NO 73 MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN 2 - Irish Traditional Music Archive

The Premises of the Irish Traditional Music Archive 11
OTHER HOUSES ON MERRION SQUARE
Remarkably, for an area that was once a bastion of British culture, other
houses on Merrion Square also have longstanding associations with
Irish traditional music.
David Richard Pigot & John Edward Pigot
At no 80 Merrion Square the Right Honourable David Richard Pigot
(1797–1873), the Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer from 1846 and a
barrister originally from Cork, lived from 1834. A colleague of Daniel
O’Connell (who lived at no 58), and a Vice-President of the Society for the
Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland from its foundation
in 1851, he was a contributor of traditional tunes to the collections of the
artist and antiquarian George Petrie (1790–1866), the foremost nineteenthcentury
collector of Irish traditional music. The ITMA holds original manuscripts
of Petrie and copies of his music collections.
David Pigot’s son, the Cork-born barrister John Edward Pigot (pen-name
‘Fermoy’, 1822–71) lived at no 80 until 1851. He was an active collector
of traditional music from the 1840s to the 1860s, and was joint Honorary
Secretary from 1851 of the Society for the Preservation and Publication
of the Melodies of Ireland. His manuscript collection of over 3,000 tunes
is now in the Royal Irish Academy. A friend of Thomas Davis (who lived
on Baggot Street), Pigot was a music editor of the Young Irelander newspaper
The Nation in the 1840s, and the music editor of John O’Daly’s
1849 Dublin-published collection The Poets and Poetry of Munster. 32 A
copy of Pigot’s RIA manuscript and of various editions of the Nation
songs and the O’Daly volume are held in the ITMA.
‘Sagairt tar teóradh’, a melody contributed to George Petrie’s traditional music
collections by David Richard Pigot, published by Charles Villiers Stanford ed.,
The Complete Petrie Collection of Irish Music (London 1902–05)