O'Brien, Vincent (1870–1948), conductor, music teacher, and répétiteur, was born in May 1870 in Dublin (where he lived all his life), son of Richard V. O'Brien and his wife, Elizabeth O'Brien (née Halton). The family's musical lineage was strong: the father was an organist and teacher and the mother was also from a musical family. Vincent O'Brien was born into a large family, a number of whom were to find employment as organists in the churches of the archdiocese and beyond. His father provided his initial musical training and he pursued further studies at the RIAM under Sir Robert Prescott Stewart (qv), about whom Charles Villiers Stanford (qv) later wrote warmly. Under Stewart's tutelage O'Brien was the first recipient of the Coulson organ scholarship. He worked as a church musician, progressing through a series of major catholic sacred music appointments from Rathmines parish church, through Dominic Street (Dominican church), to Clarendon Street (Discalced Carmelites church), and also as a teacher in St Mary's Place CBS, before accepting an invitation from Edward Martyn (qv) to be the first director of the Palestrina Choir founded in the city's Pro-cathedral in 1903. Martyn had been much impressed with a performance of Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli presented by O'Brien in St Teresa's Carmelite church in Clarendon Street in 1898 (Martyn was a man of considerable taste and generosity, whose opinions on music suitable for worship were attuned to the motu proprio promulgated by Pope Pius X on St Cecilia's Day in 1903). With Martyn's financial support, the Palestrina Choir was formerly inaugurated at the Pro-cathedral on 1 January 1903. O'Brien developed the choir to a commendable standard and laid the basis for a tradition that long survived. O'Brien married another musician, Mary O'Sullivan, in 1911, and they settled in Parnell Square in the heart of Dublin.
O'Brien had a major impact on the musical life of Dublin in the first half of the century. That influence is most keenly in the realm of sacred music. He is also remembered through those he influenced. He was the first singing teacher of both Margaret Burke Sheridan (qv) and the most celebrated of Irish tenors, John McCormack (qv). O'Brien toured with McCormack as his accompanist, notably on an extended visit to Australia in 1913, and he accompanied the tenor on his early recordings; in this role he was in fine company with Fritz Kreisler and Edwin Schneider, among others. James Joyce (qv) was also for a time his pupil. He was the co-founder, in 1946, and first director of Our Lady's Choral Society, which began as an amalgam of choristers from various church choirs of the archdiocese who had first come together under O'Brien for a performance of Handel's Messiah in December of the previous year.
In an age when it was normal for leading musicians to hold a number of appointments, O'Brien was also director of music at the Dublin seminary of All Hallows and neighbouring Clonliffe College on the north side of the city, and was head of music in Carysfort Park Teacher Training College in the south. In addition, he was appointed director of music for 2RN (later Radio Éireann) on its foundation in 1926. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the NUI in the year of the Eucharistic Congress, 1932.
O'Brien was an occasional composer and arranger but few of his works continue to have currency; an exception is the song ‘The fairy tree’, written in 1930 and dedicated to Lily McCormack, wife of John McCormack, who was herself a sometime vocal pupil of O'Brien's. His major work was the opera Hester written in 1893, but he was primarily a church musician and works such as An Easter hymn (1910) reflect his central interest in sacred music. The Three motets (‘Ecce sacerdos magnus’, ‘Justorum animae’, and ‘Terra tremuit’) for male chorus, written some three decades later, are austere and pointedly conservative; their style demonstrates the influence of the nineteenth-century Cecilian movement which sought to emphasise the devotional over the decorative in religious music. O'Brien died 21 June 1948.
His son Oliver O'Brien (1922–2001), organist, conductor, and teacher of music, was born 28 March 1922 in Dublin. With his brother Colum he was educated at Belvedere College; his musical education was provided first by his father and later through the Read School of Music, where he studied with William Walton. O'Brien pursued further musical studies at UCD, from where he graduated in 1948. Both Oliver and Colum served as organists at the Pro-cathedral, and Oliver was director of the Palestrina Choir from 1947 until 1978, when Fr Seán Ó hEarcaigh became the first person outside the O'Brien family to direct the choir in three-quarters of a century. O'Brien succeeded his father as professor of music in Carysfort Park Teacher Training College. He also maintained the family involvement as conductor of Our Lady's Choral Society until his retirement in 1979. He extended the choir's repertoire, introducing, among other works, Elgar's Dream of Gerontius with Kathleen Ferrier as a soloist and the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli to mark the centenary celebrations for John Henry Newman (qv) in 1952. Barbirolli held the choir in high esteem and worked with them on a number of occasions over the following years.
O'Brien's lifetime of dedication to sacred music was recognised in 1976 when he was made a knight of St Gregory the Great by Pope Paul VI. He was a gentle, unassuming musician. He married Elizabeth Coughlan, a former pupil, in July 1984; they lived in Upper Pembroke St., Dublin. Oliver O'Brien died 16 September 2001 just months after his brother, Colum, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin.