Michael William Balfe

His Life and His English Operas

William Tyldesley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351558303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Without doubt, Michael William Balfe (1808-1870) was the most successful composer of English opera in the mid nineteenth century. During his lifetime he enjoyed an international reputation and worked with some of the leading singers of the time, including Jenny Lind, Malibran and Grisi. Drawing on previously unused source materials such as letters, legal documents and playbills, this biography of Balfe and in-depth study of his English operas overturns many of the previously accepted 'facts' of the composer's lifestyle. Using London as his base, Dublin-born Balfe spent long periods in Paris and travelled widely in Europe. William Tyldesley discusses the continental influences evident in Balfe's operas and offers new suggestions as to the draw that Paris held for the composer. Far from leading a fairly prosperous and unexceptional life, Balfe is shown to have found himself in financial straits on more than one occasion, and to have employed possibly unethical means of extracting himself from them. Those wishing to perform Balfe's works or to do further research into them, will find Tyldesley's re-examination of the composer a necessary first port of call.

CHAPTER ONE

1807–34: Early years and travels

Michael William Balfe was born in Dublin on 15 May 1808. All the records seem to agree on that – but on little else. The details of his early life are far from clear. His parents are not unambiguously described in any source, although his mother is named as Kate Ryan by Barrett¹ and as Mrs Ryan by Kenney.² He is said by both of these biographers to have been the third child of the marriage, there being two older sisters. In fact, the entry in the Dublin Marriage License Bonds³ gives the date of marriage of William Balfe and Catherine Teresa Ryan as 27 June 1807. There is no absolute certainty that this entry refers to Balfe’s parents, but it seems highly likely since there were no other Balfe-Ryan marriages during the relevant period. If this is in fact the case it would seem that Balfe was born eleven months after his parents’ marriage. The possibility of two out-of-wedlock older sisters seems, in the social and religious climate of the time, remote to say the least. That they might have been half-sisters is a possibility, although it seems unlikely that this would not have been mentioned by Kenney or Barrett. With the exception of a note of their religious upbringing we have no further information of any kind about them, not even their names, and it does seem questionable that they did in fact exist.

There is no documented evidence of William Balfe’s occupation, although Grove gives this as dancing master. It is suggested by both Kenney and Barrett, however, that he was a competent musician who was able to give his son early violin lessons and was wise enough to pass him on to an established teacher when his abilities became evident, which they did at a very early age. The development of a legend is illustrated by the entry in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary,⁴ which states of Michael William: ‘He was the son of a dancing master and as a small child played the violin for his father’s dancing classes.’ Catherine Balfe is an equally shadowy figure. The description by Kenney (who must have been speaking from hearsay) is of a person ‘not otherwise remarkable than for the beauty of her person, which is said to have been of the most striking kind’.⁵ This is effectively the only description we have of Balfe’s mother, except for Barrett’s note of ‘the austerity of her religious observances’.⁶ It was a mixed marriage – William was a Protestant and Catherine a Catholic. Michael William himself was brought up as a Protestant. The family lived in a small house in Pitt Street, Dublin, later renamed Balfe Street, but now demolished.

Balfe’s musical antecedents were said to have extended back over at least two previous generations. His grandfather was said by Barrett to be a member of the orchestra at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin – a theatre which existed from 1758 until 1819 when it succumbed to the opposition of the newly built Theatre Royal. His great-grandfather was reputed to have been a pupil of the virtuoso violinist Dubourg who at the time was settled in Dublin, and to have played in the first Dublin performances of Handel’s Messiah in 1742 – although this was not verifiable even at the time of Barrett’s book in 1882.

It is very strange that St Leger, who claims to have been a friend of Balfe’s of thirty-six years’ standing, states firmly that Balfe’s parents were neither musical nor artistic and that he did not have the advantage of personal parental attention in his education.⁷ If this were true, then the information based on Kenney’s and Barrett’s descriptions of Balfe’s young life, and quoted in the last few paragraphs, must be inaccurate. Again, there is no documentation to help in determining the facts. From reading the accounts of the three biographers, however, it seems quite clear that there was no particular empathy between St Leger and the other two. Indeed, St Leger goes to some lengths to try to demonstrate that he is the one who should be considered as the authority because of his long-standing close friendship with Balfe. It appears that the details of Balfe’s youth should be considered as unclear, however certain of the facts some of the quoted sources may seem. In this, as in other matters, it must be remembered that the most influential source of information regarding Balfe’s personal life is Kenney’s book which has been heavily relied on by Barrett and by all subsequent writers; only St Leger took an independent line. As already mentioned, Kenney’s book relies greatly on hearsay (as indeed had to be the case) for the undocumented aspects of Balfe’s life, including his childhood. Independent confirmation of the details of Balfe’s professional life can be said to have started at about the age of fifteen when he first came to the notice of the London public.

The immediate family details are not given in any of the standard reference books. For instance, Burke’s Irish Family Records,⁸ in which a Balfe family is described, has no mention of a Michael William, although there are many Michaels in the family. Similarly, Balfe’s mother is not detectable in the two Ryan families mentioned in Burke. A strange twist to this situation is that one of the Ryan families includes many with the name Thaddeus – the name of the tenor hero in Balfe’s major operatic success, The Bohemian Girl. This, however, can only be coincidence – the name of the hero of The Bohemian Girl probably came from a popular novel of the time, Thaddeus the Pole, which had some influence on the libretto of the opera. It is strange to see that Balfe is not mentioned in the section of the introduction to Burke devoted to Irish composers, although Mrs Alexander ‘the celebrated hymn writer’ is included! Perhaps there was some social factor involved in this exclusion. Certainly there must be many branches of the Balfe and Ryan families not included in Burke.

Apart from the divergence in the accounts described above, the details of Balfe’s boyhood were not disputed by St Leger – although, clearly, if he were correct in his assessment of the parents, there could have been no question of lessons from Balfe’s father. According to the versions of both Kenney and Barrett, Balfe showed his musical talents very early – at first as a violinist and pianist, taught by his father. It seems that it soon became obvious that his abilities were beyond the scope of his father’s tuition and he was passed on, as a pupil, to the Wexford bandmaster, Mr Meadows. The family had moved to Wexford from Dublin for the benefit of his father’s health, although it is not clear what this health problem was or how it would have benefited by the move. One result of the association with Mr Meadows was a Pollacca, scored for the Wexford band, which Balfe produced after six months’ tuition. The members of the band found it difficult to believe that the piece had been written by a six-year-old boy. The author has found no trace of this piece of music, although Barrett states that at the time of writing his book (1882), the ‘music still exists’.⁹

From this point on, all accounts of Balfe’s life are in agreement. It soon became evident that his talents were running well ahead of the capabilities of Meadows as a teacher, and Balfe senior made the decision to return to Dublin where better teaching facilities were available. Here he was put under the care of William Michael O’Rourke, a broadly based and largely self-taught young musician who later also used the name Rooke. The association between Balfe and O’Rourke was to be maintained for many years in various capacities. They later played together in the Drury Lane Orchestra when Balfe was the deputy leader and O’Rourke was the pianist and chorus master. In 1816, according to Kenney, shortly after taking Balfe under his wing, O’Rourke, acting in his capacity as an impresario, produced him as soloist in a new concerto by Joseph Mayseder at a concert in the Dublin Royal Exchange. However (according to Grove and the British Library catalogue), the first concerto by Mayseder was not published until 1820. Perhaps this was simply a mistake by Kenney about the composer of the concerto. The concert was a great success and the eight-year-old Balfe was seized upon by Dublin society as a fashionable young prodigy with all the consequent problems of loss of a sense of reality that this implied. This situation was probably promoted by O’Rourke, who prepared arrangements of popular items for young Balfe to play. A notice of a concert at the Royal Exchange, Dublin in Saunder’s Newsletter of 18 June 1817 reads ‘… that wonderful child Master Balfi will perform a concerto on the violin in which he will introduce the popular air of The Minstrel Boy and a Rondo composed expressly for the occasion by Mr. O’Rourke’.¹⁰ However, Balfe senior seems to have seen the dangers and was able to rescue his son from the perils of early over-adulation.

An incident related by Barrett which, if true, is of interest because of the relationship between Balfe and the family involved in later life, was the presentation of a goat carriage and a pair of goats to the young Balfe by Sir Philip Crampton, a great admirer of his talents. Apparently Balfe drove his carriage and pair through the streets with such verve that his father felt it necessary to take action to preserve life and limb.¹¹ Whether this episode is based on fact will never be known, but there is no doubt of the existence and identity of the individual involved in the story and of his eventual rather unlikely further association with Balfe. Sir Philip Crampton was a famous Dublin surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal Society, with an international reputation for his work on the anatomical and scientific basis of surgery. Much later, in 1860, Balfe’s daughter Victoire married Sir John Crampton, the son of Sir Philip.

For the next six years Balfe continued his studies in a relatively orthodox manner, playing from time to time as violin soloist in a number of concerts, but not following the path of a juvenile prodigy which his earlier career had suggested. Midway through this period O’Rourke left Dublin for London and Balfe’s instruction was passed over to a reputable violinist, James Barton, and to Alexander Lee, a minor composer who had two of his operas performed in London in the 1820s and 1830s. During this time Balfe produced the first of his many published ballads. The original words are not certain, but Balfe’s melody seems to have been pirated and used (in 1823) in a comedy by Haynes Bailey (Paul Pry) where it was sung by the distinguished actress (and competent singer) Madame Vestris under the title ‘The lover’s mistake’. The publishers (Willis) did very well out of it; Balfe himself had to make do with twenty presentation copies. According to Grove (in the entry for Horn) Madame Vestris also performed Charles Edward Horn’s ‘Cherry ripe’ as an interpolated number in the same show.

In 1823, however, the situation changed radically with the death of Balfe’s father at the age of forty, leaving Michael William at fourteen as the breadwinner for the family (there was apparently no financial provision made for them). Here follows one of the less likely scenarios described by Kenney and repeated by Barrett. The story is that Balfe, seeing a poster of Horn, who was just finishing a concert tour in Ireland, went to see him on impulse in his dressing room at the theatre and persuaded Horn to take him to London on his return. This was scheduled for the very next morning! In the interim period of a few hours he is said to have got his mother’s blessing for this plan, to have signed a seven-year agreement to be a kind of indentured pupil of Horn, and to have made all his arrangements to leave his mother and sisters (if, indeed, they existed). This occurred within a week or so of his father’s death.

However unlikely these details of his arrangement with Horn now seem, Balfe did, in fact, find himself in London within a few days, with a place as a violinist in the Drury Lane Theatre orchestra. From this point on, the outlines of his professional history (if not the more romanticized details) are verifiable by various means, including press reports and the memoirs of other musicians. He began taking lessons from Horn’s father, C. F. Horn, the organist at St George’s, Windsor and a musician of high reputation, who had been co-editor with Samuel Wesley of one of the earliest printed English editions of Bach’s Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues. The Drury Lane orchestra was led by a well-known violinist, Nicholas Mori, who gave Balfe a chance to lead and to play occasional solos at a concert series called the Oratorio Concerts. This series was so named because it followed on from a long-standing series of oratorio performances; the name was maintained, but not the content. It is interesting to see that the parts of the concerts were described as ‘Acts’, again a throwback to an earlier practice. Balfe’s solo debut at these concerts was greeted with mixed emotions by the critic of The Harmonicon, the new but important musical journal of the time.¹² ‘An adventurous violinist … he certainly possessed that noble daring for which his countrymen are remarkable, but we cannot say that his exploits in Alt excited our admiration, although they created surprise. He has youth, however, to plead his excuse, and may with proper attention become a tolerable performer.’ There are no details of what Balfe actually played. To put this phase of Balfe’s career into chronological context, the same volume of The Harmonicon contains a respectful but baffled first review of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and the Opus 111 sonata. It is also amusing to see in the same volume a review of a new aria by Balfe’s former teacher O’Rourke (now known as Rooke and described as ‘Pianiste at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’) in which the near identity of the melody to one in Weber’s Der Freischütz is pointed out ‘although the similarity may possibly be purely accidental’.¹³

In spite of his none too enthusiastic reception as a soloist, Balfe continued as a member of the Drury Lane orchestra. The conductor, Tom Cooke, was a famously jovial and convivial person who was happy to leave Balfe as his locum when away on his many engagements elsewhere. The audiences and, more importantly, the orchestra took to Balfe’s conducting at once, in spite of his youth and relative inexperience. At this time his lessons with C. F. Horn continued, and it seems that Balfe became adept at harmonization and orchestration, a facility which led him to be engaged for the completion of work partly finished by other (now unknown) composers. He also carried out work for Mapleson, the copyist for Drury Lane Theatre and proprietor of a music hire library. This hack work provided Balfe with extra income, but to what extent he was able to support his mother back in Dublin is not clear. In fact, from this time on the details of his family become even less well defined. All in all, it seems that Balfe’s mother was not very well treated by posterity or (it is difficult to resist the impression) by Balfe himself.

By the time Balfe was seventeen years old (in 1825) he had begun to develop a promising baritone voice. Unfortunately, he was taken up by the manager of the theatre in Norwich, who was trying to put together a cast for performances of Weber’s Der Freischütz, which had been a tremendous success over all Europe. Balfe travelled to Norwich to sing the part of Caspar, was not properly prepared for it and, consequently, ‘dried’ on stage from stage fright. To add to this problem the stage effects in the Wolf’s Glen scene got out of hand; the audience thought that the theatre was about to go up in flames, panicked and left en masse. Balfe’s first attempt at professional singing therefore lasted for one night. He returned to London, to his work at Drury Lane and to further vocal study. This is a story recounted by Kenney and afterwards repeated by almost all authors dealing with Balfe’s biography. It should be pointed out, however, that no traces of this dramatic event remain in the records of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of music examples
• List of plates
• General editor’s foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• General notes and definitions
• Introduction
• 1 1807–34: Early years and travels
• 2 1834: Back in London – the English opera
• 3 1835: The Siege of Rochelle
• 4 1836–43 The Maid of Artois, Catherine Grey, Diadeste, Joan of Arc, Këolanthe
• 5 1843: The Bohemian Girl
• 6 1844–46: The Daughter of St Mark, The Enchantress, The Bondman
• 7 1847–57: The Maid of Honour, The Sicilian Bride, The Devil’s In It! (Letty)
• 8 1857–58: The Rose of Castille, Satanella
• 9 1860–63: Bianca, the Bravo’s Bride, The Puritan’s Daughter, The Armourer of Nantes, Blanche de Nevers
• 10 Balfe after the English operas: 1860–70 and later
• 11 An Overview
• Bibliography
• Previously unpublished material
• Index