A new festival took the peasant poetry of the graves at Romania’s Merry Cemetery and put them to the music of Shaun Davey

AS THE WIND whipped up and lightning crackled over the mountains of Maramures, Rita Connolly feared a pioneering Irish performance was about to end in disaster.

“We looked at each other on stage as the storm strengthened and whispered that, if nothing else, this will make a great story for the memoirs,” Connolly said after the elements abated and allowed her and five other Irish soloists to finish playing in this remote corner of Romania.

Though the stage wasn’t blown down, struck by lightning or flooded by rain, the inaugural La Sapanta festival will not quickly be forgotten by the Irish and Romanian musicians who performed there, or by those who witnessed their remarkable collaboration.

The night before the storm-tossed final performance the Irish collective had joined a Romanian orchestra and Orthodox church choir in the tiny village of Sapanta to play 12 songs written by Connolly’s husband, the renowned composer Shaun Davey.

The cycle is called Voices from the Merry Cemetery, and this was its first performance in the unique burial ground that inspired it.

Sapanta’s cemetery is famous across Romania and attracts visitors from around the world, for the brightly painted wooden crosses that each carry a poem about the person buried beneath and a picture of what they did in life, or how they met their death.

Many feature people farming, cooking, sewing, carousing in the pub and complaining about their mother-in-law; others portray unfortunate locals being struck by cars, falling under trains or suffering deadly electric shocks. Several show children who died young through accident or disease.

The cartoonish style of the carvings belies the tragedy of their subject, and the epitaph on each colourful cross celebrates life and faces down death with a rough-hewn, first-person peasant poetry that captures the optimism, energy and stoicism of the people of Maramures.

Davey has set these witty and touching epitaphs to music, played for the first time in the Merry Cemetery last weekend.

As a crescent moon rose over Sapanta, burning torches flickered among the crosses and a group of local women in richly embroidered traditional dress processed from the church through the cemetery towards the stage, clutching candles and sending haunting psalms into the night sky.

On stage, Connolly, Liam O’Flynn, Noel Eccles, Rod McVey, Neil Martin and Gerry O’Beirne prepared to perform with a chamber orchestra and 50-strong male choir from Sibiu, in Transylvania, where Davey’s cycle debuted last year when it was a European City of Culture. Before them stood David Brophy, the principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

What followed transfixed the people of Sapanta and visitors from around Romania who had crammed into the cemetery to hear it. By turns melancholy and rousing, contemplative and uplifting, the concert created what Davey called “a joyous vision of the living and the dead”.

“I was very moved to see the whole community here in the cemetery, sitting among the graves and the crosses,” the composer said after the performance.

“When we did the piece in Sibiu I thought it would be wonderful – but impossible – to do it here. But amazingly we got a ‘yes’ from Fr Lutsai.”

Fr Grigore Lutsai, Sapanta’s Orthodox priest, hailed the event as an “extraordinary experience for the people here”. “I didn’t think we could do it, but then Peter Hurley started working on me,” he said.

Fr Lutsai calls Dublin-born Hurley, a 42-year-old resident of Romania, “the most charming man I’ve ever met”. “I said: ‘We don’t have the resources,’ and he told me that he was not a rich man either but was totally committed to doing this. He talked to me day and night, and finally I agreed. He is a man of amazing character.”

Hurley made extraordinary efforts to stage the concert and three-day festival in Sapanta and hopes it will become an annual event. Plans came together too late to secure funding, so Hurley ploughed in the last of his savings and received confirmation that Davey and the Irish musicians could attend only three weeks before the start of the festival.

“Fr Lutsai was initially very enthusiastic, but with all the uncertainty and the lack of time that waned a little bit. When I said one day that, okay, we’re doing it, his jaw dropped and he took a step back. He took some time to think and then said: ‘All right, I’m in 100 per cent. Let’s do it.’ ”

As the Irish players and the Romanian orchestra and choir sent music soaring above the torch-lit Merry Cemetery, Davey spoke for many people when he called this “a perfect moment when the wildest of dreams came true”. For him this project is part of a drive to promote a “democracy of musicianship” between traditional and classically trained musicians and church singers, and to reconnect with ordinary people who have become alienated from contemporary classical music.

Hurley hopes the festival will help “preserve the living traditions, based on the rural cycle, that have not been lost in Romania”, a country whose grim history of communist dictatorship followed by corrupt capitalism has made its people suspicious of outsiders bearing gifts.

“We did something that has never happened before in Romania,” said Hurley. “We came to town and put on a festival without expecting anything in return. Some of the locals wonder why, but with time, as it all sinks in, I hope they’ll realise that we did it for the best of reasons.”

Few of those who heard Voices from the Merry Cemeterylast weekend need any more convincing. "The music was wonderful, so happy and so sad, and I had goosebumps because I knew the people who the songs were about," said local woman Irina Pop. "I dearly hope the festival happens every year. It's just a bit of a shame that an Irishman and not a Romanian thought to create it."