halls"

Sources

  1. Britannica: "Michael William Balfe".
  2. ESAT, Stellenbosch University: "The Bohemian Girl".
  3. James Joyce Music: "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls".
  4. Free Library of Philadelphia: "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls".
  5. Southwest Review: "Needle Drops | Enya's 'Marble Halls'".
  6. Linda Brockinton: "Simply Dulcimer".
  7. Image: Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, Drury Lane Theatre, hand-colored etching and aquatint, 1808. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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