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Scan 27
The Strad; a monthly journal for professionals and amateurs of all stringed instruments played with the bow, 1890
25 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1In 1845, Mr. Cramer having retired, the duties of leader and principal violin were filled by Mr. John Loder, who had shared the duties with him. Mr. Done conducted the festival this year, he having been made organist of the cathedral.
3(To be continued.)
5THE VIOLIN DAYS OF BALFE.
6BY DR. T. L. PHIPSON.
7Author of "Biographies of Celebrated Violinists,"
8"Scenes from the Reign of Louis XVI.," etc.
10"The most popular of our English composers is an Irishman," said a gentleman who must certainly have had some Irish blood in his veins also. With regard to popularity, nothing could be more true. The flowing melodies of Balfe and his effective operatic music will live for many long years yet. He got his inspiration from the melodious Italian school. The young Bellini was his contemporary for a short time, and his model for song; whilst he relied for his orchestration upon a good knowledge of the successful works of his day and a natural talent for composition. Balfe was a far more complete musician than many of my contemporaries appear to believe. What he may have lacked in genius he made up by perseverance and hard work, actuated, no doubt, by ardent ambition.
12We have no violinist, either in England or abroad, who has ever produced so popular a work as The Bohemian Girl, with the sole exception of Auber, the celebrated composer of Fra Diavolo and Masaniello, who, like Balfe, also began life as a violin player. We owe the long list of operas which have issued from Balfe's lyrical pen to the circumstance that he was the son of a violinist, who soon recognised as passionate a love of music in his son as he himself was possessed of. Born at Dublin, in 1808, Michael William Balfe was at a very early age put through a course of violin instruction by his father, who brought him on as far as he was able—and at a time when his delicate health made the task of teaching extremely irksome, but it was a labour of love—and then handed him over to a band-master named Meadows; but a little later he was transferred to Rooke, the composer of Amelie, or the Love Test.
14Like many eminent violinists whom we could mention Balfe made his first public appearance at the age of eight, with a violin that looked nearly as large as himself. It was in May 1816 that Rooke brought him out at a concert in Dublin, when he performed a composition by Mayseder with considerable success. This appearance had the effect of attracting the attention of certain fashionable patrons to the youthful violinist, but much does not seem to have come of it. The boy soon passed out of the hands of Rooke to those of James Barton, and the better known Alexander Lee, from whom he obtained a very fair knowledge of thorough-bass. At the same time his curiosity attracted him to several other orchestral instruments and to the piano. At nine years of age he composed a little song which was sung by the celebrated Madame Vestris in one of her successful characters. Years afterwards, when still quite young, Balfe used to crawl in to the gallery of a London theatre to hear this song, and revel in the applause which invariably followed it. It was published under the title of The Lover's Mistake, and we believe that all Balfe got for his remuneration was a parcel of twenty copies, to give away, or sell, as he might think proper. For about six years the lad continued to study music with assiduous industry, occasionally accepting an engagement to play at concerts. In Dublin he was already looked upon by the public as a violinist of established repute, distinguished for the correctness and intelligence of his playing, no less than for the grace and feeling he threw into the slightest passages, when his excellent father died in 1823. Balfe was then only fifteen years of age.
16Charles Horn (son of the composer), a well-known singer, was in Dublin at the time, and he had heard Balfe play a violin solo; he was on the eve of departing for London when the boy paid him a visit and begged to be taken there with him. Horn proposed that he should be articled to him for seven years, and this proposition was accepted. The future composer soon got a position in the orchestra of Drury Lane for the so-called Oratorio Concerts, which were given during Lent. He rose rapidly to the rank of first violin in these concerts and played solos on alternate nights with Mori, already an eminent performer. These violin solos were the most popular items in the programme. It was a very high position for so young a performer, and his ambition led him to work hard in order to keep it. When the oratorio concerts closed, Horn procured for his young friend an engagement in the Drury Lane orchestra during the theatrical season.
18The witty and jovial Tom Cooke, quite a celebrity in his day, was then conductor of the music at Drury Lane, and he soon recognised the remarkable capacities of the youthful violinist. Many a time in Cooke's absence from indisposition or other causes, did young Balfe wield the baton, and it is said that he quite eclipsed his conductor on these occasions.
20Not long afterwards Balfe began to study under C. F. Horn (the father of the singer who had brought him from Dublin), organist of the Chapel Royal at Windsor, and a clever composer. Under his able tuition, he acquired in a very short time a truly marvellous talent for composition, and could complete a full and effective instrumental score of any melody with remarkable ease and rapidity. Of course his life in London was not precisely a bed of roses. More than once he was the dupe of impostors who made use of his early talents as a composer to serve their own ends, and he had a fair share of hardships and privations. The members of the Drury Lane orchestra were also engaged for a series of concerts at Vauxhall Gardens, then a fashionable suburb of London. During these engagements Balfe somehow discovered that he possessed a tolerably good baritone voice. It was a voice of considerable compass, but of moderate power and quality; nevertheless, he determined to cultivate it, and with that object went through a course of vocal studies. The result was that in about a year he decided on trying his fortune as a singer and actor. He made his first attempt in this direction at a theatre in Norwich, as Caspar in Weber's opera Der Freischutz; but the result was a failure—not due entirely to his own want of experience and power, but partly to an alarm of fire during the incantation scene.
22So Balfe returned to the orchestra at Drury Lane, though he still retained his idea of coming out as a dramatic singer; but the thought of maturing his vocal and theatrical studies under the genial Italian sky entered his mind at this period, and he began to study the French and Italian languages.
24His most ardent desires were eventually realised by a very romantic freak of fortune. Being introduced to a wealthy Italian nobleman, Count Mazzara, this gentleman was not only enchanted by Balfe's violin playing, but found in the young Irishman such a
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