MILLARD, [Samuel] Harrison (b Boston, 27 November 1829; d 70 East 120th St, New York, 10 September 1895)
Harrison Millard, or Signor Millardi as he aberrantly rechristened himself during a few youthful years, will, in truth, not go down in musical history as a particularly effective Victorian vocalist. However, his name is much better remembered than those of many of his more vocally deserving contemporaries, because of his other musical activities: most especially his achievements as the author and/or composer of some particularly popular ballads in the English drawing room or patriotic styles, and also because of a short, but anecdotally fruitful, career as a military musician.
Sam Millard was born in Boston in 1829 (though, for some reason, most references chop a single year off his age), the son of a British-born builder of the same name and his wife Marie or Maria Ham of New Hampshire, and it is said that he took to music at an early age, performing as a boy alto in church choirs and, from 1845, as a soloist with the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. An anecdote has him stepping in, in an emergency, at the age of 15, to sing the tenor part in Samson.
Around 1851, now a tenor, he went to Europe to study, and in April 1853, a ‘viaggatore’ reported back to the hometown press ‘[He} is developing his fine tenor rapidly. I heard him the other evening in a cavatina from one of the operas at the Accademia. His execution of the difficult passages elicited great applause’. Again, in the late part of 1854, laudatory paragraphs about the activities of Millard, and his fellow Bostonians-in-Italy, Adelaide Phillipps, Eliza Hensler and baritone Edward Sumner, filtered back to Dwight’s Magazine. The correspondent was unmistakeably Mr Millard, and I suspect the ‘viaggatore’ may have been as well.
Miss Hensler went on to sing at La Scala, Miss Phillipps to a splendid career, Mr Sumner seems to have vanished: as for Mr Millard, he went back to Boston, where in, November 1854, Dwight chronicled a little private gathering ‘[Mr Millard gave] his friends an opportunity of witnessing the results of three years Italian schooling of the naturally fine tenor voice… all were delighted with the ripe beauty of Mr Millard’s voice.. [he] seems like an Italian artist, without any of the Italian exaggeration’, concluding ‘We cannot doubt Mr Millard will be a delightful concert singer … with the exception of Mr Arthurson, we have not had his equal…’.
Shortly after, Millard gave a public concert at Chickering Hall. He sang an aria from Il Bravo, ‘Questa o quella’, ‘If with all your hearts’, a French chanson, and duets with Mrs E A Wentworth and a fifteen year-old Eliza Davis (who had a cold), and Dwight sportively dubbed it ‘a charming little affair’.
During 1855, Harrison Millard appeared in Boston in concert and in oratorio with the Handel and Haydn Society, and at the beginning of 1856 he made what appears to have been (in spite of unspecific ‘debuts’ in Florence and Arezzo) his first appearance in opera, guesting with the Anna Lagrange company, during its visit to Boston. Miss Hensler won praise for her appearance in Linda di Chamonix, but Millard did not:
‘We wish we could say the same of Mr Millard’s assumption of the role of Fernando in La Favorita. Quite a numerous audience were assembled and he was greeted, at first, with warmth but, further than the courtesies always extended to a debutant, his appearance created no enthusiasm and, but for the energetic and in some cases sublime personification of Leonora by Mdlle Didiée, the opera would have been a failure…’
Millard, however, joined Conrad Borrani and Henriette Behrens in a grandly titled ‘American Opera Company’ which performed some concerts, during April, in Philadelphia, before he returned to Boston, advertisedly ‘from remarkable success in Philadelphia’, to give a ‘Farewell Concert’, prior to leaving again for Europe. The Misses Hensler and Phillipps also took part and, alongside Millard’s ‘Ah si ben mio’, ‘Quando le sere’, ‘You’ll remember me’ and his own ‘Il Pescatore’, he gave ‘Si la stanchezza’ with the latter lady, and trios from Attila and Il Trovatore with both. The ladies were highly praised but ‘Mr Millard was received with less favour … He has a method of forcing his upper notes which is anything but agreeable. In ballad singing, which does not run high, he excels, hence his success in Balfe’s ballad…’
Millard – or Signor Millardi as he had for the nonce become – did not return to Italy, but instead visited England, where he was taken up by Jullien for his concert series at the Surrey Gardens. Dwight loyally copied back a review from the Manchester Examiner of his performance (‘Harri Millard’ this time) in The Creation, praising their boy for ‘a voice of remarkable and beautiful quality’ which, even if his lower notes were adjudged weak, ‘his style is masterly, we have seldom had to chronicle a more successful debut’, but the British press simply derided his Surrey Gardens ‘La donna è mobile’.
He appeared at Charlotte Dolby’s soirees, at the Beaumont Institute, and in the early part of 1857 was engaged, along with Fred Lablache and the young British mezzo known as Corelli, to support Catherine Hayes in her extensive farewell concert party tour. Back in London, he sang at Alfred Mellon’s Passion Week concerts at Drury Lane, at Woolwich with Frank Mori, at George Case’s monster concert, and, on the occasion of an Exeter Hall Easter Monday Verdi spectacular, sang ‘Questa o quella’ and ‘Parigi o cara’ on a bill with Sims Reeves. Signor Millardi was making his way. In April, he sang the tenor music in the Stabat Mater at the Réunion des Arts with Annie Thirlwall, Annie Lascelles, and the Signor Kinni (who really was Italian) and Gregorio (who wasn’t), and at St Martin’s Hall in the People’s Concerts. He appeared at the Beethoven Rooms for Mme Enderssohn and again with Mrs Macfarren, returned to the Surrey Gardens for Jullien and I spot him, come Christmas, singing in The Messiah at Northampton, alongside Mmes Enderssohn and Huddart and Charles Santley.
In April 1858, he had one more shot at the operatic stage, when he appeared, again with Mme Enderssohn and with old ally Borrani, in Lucrezia Borgia in a very brief J H Tully season. My last sighting of Signor Millardi on the British platform is on 3 June 1858, at a concert given by the Misses Mascall at the Hanover Square Rooms.
His British sojourn had been neither the success nor the disaster promised by his earliest reviews, but it was now over, and Millard (the Italian pretence now dropped) returned to Boston, its churches and its concert platforms.
There, on 21 February 1859, he featured, alongside Mrs Harwood, J Q Wetherbee and Charles Guilmette, in the title-role of Robert Stoepel’s ‘romantic Indian symphony’ Hiawatha.
By the time of the 1860 census, however, shortly before his marriage to Miss Laura Thompson, he found it fit to describe himself as ‘organist, teacher and music publisher’s reader’.
In 1861, however, he is listed as the tenor of the quartet of New York’s Christ Church, at Fifth Avenue and E35th Street. Mr Millard’s career as a performer was far from finished and it was, indeed, to enter what would turn out to be its most memorable moments.
In 1861, S H Millard joined the army, as a private solider in Company A of the 71st Regiment. His musical talents were put to use, and on 9 May he conducted a guards’ concert at the Navy Yard Barrack, Washington, in which his songs ‘The flag of the free’ and ‘Viva l’America’ were featured. He also sang the apt (?) ‘Let me like a soldier fall’ and, apparently, duetted the Trovatore ‘Miserere’ with Harvey Dodsworth. The occasion caused somewhat of a stir, caused Private Millard and his soldierish and patriotic songs (including ‘Only Nine Miles to the Junction’) to be enormously noticed, published and sold. Apparently flushed with success, Private Millard enrolled in the 19th US Infantry, the regular army, where he was affected to the staff of General Rousseau. He took part in the Battle of Chickamauga (19 September 1863 sq), in the course of which he was wounded, and he retired from the army the 7 November following.
Millard, thereafter, took up a post as a custom-house entry clerk at the New York Customs House while, nevertheless, continuing his efforts as a ‘musician and composer’. In early 1871 it was announced internationally that he was in the throes of composing a four-act opera, Deborah, which ‘if he completes it, will be the first of its kind by an American’. It appears that it was completed, but it was not performed.
He also continued to make appearances as a vocalist, and, in the 1870s, I spot him on a number of occasions singing at Chickering Hall and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In September 1879, however, he decided to give up his job at the Custom House, and the following year his name began to appear more regularly in the musical and dramatic press. Three new songs, ‘I’ll Open the Gate for you’, ‘The Ships Go Sailing By’ and ‘We Will Be Friends Forever’ were advertised, he mounted a concert (18 February) at the Chickering Hall, and he launched himself, in partnership with W H Singleton, as a theatrical performer. ‘Millard’s Excentriques in Our Photograph Party’ trumpeted the Low’s Opera House, Providence, Rhode Island, bills for an entertainment which was ‘a musical comedietta based on Longfellow’s Evangeline, with music composed, selected, arranged and performed by Millard with the assistance of the Misses Clara Arnaud, Alice Henderson, Charlotte Hutchings et al. When E E Rice, proprietor of the enormously successful burlesque Evangeline, protested about this copycat production, Singleton advertised bullishly that Millard’s piece was ‘far superior to his old and worn out [Evangeline] with its puerile and insipid music and bad puns’. Harrison Millard singing his own ‘When the Tide Comes In’ and ‘Dear Little Heart’ appeared, it seems, for about as many performances as Rice’s piece did in years.
In 1881, he published what he hopefully advertised as ‘a national anthem’ ‘God Save Our President from Every Harm’.
In 1883, Millard jumped on another bandwagon with an ‘operatic’ version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was produced (26 June) by the touring Holman Opera Company with Brookhouse Bowler as Reuben Meredith and Charles O’Connor playing Topsy in travesty, and again in San Francisco in 1894 by Mme Fabbri’s company; and in 1888 he can be seen in San Francisco with an entertainment Fashions in Music, in which he delivered a number of his own songs, as well as baritone arias from La Traviata and Beatrice di Tenda. He shared a bill with the mind-reading act of a Mr Bishop, and with the whistling Mrs Shaw, and travelled to the Caribbean and Central America with his performance. ‘Mr Millard who has a not very musical and somewhat throaty light baritone or low tenor voice, sang his own songs very well, and received hearty applause’.
Latterly, he performed less himself, and devoted himself to promoting his youngest daughter, Marie Millard, who had some success as a comic opera soprano. Marie (b New York, 25 April 1869; d Los Angeles, 12 February 1943) subsequently (19 June 1898) married the musician Louis F Gottschalk.
Millard died of Bright’s disease, in New York, in 1895, but the most popular of his several hundred published songs survived him largely, and parlour ballads such as ‘Whip-oor-will’, ‘Waiting’ and ‘When the Tide Comes in’ and, of course, his once popular patriotic tunes, have earned him a permanent place in the musical literature of nineteenth-century America, which has charitably forgiven him the Excentriques and the mind-reading.
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