Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer

Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer (, 8 October 1882 – 29 November 1957) was an Irish composer, mainly of operas and vocal music, among them the first musical settings of poems by James Joyce. Biography Palmer was born of Protestant Irish parents in Staines, Middlesex (England). He grew up in South Woodford, near London, where his father, Abram Smythe Palmer, was vicar at Holy Trinity Church. He studied at Oxford where, in 1901, he was the youngest Bachelor of Music in college history. Between 1904 and 1907 he studied composition with Charles V. Stanford at the Royal College of Music, London. He moved to Ireland in 1910 where he was initially active as a church organist in Dublin suburbs. From his early twenties he suffered from multiple sclerosis, which made a professional independence increasingly difficult. In the last decades of his life, Palmer used a wheelchair and depended upon the care of his two sisters, who were running Hillcourt, a private girls’ boarding school in Glenageary, near their home in Sandycove (south Dublin). Palmer died in Dublin. Music Palmer’s music includes at least three operas, a number of choral pieces and many songs. His strong interest in opera came during a p