Bean Pháidín

Description

In this darkly comic song from the West of Ireland, a madly jealous woman wants to break the legs and murder the wife of the eponymous ‘Wee Paddy’, so she can have him all to herself. In this arrangement, the woman attempts to maintain a veneer of respectability by singing a sean-nós (old-style) song, but the mask soon slips and she descends into a jealous, murderous rage: the insistent ostinato in the inner voices becomes ever more obsessive; in the melody, the number of repetitions of ‘nach mise’ (not I) increases with each refrain; cross-rhythms exchange blows as the woman wishes for broken bones; the lamento bass in the chorus is extended into a chromatic fourth, or passus duriusculus by the end, a venerable symbol of lamentation.