Joseph Chester – FRAGMENTS OF LUCIA

FRAGMENTS OF LUCIA is a solo guitar performance by Joseph Chester of his highly-acclaimed album LUCIA, a suite of 10 pieces inspired by fragments of the life of Lucia Joyce.

Joseph Chester is a multi award-nominated songwriter, composer and musician whose albums have featured in the books ‘101 Irish Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’ by Tony Clayton-Lea, ‘Buried Treasure’ by Dan Hegarty and in The Sunday Times list of the best Irish albums of all time.

Lucia Joyce (daughter of James Joyce) spent 47 years in institutions as a result of mental illness, including long periods in isolation. She died in the notoriously cruel St. Andrew’s asylum, Northampton at the age of 75. And yet, in her youth she had shown enormous potential as a dancer and illustrator. Over the course of two years, Chester took ten key moments from the life of Lucia Joyce. Ten facts of her existence and composed a piece of music for each, to pay tribute to her, to bear witness to her and in some fantastical, imaginary way, let her speak.

The Paris Times wrote that, “James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father.” Some say she was a muse for Finnegans Wake. Her father described her as, “A fantastic being with a mind as clear and unsparing as the lightning.” However, after undergoing tests, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was committed in 1936. She would never know freedom again.