Killarney

A scenic showpiece song with music by the Irish opera composer Michael William Balfe (1808–1870) and words by the actor-playwright Edmund Falconer (stage name of Edmund O’Rourke, 1814–1879), published in the early 1860s in connection with Falconer’s Killarney-set stage work. Its catalogue of the lakes’ beauties — “By Killarney’s lakes and fells” — made it a fixture of the Irish tenor repertoire and a standard in parlor collections on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.