Willoughby Weiss, British bass

 

More than twenty years ago, when I first began my writings on Victorian Vocalists, one of the earliest subjects to come under my attention was the bass, W H Weiss. However, the article, below, for some reason didn't make the 100 which got into my published collection (Victorian Vocalists, 2017), and has sat in a file since 2005 ...

Until now, when a conversation on bass singers with my friend Betsy, and a sighting of a nice photo on ebay, has prodded me into delayed action ...

WEISS, Willoughby Hunter (b Waterloo, Liverpool 2 April 1820; d St George’s Villa, Gloucester Rd., Regent’s Park, London 24 October 1867)

WEISS, Georgina Ansell (b Gloucester x 16 January 1826; d Chain Pier Cottage, Brighton 6 November 1880)

 

The most outstanding and successful native bass singer of the British operatic and concert stages in the 1850s and 1860s, Willoughby Weiss was born in Liverpool in the year 1820. His father was the well-known flautist Willoughby Gasper Weiss (1872-1853), latterly active also as a composer and a music-seller in Liverpool, and his mother the former Ann Hunter (1798-1853, m St Oswald, Chester 6 December 1814). Of his parents’ six children, Willoughby was the only one who followed his father into a musical career, and he left home in his teens -- heralded by grand Liverpool notices ('rich and truly splendid bass voice .. not inferior to many of our best singers') -- for London, where he took singing lessons from George Smart and then from the composer M William Balfe.

It was Balfe, perhaps under the terms of an indenture, who shepherded the young basso into his earliest London engagements and who gave him his first opportunities. The first of these that I have spotted was in March 1841, shortly before young Willoughby’s twenty-first birthday, at a concert given by the Concentores Society at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. Several veritable stars of the music world – Maria Hawes, John Parry and the established bass singer William Machin – were on the bill, but the young man and his ‘splendid bass voice’ won distinct approval for his rendition of Balfe’s ‘Might I march through life again’.

Further engagements followed swiftly, and, just a few weeks later, the young vocalist stepped on to the platform at the Hanover Square Rooms (30 April) to share, with the same William Machin, the basso music in a prestigious performance, for the New Musical Fund, of Haydn’s Creation. His fellow soloists were a rich team: Charlott Ann Birch, the very young Louisa and Susan Pyne, Elizabeth Rainforth, J W Hobbs, William Harrison and Machin. 

 

Although it was quickly evident that, all things being equal, young Mr Weiss would be a vocalist to be reckoned with in years to come, at this stage there were still criticisms of his performance. At Miss Roeckel’s concert, he ‘sang two songs displaying the compass and intonation of his fine bass voice, but his style is that of a barrel organ stop – frigid, heavy and passionless’. He gave that favourite standby of the young basso, ‘Qui sdegno’, at the Choral Fund concert (21 May) and at one of Charles Neate’s soirées, with what was referred to as ‘his phlegmatic coldness’, although ‘in a preferable style to Herr Staudigl at the German opera who barbarously interpolates this sublime song with detestable variations’. At another, he gave Smith’s ‘The Battle of Hohenlinden’ and was dubbed ‘an excellent bass singer’. At twenty-one years of age, to be spoken of in the same breath as the magnificent Staudigl was (even if merely to provide a music critic with a superfluous jab) quite something. He sang in a number of further concerts (Mlle Meerti’s, Gesualdo Lanza’s, Blewitt’s, Frederick Williams, Elise Launitz’s) during the course of the season and, then, in the early part of the new year, he travelled with his teacher to the Continent. In March, the news came through from Paris that ‘Balfe and Osborne had a successful concert last week, all the English being present. A Mr Weiss who made some stand last year in London was well received.’

 

Back in Britain, in May, Weiss visited his home town, in the company of Balfe and his wife and, joined by two other locals in Mrs and Miss St Albin, gave a concert: ‘Mr W Weiss the son of Mr Weiss, the respected music-seller here, gave his inaugural concert on Wednesday last and made his first appearance before his fellow townspeople whom he equally surprised and gratified. [He] possesses a voice and talent that, with continued study, will assuredly place him very high in the profession he has chosen’.

 

From Liverpool they continued on to Dublin, where they were joined by Adelaide Kemble and Miss Rainforth, before returning to London for the season. The young bass found himself warmly welcomed as a concert singer, and on 29 June Balfe promoted a concert, at the home of the Earl of Tankerville, in which his young pupil was featured alongside Miss Kemble, the Ronconis and Rubini. Immediately after, Balfe took his little group – with Misses Kemble and Rainforth as prime donne -- off for a two months tour, starting in Dublin with a series of operas. Thus, it was in Dublin that the ‘pupil of Mr Balfe’ made his first appearance on the operatic stage, singing the role of Oroveso in Norma alongside the two sopranos who had the previous season starred in the same roles at Covent Garden with Adam Leffler as their basso. Norma was followed by La Sonnamubula, Il Nozze di Figaro and Elena Uberti (the Covent Garden 1841-2 repertoire), before the little star team headed on to Glasgow and then back via concerts in such dates as Nottingham (‘he gave ‘The Wanderer’ in very masterly style’), Bath and Cheltenham, to London.

 In London, Weiss appeared at the Hanover Square Rooms Wednesday concerts – where he was proclaimed ‘a rising vocalist who possesses a rich bass voice of great scope’ following his rendition of Calcott’s ‘The Last Man’ -- and in a selection of other concerts, before he was signed to make his London opera debut -- again as the successor of Leffler -- at the Princess's Theatre. The debut took place on Boxing Day 1842, and the opera was La Sonnambula, with Weiss as a 21 year-old Count Rodolfo to the Amina of Eugénie Garcia and the Elvino of John Templeton, and with the ageing Elizabeth Feron as Theresa. ‘Although labouring under the disadvantages of a theatrical novitiate, [he] displayed his superb and manly organ to great advantage’ reported the press. In the months that followed, the young singer was given a thorough operatic baptism as the Princess’s mounted Lucia di Lammermoor (Bide-the-Bent), Little Red Riding Hood (Lord Robert de Bracey), I Puritani (Sir George Walton), Tancredi (Orbazzano) and La Gazza ladra (Podesta) with Garcia, and latterly Albertazzi, as prime donne and Allen succeeding Templeton as tenor. The more experienced François Burdini shared the basso roles with Weiss, and Weiss shared his operatic pursuits with appearances in oratorio and in concert (Philharmonic Society).

 

Whilst Willoughby Weiss was establishing himself as a, or even the, English basso of the future, a young soprano from Gloucester ‘whose father [Henry Barrett, organist and musical instrument seller] was formerly in the [Three Choirs Festival] choir, and possessed a magnificent voice’ – but who was, in 1841, languishing in Gloucester jail presumably for repeated bankruptcy, and who died in February 1843 -- made her first official professional appearance at the Gloucester Festival of 1844, singing ‘a nymph’ to the Galatea of Caradori Allan and the Acis of Manvers. ‘Her appearance excited great interest and, when she had in some measure overcome her extreme diffidence, justified the kindness of her reception. She has fine qualities and promises to become a distinguished vocalist’. ‘Nineteen year-old’ Georgina Barrett, a new and highly promising pupil of the Royal Academy of Music, had already been seen on the amateur stage, notably as Dorabella in a Cosi fan tutte at the Prince’s Theatre (1 February 1841), in which she had been teamed with the future Mrs Alexander Newton as Fiordiligi. At the Academy, she would have as contemporaries such singers of the future as Louisa Bassano, Marian Marshall, Marian Enderssohn, Sophia Messent, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Rose and Sara Flower, but young Miss Barrett would have a career almost as good as the best of them. She would have all but the very earliest part of that career, from 15 September 1845, as Mrs Georgina Weiss.

 

In 1844, Willoughby Weiss returned to the Princess’s, where he repeated his Oroveso to the Norma of Mrs Wood, sang Elmiro in Othello with Allen, Mme Garcia and Burdini, and through May and June took the part of Campo Mayor alongside Anna Thillon in her triumphant production of The Crown Diamonds. Later in the year he created the part of Moncegnino in Balfe’s The Daughter of St Mark. The highlight of Georgina’s year was her London debut as soprano soloist (6 November) with the Sacred Harmonic Society in Israel in Egypt alongside the Misses Cubitt and Dolby, Hobbs, Stretton and Machin.

 

In 1845, amongst a full run of concert engagements, Willoughby Weiss created the role of the Duke d’Aquila, alongside Mme Thillon, Harrison and Borrani in Balfe’s new opera The Enchantress, Georgina appeared at the Ancient Concerts (‘a very promising élève of the Royal Academy of Music’), and in between times the two young people went up to Liverpool and got married. 

 

In 1846, Willoughby Weiss was engaged for the operatic company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and, on 3 February, he created there the title-role in Macfarren’s newest opera Don Quixote alongside Miss Rainforth and George Stretton, making his mark with a drinking song ‘When Bacchus invented the bowl’. A few weeks later he introduced another role, in Benedict’s opera The Crusaders, playing the part of William on a bill with Misses Rainforth and Romer, Harrison, Borrani and Donald King.  Later in the year, whilst Georgina stuck to the concert platform, he was also seen in Fra Diavolo, Cinderella, Stradella and The Maid of Cashmere, before taking on another important new role as the Marquis de Vernon in Balfe’s The Bondman (11 December). He had one of the opera’s most notable arias, ‘There is nothing so perplexing’, and the press acclaimed ‘his delivery of it was the most masterly and thoroughly effective vocal exhibition of the whole evening’.

In the first months of 1847, he added two further notable credits to his quickly swelling list. At a concert given at Drury Lane by Hector Berlioz (7 February) Willoughby Weiss sang the role of Mephistopheles in the concert version of the first two acts of his Faust, and, a fortnight later, he introduced another new role as Mathias in Matilda of Hungary.

Georgina, meanwhile, was making her way successfully in the concert world, often in tandem with her husband, but also alone. When she appeared at the Historical concerts at Exeter Hall, with an air from Comus, she won a recall. However, her operatic debut was not far away. When the conductor, Jullien, took the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for the English opera season on 1847-8, he hired a number of artists with little or no stage experience. And thus, he hired not only Willoughby Weiss, already a reference as a bass singer in English opera, but his even younger wife.

The season opened with Lucia di Lammermoor with the as yet unrisen Sims Reeves as its star. Weiss, who had weeks earlier been singing Henry Ashton in the opera with the Donald Kings in the provinces, settled this time for the part of Raymond, while the newest English bass, Henry Whitworth, played Ashton. Then, on 20 December, came the production which was to have been the key of the season: Balfe’s new opera The Maid of Honour with a cast of whom the young bass, in the role of Sir Tristram, was probably the most experienced on the operatic stage. Georgina was cast, behind Charlotte Ann Birch and Miss Miran, as Queen Elizabeth I. She was apparently ‘painfully nervous’, but the press review of her performance was nevertheless favourable, crediting her with ‘A soprano voice of delicious quality and extensive range […] utmost firmess and the most irreproachable intonation’ up to B natural. Strictures on Willoughby’s singing had now vanished for good. ‘For Mr Weiss we have only one word to say, his singing throughout his part was perfect’. Unfortunately, The Maid of Honour did not prove a draw, and after The Marriage of Figaro, in which Willoughby was cast as Almaviva to Whitworth’s Figaro, some more Lucias in which Weiss now sang Ashton, and a series of concerts and Benefits, the season folded in financial disarray.

Georgina, who had appeared only in the feature opera, had already returned to the concert stage and, along with Reeves and Henry Phillips as bass, had been heard at Exeter Hall in a performance of Judas Maccabaeus. On 2 March, she returned there to sing Galatea in Acis and Galatea. Reeves was her Acis, and Willloughby took the role of Polyphemus.

 

They were soon, however, back on the operatic stage. In April, Weiss returned to the Princess’s to take the small part of the Bailie in Anna Thillon’s vehicle The Nightingale, and when this was followed by a revival of The Crown Diamonds, Georgina joined the company to play Diana, alongside her husband’s Rebolledo. At the end of the season, he went north to sing in opera with Rebecca Isaacs, and then they both headed for the south coast to give concerts with Marietta Alboni. But once the operatic season at the Princess’s reopened, they returned to London and, on 16 October 1848, opened in an English version of Leoline. 

Halkett Rafter made her debut in the show’s title-role, and the Weisses supported as Frantz and as Lady Rosenthal. The rest of the season included repeats of Lucia and Norma, and Willoughby took up a series of new roles as ‘a benevolent old gentleman of the days of Charles II’ in Robin Goodfellow, alongside his wife as Lady Alice, Old George in Herold’s Marie, Domenico in George Linley’s Francesca Doria, Ratcliffe in Captain Rafter’s operatic version of The Heart of Midlothian (‘Afloat on the ocean’), Roberto in the Auber pasticcio The Blind Sister and Enrico in The Deserter.

In the close season, the two Weisses went down to the Surrey Theatre where E J Loder mounted a production of Les Huguenots. Weiss gave an impeccable Marcel, but Georgina’s Marguerite de Valois seems to have been less liked (‘the character requires a more accomplished vocalist’). The season also included La Favorita (Balthazar) et al. The two returned in October to the Princess’s, where the young Louisa Pyne had arrived to support prima donna Dolores Nau. They played Zerlina and Anna in Don Giovanni, with Georgina being cast as Donna Elvira and her husband as Leporello, to the tenor Don of William Harrison. Harrison also starred when Macfarren’s Charles II was mounted. Louisa was the jeune premiere, leaving the part of the Queen to Georgina whilst Weiss was cast as Captain Copp. ‘Madame Weiss’, it was noticeable, was regularly cast in royal or regal roles, and a contemporary writer refers to her as ‘a high-toned lady’, but in December, Schira’s opera Mina was produced, with Louisa Pyne as its juvenile again, and Mme Weiss was cast as Jenny, the maid. Willoughby played Lurio, an innkeeper. 

When The Night Dancers was revived for Mlle Nau, Georgina played Mary, when Le Val d’Andorre was produced, both she and Willoughby (Jacques Sincère) were in the cast, and he also took part in the productions of Gustavus III (Anakström) and Schira’s The Orphan of Geneva (Carwin). At Easter, when The Beggar’s Opera was put up with Louisa Pyne and Harrison in the leads, Georgina played Lucy Lockit. At the end of the Princess’s season, the whole company, the Weisses included, headed out of town with the theatre’s repertoire.

 

In 1851, Miss Pyne, Harrison and Willoughby Weiss were taken to the Haymarket Theatre to form the kernel of an English opera company at that respected house. The company appeared successfully in The Crown Diamonds, The Cadi, Son and Stranger, Queen for a Day, La Sonnambula, Charles the Second, The Beggar’s Opera, and the three stars were retained for another season in the first part of 1852. Weiss also took time out, among other concerts, to appear as Mentor on Edward Loder’s operatic masque The Island of Calypso  at the Philharmonic Concerts (14 April 1852) with Sims Reeves, Charlotte Dolby and Miss Lucombe.

Georgina, who kept up a regular run of concert performances, also stepped back into opera when she appeared in one act of Oberon at the Hullah concerts, and then, in the middle of the year, joined Emma Romer’s company at the Surrey Theatre. Amongst the roles she played there, she created the part of the heroine in Meyer Lutz’s little opera, The Charmed Harp.

 

Willoughby Weiss’s career had to date been very largely centred on the operatic stage, but he had also appeared in town and country in oratorio, and in September 1852 he was invited to take part in the Norwich Festival, sharing the bass music with Karl Formes and Belletti. Henceforth, the oratorio stage would become a much more important feature in his career. In the meanwhile, however, Mr and Mrs Weiss joined a travelling opera company which also featured Tom Travers, Mrs Alexander Newton and Fanny Huddart, for some performances in the provinces.

In 1853, again, they went to the country with opera companies led by Sims Reeves and his wife, with whom Willoughby also appeared in performances of Fra Diavolo, The Beggar’s Opera and La Sonnambula in town. In Fra Diavolo, Weiss took the comic role of Lord Allcash. However, in between these operatic engagements, they were seen frequently in concert, and now in oratorio. I spot him in January 1852 doing Walpurgisnacht with the Harmonic Union, and in 1853 the title-role in Elijah at Leeds. He also gave the cantata Kampf und Sieg with the New Philharmonic Society, and on June 20 the Weisses, husband and wife, joined Louisa Pyne, Charlotte Dolby, Charles Lockey and Alexander Reichardt at the Exeter Hall in a performance of The Messiah for the Choral Fund. Later in the year, Weiss sang the bass music in Samson and The Messiah with the Sacred Harmonic Society, and performed in Die erste Walpurgisnacht and Haydn’s ‘Te deum’ for the opening of St Martin’s Hall, whilst Georgina was heard in Dalston at the opening of the new local hall singing the soprano part in Judas Maccabaeus. The two of them joined together to give Elijah at Bradford at Christmas and, early in the new year, Elijah and Acis and Galatea at St Martin’s Hall, The Creation at Stonehouse, and so forth.

And all the time the concert engagements, separately and together, rolled in.

 

In 1854, the rumour was whispered on the other side of the Atlantic that Louisa Pyne, William Harrison and Weiss would visit America. But Weiss didn’t go, leaving his place in what was to be an enormously successful enterprise to Conrad Borrani. Instead, he just carried on with more of the same: Lake’s Daniel, a new Elijah (both of them) at St Martin’s Hall, Wyke’s Paradise Lost with the New Philharmonic Society, a season of opera at Drury Lane with the Reeveses (Don Giovanni, Pietro in Masaniello, Lord and Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo) and further performances at the Lyceum (Lucia di Lammermoor, Arnheim in The Bohemian Girl), the Orchestral Union concerts, the annual Three Choirs Festival on a truly royal bill of performers, and Judas Maccabaeus at St Martin’s Hall. In December, Mr Weiss went to Oxford with Charlotte Dolby and William Cummings to create F Gore Ousley’s The Martyrdom of St Polycarp (Polycarp). With time out to go to the country, supporting Jenny Lind, in concert.

In 1855, things went much the same. If Willoughby, as by now certainly Britain’s most successful home-grown bass singer, was more generally in evidence than his wife, Georgina continued to appear regularly and successfully on both stage and platform.  The Reeves connection held strong, and the Weisses appeared both in opera at the Haymarket and in Dublin (Fra Diavolo, The Bohemian Girl, Lucia di Lammermoor, Henry Smart’s Berta) with the famous tenor. On the oratorio front, Weiss was now a regular soloist both at St Martin’s Hall and Exeter Hall, he was a principal bass at the Birmingham Festival and, with Georgina, on the list of soloists for the Three Choirs Festival. At Christmas the spouses Weiss sang Elijah at Leicester. And on New Year’s Day 1856, Willoughby visited Windsor Castle for a command performance of Méhul’s Joseph with Clara Novello, George Benson, Sims Reeves, Lewis Thomas et al.

 

In 1856, the Weiss family devoted themselves more and more to oratorio and concerts and their only appearances in opera were at Sadler’s Wells, in the usual repertoire of the Reeveses. Amongst a run of oratorio performances in London and the provinces, they appeared with the Harmonic Union in S S Greathead’s Enoch’s Prophecy, Georgina sang second soprano to Jenny Lind in the first English performance of Paradise and the Peri, and both of them visited Birmingham with Reeves, Miss Novello, Miss Dolby and Lewis Thomas for a double performance of Elijah and The Messiah, for the opening of the new Music Hall. Weiss also took part in the Three Choirs Festival and the disastrous York Festival, and both sang in the Bradford Festival. He created the role of the Sheriff in Hatton’s cantata Robin Hood with Annie Milner, but Georgina didn’t appeal to the local critic ‘we can always listen to [her] with pleasure if we do not see her’. Apparently Mrs Weiss was extremely mannered. In the last part of the year, the two of them joined with the Reeveses, Marian Enderssohn and Allan Irving in a concert party.

 

In the early part of 1857, oratorio engagements, either for him or for them both, followed one after another, amongst which Willoughby was bass soloist for Henry Forbes’s Ruth at the Hanover Square Rooms. In August he repeated the role of the Druid in Walpurgisnacht with the Vocal Association, while on the same programme, Georgina gave the Mendelssohn finale, Loreley, made famous by Catherine Hayes. In August, both of them were amongst the soloists for he Three Choirs Festival (where they both sang in Robin Hood) and the next month the Norwich Festival.

In September, however, Willoughby Weiss returned to the operatic stage. Louisa Pyne and William Harrison had returned triumphant from their visit to America, and were launching themselves, at the Lyceum, on a London season. Weiss resumed his place at their side, although, when they opened on 21 September, with The Crown Diamonds he was not this time in the cast. The next opera was Les Huguenots with Anna Caradori and Augustus Braham in the leading roles, and Weiss was the Marcel of the occasion (‘marked by appropriate ruggedness, while he sang throughout with excellent discretion’). Hamilton Braham sang Oroveso when Norma was given, Weiss played Don Jose in Maritana, and when the season’s star item, Rose of Castille, was produced he introduced the role of Don Pedro ‘with excellent voice’.

 

At the end of the Lyceum season, the company went on the road, but Weiss surrendered his roles to the young Ferdinand Glover and stayed home. However, when they returned, on 21 January 1858, for one performance of The Rose of Castille, as a celebration of the wedding of the Princess Royal, Weiss took up his original role for the occasion. He also appeared at the State Concert given to commemorate the same occasion, taking part in the Beethoven Choral Fantasia and in Costa’s serenata The Dream alongside Clara Novello, Annie Lascelles and Sims Reeves.

At the same time, he returned to the theatre for a celebratory Macbeth. For the occasion, he sang the part of Hecate with Georgina as one of the singing witches. The rest of the year was devoted to concert performances at all the main venues, including the Birmingham Festival, where Weiss joined Reeves and the Misses Novello and Dolby to create Sterndale Bennett’s The May Queen, the Leeds Festival (both of them), the Crystal Palace concerts (both), the Surrey Gardens concerts (both) as well as Anna Bishop’s big homecoming concert (both). Weiss gave the first London May Queen at St Martin’s Hall (December 15), Georgina performed Judas Maccabaeus at Bristol with Reeves and Santley and the two of them went concertising with Reeves and Annie Lascelles, before, on 27 December, Weiss rejoined the Pyne and Harrison combination for the creation of Balfe’s newest opera Satanella at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.

Weiss was given a meaty part, alongside Miss Payne and Harrison, as the fiend Arimanes: ‘[his] fine bass voice is not inaptly employed in discoursing the wit and ungodly words of the Prince of Darkness’. Performances of the earlier successes topped up the grand success of Satanella through till the end of March, when the company again headed for the provinces, again without Mr Weiss.

For the next three years, the Weisses abandoned the stage for the platform, and accumulated vast lists of oratorio and concert engagements. If Georgina was now accepted by the biggest societies as a second soprano – to such as Clara Novello or Catherine Hayes – Willoughby shared the top of the heap with such performers as Charles Santley and Belletti. In consequence, there was a flare-up when the committee of the Three Choirs Festival scheduled him to sing second bass to Belletti in Elijah, long one of his acknowledged roles, and the Weisses withdrew from the Festival. All was calmed over the following year, when Weiss returned to his habitual place.

In January 1860, he took part in the performance at Glasgow of Horsley’s Gideon, in March he and Georgina starred in Son and Stranger at the Crystal Palace, in September they returned to Worcester and then to Norwich for the Festivals. At Norwich was given the first performance of Benedict’s cantata Undine, in which Weiss created the role of Kuhleborn. Over the following months he supported Clara Novello in what were advertised as her Farewell Performances.

 

In the last part of 1860, he appeared in the Monday pops, sang Elijah in Manchester, and found himself at the centre of a squabble when both the main Leeds musical societies claimed to have booked him for their Christmas Messiahs. On 1 February 1861 he sang the role of John Knox in Henry Leslie’s new cantata Holyrood, in September both of them took part in the Three Choirs Festival and in November, Willoughby sang the role of Caspar when Charles Halle staged a concert performance of Der Freischütz at his Manchester concerts. When a certain Madame Nita Norrie sponsored a concert party, Mr and Mrs Weiss went out for a round of northern dates, before getting into their annual routine of Christmas oratorios. In 1862, Weiss sang with Jenny Lind in a series of oratorios and at the Crystal Palace Handel Festival, before in June he at last returned to the theatre and to the Pyne and Harrison company.

 

The 1862 season of the now well-established company did not produce a new piece to match those which Weiss had created in his earlier seasons with the company. He played his original role in The Rose of Castille, Don Jose in Maritana, the part of Colonel Wolf, originally taken in The Puritan’s Daughter by Henri Corri, and the press reacted: ‘We were glad, and so seemed the public, to welcome back again to the arena he should never have been allowed to quit that excellent English bass, Mr Willoughby Weiss, whose noble voice and thorough musical proficiency render his services extremely valuable in a long list of operatic characters. Such an artist can ill be spared just now to the only theatre in which our national opera is represented.’ 

The roles of the Count de Camillac in Wallace’s Love’s Triumph, the Baron de Villefrance in The Armourer of Nantes, and, in the following season, of the Indian warrior Casgan in The Desert Flower and Gonzaques in Blanche de Nevers (‘The Old Vine Tree’) did not add to his reputation.

Amid the now normal run of non-theatrical engagements, however, the Weisses did again return to the theatre. In 1864, Weiss appeared in J B Buckstone’s concert at the Haymarket playing The Castle of Andalusia with members of the regular acting company. It clearly went well, for a couple of months later the manager put the old piece on his regular bills and hired Willoughby (Don Caesar) and Georgina (Donna Lorenza) to star.

Hot on the heels of this engagement, husband and wife were engaged for Covent Garden, where the successors of Pyne and Harrison were struggling to find success. Weiss was cast as Pietro in Masaniello and Rodolfo in La Sonnambula, and when Hatton’s opera Rose was produced, Georgina was given the role of Georgette with her husband as Jacques. Georgina also stood in for Parepa in the leading role of the season’s major production, Helvellyn.

When the opera season faded away, the Weisses returned to the concert world where Willoughby sang (29 Match 1865) in the first performance of Henry Smart’s The Bride of Dunkerron, until the two spouses were summoned to join the English opera company sponsored by E T Smith at Astley’s Theatre. They appeared as Gabriel and the Gipsy Girl in Guy Mannering, and he played Matt o’ the Mint and Dandini during the course of the engagement.

This would, in fact, be the couple’s last theatrical season. Weiss had had some health problems, and, hereafter, he preferred to stick to the concert platform. His presence there, however, if anything, increased over the next seasons. He was seen on all the principal platforms of the city and, if Georgina was more modestly displayed, she was still performing well.

During these seasons, the novelties on Weiss’s programme included John Cheshire’s cantata The King and the Maiden (as Allbrecht), C J Hargitt’s The Harvest Queen, Benedict’s The Legend of Saint Cecilia at the Sacred Harmonic Society, and Beethoven’s The Praise of Music. In October of 1867, he appeared at the Agricultural Hall in a performance of Judas Maccabaeus with Mme Enderssohn, Julia Elton and W H Cummings. His next engagement was to be at Edinburgh. But Willoughby Weiss did not make to to Scotland. He was taken ill, and as soon as 24 October, he died. Aged 47.

 

Georgina Weiss did carry on. She appeared intermittently in concert up until 1871. Then she remarried, one Charles Davis of New Malden, Surrey (m Finchley 13 February 1872), and disappeared from the musical world. She died some eight years later, aged just 54.

 

Willoughby Weiss’s place in the history of British music, and of English opera in particular, is one of importance – amongst basses – second, perhaps, only to Henry Phillips. But he has another claim, if not to fame, then to recognition.

Weiss, from an early age, was a prolific songwriter, and amongst his large output there was one song which, aided by his own rendition of it, became extremely popular: a setting of ‘The Village Blacksmith’. He also set to music Longfellow’s ‘The Slave’s Dream’, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’, ‘The Fisherman’s Cottage’ and ‘The Day Is Done’, Sheridan’s ‘The Mid-Watch’ and Poe’s ‘It Was Many and Many a Year Ago’, plus several pieces with words by Frederick Enoch, including ‘When the Tide Rolls, ‘The Star That lights the Sailor Home’ and ‘The Old Sacristan’, His other titles included ‘The Miller’. ‘The Sentinel’, ‘King Canute’, ‘Will the Warrener’, ‘Kate of the Cannobie’, ‘We Were Boys Together’, ‘Let me be near thee’, ‘Robin the Archer’, ‘Fond Memories of Home’. Charles Coote composed a ‘Village Blacksmith Quadrille’ (pub: Weekes & Co) which included several of Weiss’s songs.

 

The Weisses’ daughter, Georgina Angelique Weiss (d Treemorne, Bushey Grove Rd, Watford 21 Feb 1920) married (10 June 1871) the tenor vocalist and music comedy player known as ‘Selwyn Graham’ (né Frederick Thomas Small).