The 15-year-old Florrie O’Connor stands with her Irish harp in the studio of Thomas Atkinson in Harold’s Cross, Dublin. The year is 1907. The identity of the young musician, whose clothing is adorned with several medals, was only recently established through research. The key to this discovery was provided by a publication of the Viennese physician and ethnologist Rudolf Trebitsch (1876–1918).

When Trebitsch travelled to Ireland and Wales in the same year on behalf of the Phonogram Archive Commission, he recorded not only speech and singing but also individual musical instruments. In his report, published in 1908, he described Florrie O’Connor as a “15-year-old virtuoso from Dublin” who had already received numerous awards for her harp playing. According to Trebitsch, the Irish harp was at that time played by “only very few people in Ireland”. (Trebitsch 1908)

One of these sound recordings preserves what the photograph can only suggest. Under the catalogue number PI. 697 in the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Florrie O’Connor’s performance of the old Irish melody The Dawning of the Day has survived. More than a century later, not only her portrait but also her music has been preserved.

Today, the photograph is held in the photo collection of Museum für Volkskunde Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) as a cabinet card (pos/49960) and as a lantern slide (dia/483) used for Rudolf Trebitsch’s scientific lectures. An earlier negative reproduction (neg/13585) is documented but no longer extant. The object thus tells not only the story of an early sound recording, but also of the continued use of photographic images in scholarly collecting and lecture practices.

Astrid Hammer