John Spillane’s magnum opus? A folk opera inspired by the Lough in Cork

Just when you thought that three-act double concept albums about Victorian fairytales in Gaelic were a thing of the past, along comes John Spillane to divest you of the notion.
What on earth, I ask, made him embark on Fíoruisce — The Legend of the Lough, a creative enterprise that makes Rick Wakeman’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1975) sound like a simple pop song by comparison? “I know, I know,” Spillane says, not at all apologetically but with good humour. “It was a lifelong ambition.”
The Cork-based songwriter and storyteller says he has long had an interest in the story of Fior-usga, a fairytale collected in the early 1800s by the Anglo-Irishman Thomas Crofton Croker and published in his book, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, in 1838.
The story, Spillane explains, is a mind-bending mixture of Irish mythology, folklore, shape-shifting characters, war, hexes and elegies that end with the submerging of a kingdom. Folklore has it that the realm metamorphosed into Cork Lough, a freshwater lake to the southwest of Cork city. On a clear day, the legend informs us, caps of the underworld towers can be seen.
Now in his early sixties, Spillane’s career has been 40 years in the making. In 1981, much to the despair of his mother, he left a job at a bank to try singing and songwriting. He and a friend bought a van and some loudspeakers. “I was a rocker and then I was in a jazz band in the 1980s, the Stargazers, and a trad band in the 1990s, Nomos.”
He didn’t completely abandon nonmusic career options, however, later attending University College Cork to study English, Irish, Latin and philosophy. While he became a teacher for some years, the thought of attaining full-time status as a songwriter took hold in the early 1990s.
Spillane says the concept double album is his “magnum opus”. He is passionate about Irish folklore and the history of the Irish language, and while he is thankful to Crofton Croker for his gathering of folktales, he is also wary of the reasons.
“Oh, his heart was in it, I think he was a good man,” Spillane says. “But William Butler Yeats was critical of that generation. He said they had an Arcadian view of Ireland. They saw the lovely people among the fields, peasants collecting hay and bringing baskets full of herring up from the shore. They didn’t see the poverty, however, and they felt no guilt or shame about being of Protestant descent, with all the entitlement that gave them.”
What’s more, he continues, “the Irish language was invisible to them, even though it would have been the majority language spoken in Ireland in the 1820s. Indeed, Gaelic was one of the great literary languages of Europe. We had a sophisticated culture here, the only country in Europe with professional bard schools. But to them that didn’t exist and they didn’t have one word of Irish.”
Spillane’s album began to take shape following a conversation in the early 2000s with the songwriter and guitarist Giordaí Ua Laoghaire. “He mentioned something about an opera and the lough, and that was the first time I heard the two words together in the same sentence — lough and opera.
“He mentioned it casually, you know. He said he wasn’t going to do it or anything, but I could visualise it because a lot of the early operas were based on mythology. I thought it through and realised there was scope for an opera. I spent three years working intensely on it, from 2015 to 2017.”
During this period Spillane workshopped songs with the opera composer and conductor John O’Brien, a batch of opera singers and Pat Kiernan, formerly the artistic director of the theatre company Corcadorca. “The idea was to put it on at the lough, but I never succeeded in getting the funding. It was on the shelf for three years and then in 2021 I got a bursary from the Arts Council.”
Additional academic support came from Gearóid Ó Crualaoich at the UCC and Michelle O Riordan from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Despite the scholarly dimensions of the research, Spillane says a rock’n’roll spirit runs through the work. “I had a wonderful adventure doing it. When I went to make the record, however, I changed from opera to sean-nós [‘old style’] singers.”
The change in singing styles occurred when he heard the traditional singer Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin. “I said, that’s my king, the king of the lough. And he looks like a king of the lough too. And then I heard Ríoghnach Connolly sing and fell in love with what she does with her voice.”
There were other reasons. “For the opera singers I had to have an in-between person. I sang on to tapes, Eoghan or Ríoghnach wrote down the dots and gave it to them. But with the sean-nós people there was nothing written down — you give them the tune and they can do it by ear, they just get it. Also, sean-nós singers are like jazz musicians in that they will ornament in their particular way. They feel and negotiate their way around things.
“After this I might just make an ordinary album,” Spillane adds. “I’m 63, so I suppose I’m not doing too bad. I mean, for the past 25 or so years I’ve been self-employed full-time and it’s still going fine. I’m what they call successful. That’s what many musicians and songwriters want, isn’t it?”
A lot of people are brilliant when they are in their twenties, he notes, “but they peak young. Poets tend to get better as they get older. Painters also get better as the years pass. A lot of young songwriters seem to have something that is not developed, or that will last long term. Unfortunately some can’t continue to do it. Also it can be tough in that you can be successful and still not make a living, so I know I’m lucky.”
What does he put this down to? Spillane mulls over the question. “Well,” he says, ever the story teller, “I’m the tortoise and my career is more a marathon than a sprint.”
Fíoruisce — The Legend of the Lough is released on Sep 13; fioruisce.ie