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Why?

John Barton Armstrong

£5.45

	…a good right-hand study … the title speaks volumes.
	— Piano

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Ennio Caironi, Piano

This video is based on exactly the same audio recording as is presented earlier on this page; it merely adds imagery to the existing sound.

Catalogue code: FM135 • Published: 1947
Entry last updated: 23rd July 2026

	Arnold Bax set to music only four of his own poems: two of them with authorship attributed to his nom-de-plume, Dermot O’Byrne. I recall asking the Scots Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean, “Who is a Gael?” He replied: “One who has the language, the Gaelic.” Now that this ancient language’s survival is threatened, the point is all the more clamant. That authoritative view (from the acknowledged doyen Gaelic poet of recent history) deserves consideration. It is facile to ridicule Bax’s alter ego of Dermot O’Byrne, but Bax had the Irish Gaelic language. The volume under review reproduces the MS of his translation of Synge’s play, The Shadow of the Glen, into Bax’s Irish Gaelic. Synge did not write in Gaelic. Neither did Yeats. Bax did. He justified his nom de plume, Dermot O’Byrne.
	—Ronald Stevenson, International Piano Quarterly