I penned this piece last century. So thought it about time to publish it. Though, alas, I've still not found the gent's photo. He's the Bert (as in John Paul George Ringo and Bert) of the C19th opera. In there from the start, but dropped out before the fame came.
BORRANI, Mr [BOISRAGON, Conrad Gascoyne] (b Cheltenham 21 January 1812;d Melrose Villas, South Norwood, Surrey 6 September 1890)
When chorister, H Wayne Ellis, penned his memoirs of the mid nineteenth-century opera companies with which he had worked, and of his singing colleagues of those years, he often had a colourful or amusing little tale to tell. When it came to ‘Mr Borrani’ he simply smiled: ‘an excellent vocalist, a fine actor and a most genial gentleman…’. He went on from there to gossip that the genial gentleman’s real name was ‘Borain or Borrighan’ and that he was ‘the son of an Irish dentist from Cheltenham’ who had sent him to Italy to study singing.
Mr Ellis’s memoirs are very largely accurate, but here he was not quite right. The rather better-educated vocalist, Bessie Palmer got nearer. She reported ‘his name was Boisragon’. Not very Irish-looking, but indeed pronounced very like Borrighan, which is probably what fooled Mr Ellis. But Boisragon it was, and his father was indeed both Irish born and Cheltenham-based. Even though he was a doctor and not a dentist, and a very celebrated one at that.
The Boisragon name came, of course from France. From those days of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes which had sent so many Huguenots flying into exile. Louis Chevalleau, sieur de Boisragon, from Saint-Carlais in the Poitou, had gone initially to the Netherlands, but when William of Orange crossed to England, he and his second wife, Marie Henriette, daughter of another refugee, the Marquis de Rambouillet, went with him. From this couple was descended the memorable British – and sometime Irish -- family of Boisragon.
Dr Henry Charles Boisragon (1778-1852), born in Belfast, the son of career army man Major Charles Gideon Boisragon and his Irish wife Mary née Patterson, became a fashionable physician, at first in Bath and then, from 1807, with enormous notoriety in Cheltenham. He mingled with and ministered to the aristocracy and even the royalty who patronised this most select of British spa towns, and for thirty years he was a notable figure in the very social town’s society. The doctor had taken a wife in his pre-Cheltenham days (1803), Miss Mary Annetta Fanshawe, the daughter of John Gascoyne Fanshawe of Parsloes, Essex, and she would bear him three sons. Two of these followed in adult life the traditional family professions: Charles Henry Gascoygne Boisragon (1804-1837) became a Captain in the East India company army and founded a veritable dynasty of military men – two Major Generals, a Colonel, a V.C., and many more – before succumbing to the smallpox in Bengal at the age of 33; Theodore Smith Gurmastone Boisragon (1810-1881) became a doctor, an amateur musician, published an Illustrations of Osteology (1839), ran a fashionable lunatic asylum, and lived and died a bachelor.
The third son, Conrad Gascoygne Boisragon, went on the stage.
When the young, Eton-educated Conrad showed up with a musical talent, and a fine bass-baritone voice, his father – who had already put Theodore through medical school – came to the party and, as Ellis says, sent him off to Italy to study. I have, after dint of long digging, discovered that it was to Florence that he went, but unlike most Victorian vocalists who made that fashionable voyage for their shorter or longer musical education, he never tacked ‘pupil of so-and-so’ on to his name.
The Wiener-Theater Zeitung of 28 April 1834, in its column Aus dem Theaterwelt, records Dem Malibran and Lablache from Naples, Pasta from Milan, Boisragon from Florence, Herr and Mme Stockhausen .. a nice list in which to be included!
Anyhow, he came back to England in the spring of ’34, and I spot him on 14 May 1834, taking part in F Cramer’s ‘Farewell Concert’ at the Hanover Square Rooms, singing ‘Qui sdegno’. The Morning Post credited him with ‘a rich, mellow, genuine bass voice of great compass and power .. [the aria] gave him an opportunity of displaying his low tones, for it concludes on E below the lines in the bass. Mr B did so in both verses, which lessened the effect: had he descended as Phillips does, to E in the third space the first time and finished with the lower one, it would have been more effective. Mr Boisragon, who appears to be very young, has only just returned from Florence,where he has been singing at the opera with great success. He was deservedly well received and will, with steady perseverance, become a singer of distinction’.
He made what were announced as his ‘first appearances’ at Pio Cianchettini’s concert at Cheltenham and the Hereford Festival.
At the Three Choirs Festival of 1834, at Hereford, on the occasion of the first evening concert, after a first half including items by Braham, Phillips and Mme Caradori Allan, the second half was set in motion by the Pastoral symphony followed by: ‘We now had a fair opportunity of hearing a new candidate for vocal fame, Mr Boirgon, son of a distinguished physician at Cheltenham, whose passion for the art has included him to turn an accomplishment into a profession. He possesses a powerful bass voice, which practice will much improve, and a style acquired by studying in Italy, much more pure than that of many highly-praised singers of this country. So well did the audience think of his performance, that his aria (from Bellini’s Sonnambula) was encored…’
He sang La Sonnambula’s ‘Vi ravviso’ (‘for the first time in Britain’) and Neukomm’s ‘The Sea’ (‘two tones lower [than Phillips]’) and the local press gave the world columns of praise and all the details we could wish for …
He had studied with Lablache in Naples and with Giuliani in Florence. And he was going back to Italy …
‘Mr Boisragon (who is the son of the physician at Cheltenham) has an extraordinarily powerful bass voice; its depth and breadth of tone, compass, and power, are perfectly astonishing. But it wants cultivation, and conscious of this, Mr B is about to proceed again to Italy...’ (Barrow’s Worcester Journal).
I don’t think he went …
The great contralto Bessie Palmer confides in her memoirs that Conrad made his first appearance on the English stage under his own name, yet I could never find any trace of that. From his mid-twenties he was always Borrani. But Miss Palmer was right. In 1833, a boatload of Italian opera singers, under the management of one Guglielmo Guglielmi, had landed in Liverpool, and for the next couple of seasons – with the concourse of one Marquis di Muti Papazzuri -- this group purveyed Italian opera to the provinces of Great Britain. The membership of the company, of course, was decidedly unstable and at various times they attached the services of such local Italian singers as the very appreciable soprano Amathilda Kyntherland and the buffo Giuseppe Paltoni and his English wife née Fanny Corri. They also picked up the very young Mr Boisragon of Cheltenham, whom I spot singing Dandini in Cenerentola, Aliprando in Il Corradino, Lorenzo in Vaccai’s Giulietta e Romeo, the title-role in William Tell, Figaro in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Iago in Otello, Assur in Semiramide and Il Barone Walter in Il nuovo Figaro at the Liverpool and Manchester Theatres Royal in January and February 1835.
Their doings were noticed in Italy and the Censore Universale dei teatri commented on ‘un basso inglese che aveva fatto i suoi studii a Napoli, e che si chiama Boisragon, [apprezzato] per un abilità non commune…’.
Young Boisragon evidently attracted some attention by his Italian opera performances, for in 1837, when the production of Rooke’s Amilie was under preparation, the press reported a rumour that an offer to play the third bass part, behind Phillips and Stretton, in the opera was being made to Mr Boisragon. But English opera was not just for yet, and, by the time it was, ‘Boisragon’ had become ‘Borrani’.
The March 1838 prospectus for the coming season at the Italian Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre lists him, alongside the other two new boys of the season, Signor Morelli and a certain young Signor Tamburini, as ‘Borrani’. For Conrad was to make his first London appearance in London’s most fashionable operatic theatre. It became, in later days, the habit to open the Italian opera season with the new, untried, paying and/or more improbable members of the company. But I think at this stage that habit hadn’t yet arisen. For when Signor Borrani went on, on the very first night of the season, to make his début as Count Rodolfo in La Sonnambula, he was playing alongside the first-time Amina of no less certified a diva than Fanny Persiani, fresh from creating Lucia di Lammermoor in Paris. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have gone terribly well. The Musical World sniffed ‘His voice is bass, or rather barytone, of slight volume, but flexible and his intonation is perfect. We recollect to have heard this gentleman, under his real name, at Francois Cramer’s Farewell Concert, given at the Hanover Square Rooms, some two years ago; since which period, we believe, he has been a diligent if not a successful student of the art’. Another critic was more percipient: '[he is] an acquisition to the stage though not likely to be a star of the first magnitude’. A third reported that he was ‘a baritone, not, to judge by this attempt, of very good quality, and his style is deficient in refinement, but he may improve as he acquires greater confidence’. He didn’t get the chance. You didn’t, at the Italian opera. He wasn’t given another role.
‘Signor Borrani’ went back to Cheltenham, where he can be spotted in August of 1835 singing at the Grisi concerts, and in 1838 singing ‘Qui sdegno’, ‘Vi ravviso’ and an aria by D’Arcis at that gentleman’s concert, as ‘Conrad Boisragon’ and, through the winter season, in the local chamber concerts alongside the former Mary Cawse, but it was over a year before ‘Borrani’ got that second chance, and this time it was not in Italian opera, but in English opera: at Covent Garden, in the role of Artabanes in the classic Artaxerxes. 'His first appearance on the English stage'.
Once again, he was cast with other little-tried performers. A Miss Austin and a young tenor of promise named William Harrison. Plus Madame Eliza Vestris. This time, the evening was a decided success for all concerned. The young prima donna was loudly called for at the end of the evening, and Vestris led her in front of the curtain. Then it was Harrison. ‘Mr Harrison came to announce the piece, when a number of persons shouted for Borrani. He was a long time coming, but when he did come he seemed determined not to go and firmly kept his post behind Harrison for some time, to the amusement of the spectators.’ Second time on the stage, he probably had no idea what to do! The Times pronounced that he had ‘very efficiently filled’ the role of Artabanes, ‘[He] sang with much spirit and effect displaying those rare qualities for a singer, dramatic power and action. His song ‘Thy father, away’, was encored.’ The Musical World, inclined to be testy at Miss Austin and her teacher, confirmed he had made ‘a successful debut… his voice is a baritone of good power and considerable sweetness and he sings with energy and expression. His execution of ‘Behold, on Lethe’s dismal strand’ and ‘They father away’ was impressive and energetic but a little too overacted. This gentleman will be found a most valuable asset to the theatre.’ The Odd Fellow concurred ‘[he] exhibited powers of high musical excellence and his different songs were imbued with much dramatic power’.
In spite of this almost certain success, while Harrison rose tenoriously in his profession (and Miss 'Giovanna' Austin vanished, pro tem, to Italy), Borrani took a pause. Whether intentional or not, I know not. He can be seen in a handful of good London concerts and a meed of Cheltenham ones (‘his voice possesses the power of a legitimate bass with the sweetness and flexibility of a baritone’) in 1840, very little in 1841 and 1842 – although I spot him at Hereford, in October, winning encomia for his ‘Qui sdegno’ and ‘Vi ravviso’ and, again, in April 1842 in a team with a person announcing herself as La Contessa Bevilaqua Lazse and a tenor named Knox (‘A variety of English and Italian vocal pieces were extremely well sung, especially by Mr Borrani who is greatly improved’ ‘’My bark is bounding’ by Mr Borrani will long be remembered by all who heard it as an exquisite specimen of the compass, weight and ductility of his powerful voice’), as well as on a variety of Cheltenham occasions -- and it is not till four years on, that the name of the now thirty year-old Mr Borrani (no longer Signor) resurfaces in the London theatre: in the prospectus for Alfred Bunn’s coming English opera season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
This engagement was to be the key to Conrad Borrani’s career, for Alfred Bunn was the era’s great producer of English opera, of enduring English opera, and through the following years during he put on to the stage a regular run of new English works, as well as a goodly quota of foreign but new-to-England works. And throughout the whole experience, Mr Borrani was there as one of the company’s leading singers, creating and playing memorable roles in memorable operas, and building what would – in spite of, or perhaps a little thanks to, his slowly developed start -- a remarkable career.
Bunn opened his 1843 season with a revival of his fluke success of 1835, The Siege of Rochelle, but Borrani wasn’t in that one. He didn’t make his maiden operatic appearance on the Drury Lane stage until more than fortnight into the season, and when he did it was in good company, a good role and a fine opera: the first English version of Donizetti’s La Favorita. Emma Romer was cast in the title role, Templeton was her mio Fernando, and the three bass/baritone roles were taken by the proven Adam Leffler (King Alphonso XI), George Horncastle (Don Gasparo) and in ‘his first appearance on this stage’, Mr Borrani as the monk Balthazar. He ‘sang very carefully’ the powerful music of his part, and stamped himself straight away as a more than useful member of the Drury Lane company.
The Lady of the Lake and Cinderella were next revived for Mrs Alfred Shaw with Leffler, Horncastle and George Stretton taking the bass parts, before on 26 November Bunn mounted his first new English piece of the season. This one had just two baritone roles, and they were taken by Borrani and Stretton. Borrani actually got the, musically, better part, the heroine’s father, with two major solos, Stretton had the dramatically more lively role but no solo. Both of them would play their roles interminably in the years to come, for Bunn’s new opera was The Bohemian Girl, the most successful and most performed opera of the C19th stage.
Borrani played the part of Count Arnheim, father to little lost Arline, stolen by the gipsies and restored to home and a happy ending in the final reel, thanks to the efforts of a tenorious Polish nobleman. Miss Rainforth was Arline, Harrison played the Pole, and Stretton and Abby Betts the gipsies. The Count went from being a stalwart gent with a song about ‘A Soldier’s Life’ in Act I, to a sad, childless father in Acts 2 and most of 3, before cracking a smile for the everbody-happy finale. The sad moments proved Borrani’s best, however, for Balfe had supplied him with a song which challenged even the soprano and tenor showpieces of the opera as a take-away hit. ‘The heart bowed down’ would become Borrani’s trademark song, just as ‘Away to the mountains’ from The Mountain Sylph had been that of his predecessor, the great Henry Phillips.
The first night of The Bohemian Girl was a triumph, but the press, while admitting such, trod pickily through its parts. ‘A Soldier’s Life’, it decided, was ‘not a striking piece nor was Borrani happy in it. His voice does not want depth but the quality of the lower notes was often very doubtful’. It is perfectly possible. Composers were still writing roles for Henry Phillips, whose voice was several tones lower than those of either Borrani or Stretton. And people were still, excusably perhaps, thinking of and comparing his successors with Phillips: ‘To the song ‘The heart bowed down’ he did not give all that expression which Phillips was wont to give to productions of the kind, but he sang with much judgement and the encore he obtained was well deserved.’ Half a century on, with the comparisons no longer relevant, the same paper could sigh ‘Borrani … an admirable baritone, and sang ‘The Heart bowed down’ with perhaps greater vigour than any baritone since’.
The Bohemian Girl took up much of the rest of Bunn’s season, and a good bit of those that followed, but come the new year, the programmes were necessarily varied. The French tenor Gilbert Duprez was engaged as a guest, and he chose to make his first appearance in The Favourite. The cast that had surrounded Harrison the previous year repeated their roles. Then Bunn produced Duprez’s most celebrated vehicle, Rossini’s William Tell. Stretton was cast as Tell, and the Horncastles played Gessler and Rodolphe. Borrani took the supporting role of Walter Furst, and lent his stirring tones to the scene of the Gathering of the Cantons.
Once the Duprez season was done, Bunn came up with another new work, Julius Benedict’s The Brides of Venice. Stretton again was cast in the best baritone part, as the Count Orio Sorazano, a dissolute nobleman turned pirate king, but just before opening night he dropped out, and Borrani stepped in to his role. Unfortunately, The Brides of Venice was an essentially undramatic piece of which the only memorable moment was the ballad ‘By the sad sea waves’. Mrs Shaw got that one. As for Conrad, the Times opined ‘Borrani, a careful vocalist, is not the singer of passion and he probably was quite content with the quiet march of the drama’. Only its hit song would survive of The Brides of Venice.
The 1844 season brought back most of the previous year’s company, including Borrani and Stretton, who would share between them the main baritone roles of the year. The opening novelty was the soon to be ubiquitous Auber opera The Syren, with Borrani cast in the role of the Duke of Popoli and then, after another round of Bohemian Girls, came the newest Balfe opera, The Daughter of St Mark (27 November 1844). Borrani was cast as Andre Cornaro, father to the heroine ('When All Around Our Path is Dreary'), and two other basses, Weiss and Burdini took supporting roles. This piece was only a small success, but there was soon better to come. On 14 May 1845 yet another Balfe opera, The Enchantress, was put on the stage, with another guest artist, Anna Thillon, in its title role. Harrison, the primo tenore assoluto of the company had the putative hero’s role, but for once the baritone part seemed dramatically to have the best of things: a pirate chief, disguised as a hermit, the tenor’s rival in love for the heroine who ultimately risks his life on her behalf and then resigns her hand to the tenor at the final curtain. And the part of Ramir was played by Borrani. Such a colourful part must have made a nice change from being Elizabeth Rainforth’s rather depressed father. There was no ‘Heart bowed down in this one’, but Ramir was a fine part and Borrani had a fine run in it, at first with Thillon and later with Emma Romer as Stella, as The Enchantress settled down alongside The Bohemian Girl as one of the vertebrae of the Bunn repertoire. And the Borrani repertoire.
After the season, the stars visited Dublin with The Enchantress, The Bohemian Girl and The Daughter of St Mark (‘his first appearance here and at once established himself as a favourite by his fine voice and his correct style of singing’), then the Queen’s Manchester where they added The Beggar’s Opera (‘this distinguished trio have sojourned here for the last fortnight and have won golden opinions’), and the Theatre Royal, Liverpool (‘a most magnificent voice.. greatly admired’) before returning to town.
The 1845-6 season was swiftly to add another success. It was not Henry Forbes’s rather limp The Fairy Oak (18 October), in which Borrani was yet again consigned to playing Miss Rainforth’s unhappy parent, a magician whose main song rejoiced in a title ‘My heart grown old in misery’ which was all too redolent of ‘The heart bowed down’, but the Vincent Wallace opera produced a month later. Maritana (16 November 1845) would go on to challenge The Bohemian Girl for the title of the most popular English opera of its period. Emma Romer and Harrison took the central roles in this umpteenth remake of the Don César de Bazan story, and the principal bass role of the scheming Don Jose was taken by Henry Phillips. Borrani was cast as King Charles II, whose lust for and pursuit of the street singer, Maritana, is at the centre of the piece’s events. The tenor (‘Yes let me like a soldier fall’) and soprano (‘Scenes that are brightest’), and Elizabeth Poole as the little boy Lazarillo (‘Alas! those chimes’), pulled the songs that would become the classics, and Borrani’s song ‘The Mariner in his barque’ in the second act was perhaps less effective than some of the duet and trio music in which he took part. Once again, there was no ‘Heart bowed down’. They didn’t happen too often.
With all the established favourites running and rerunning on the bill, it was not until 26 February 1846 that the next new opera was mounted. It was Balfe again, and the title was The Crusaders. Harrison, Miss Rainforth, the steadily rising bass Weiss, Stretton and Horncastle were all in the cast. And Borrani? He played Raymond, Count of Toulouse, who was, of course, Elizabeth Rainforth’s father ('My bosom of those fears disarm'), through the piece’s respectable run.
In April, Anna Thillon returned and with her the more joyous music and opéra-comique type libretti of the works of Auber. This time it was his delicious The Crown Diamonds and Borrani was given the role of Rebolledo. The role was increased for the occasion by the introduction of a song for him written by J H Tully, which was sung to the accompaniment of the castanets.
Borrani had just one more new role during this season, and it came on the occasion of Harrison’s Benefit. Harrison chose to appear with Miss Romer in The Barber of Seville. Weiss played Basilio, Horncastle was Bartolo, and Borrani got the thoroughly comical role of Figaro.
After another tour with Harrison and Miss Romer, the company were back in town, where the 1846-7 season saw a revival of Balfe’s 1836 piece The Maid of Artois for Anna Bishop. Borrani was cast as the Marquis de Châteauvieux, a role originally played by Phillips. The part was equipped with another of Balfe’s most melodious ‘father’ songs, ‘The light of other days’ of which Phillips had made a classic and Borrani ‘did not fail to win the customary encore’.
Lavenu’s Loretta (November) with a fine cast headed by Anna Bishop, Harrison, the Misses Poole and Isaacs, Weiss and Borrani did not set Drury Lane agog, a revival of The Favourite, which hadn’t exactly been that first time round, with Borrani again as Balthazar followed, and Balfe’s The Bondman was successfully put on (without Borrani in the cast), before what should have been the event of the season: the production of Wallace’s new Matilda of Hungary. Borrani was Count Magnus, again alongside Harrison and Miss Rainforth, and had a heavy book of music – solo, duets, trio – to sing. However Matilda of Hungary had limited appeal, and Bunn soon switched back to more Maritana.
Bunn’s four seasons at Drury Lane might have ended a little on a down beat, but they had been on the whole a triumphant achievement, an achievement in which Conrad Borrani had played a thoroughly useful part. Now, however, Mr Bunn was out. Of the Lane, that is. But he was not down and, when the following August came, Alfred Bunn opened his operatic season as usual. Miss Romer, Harrison, Horncastle, Borrani and Rebecca Isaacs from his established team were all still there, Miss Poole, Stretton, Miss Rainforth, Donald King and others of the old company would soon arrive. There was just one big difference. Instead of being enthroned at Drury Lane, the opera company was now headquartered on the other side of the River Thames, at the Surrey Theatre.
Bunn opened, reasonably enough, with his biggest hit, The Bohemian Girl with Harrison and Borrani repeating their original roles, before switching to The Enchantress. La Sonnambula and Maritana followed, then a revival of The Bondman in which Borrani took Willoughby Weiss’s role of the Marquis of Vernon, The Daughter of the Regiment (Corporal), The Beggar’s Opera and more Bohemian Girl before the first part of the season was done and Bunn shuffled his team. The stars of the first part, including Borrani, mostly moved on.
In March, however, Borrani appeared again on the West End stage, and for the first time for a long, long time it was under a management other than that of Bunn. The occasion was a short season of opera at the Strand Theatre, with Elizabeth Poole as prima donna. The Daughter of the Regiment, La Sonnambula and Auber’s Haydée, with Borrani as Sulpizio, Rodolfo and Malapiero, respectively, made up the programmes, after which Borrani migrated north to Sadler’s Wells for an umpteenth repeat of The Bohemian Girl, put on by Miss Rainforth herself.
However, a more settled existence would soon return, for in 1848 (9 October), Alfred Bunn went back into the English opera business, this time at the headquarters of the Italian opera, Covent Garden. Many of the Drury Lane team were there, Miss Romer, Harrison and Borrani at their head, but Bunn saw fit to open with a revival of Maritana, starring the composer’s sister. Phillips was back as Don Jose and Borrani repeated his King before going on to repeat his Ramir and his Count Arnheim. When Sonnambula went on, however, he relinquished his role to the young Henry Whitworth and Harrison left his to a new tenor who called himself ‘Sims Reeves’. In November, Rossini’s The Lady of the Lake was brought out to feature another newcomer, Louisa Bassano, in the role the Mrs Alfred Shaw had made her own, and Borrani was cast in the splendid and in-no-way-sad heroine’s-father role of the clan chief, the Douglas. His performance of the florid music was judged ‘in all respects creditable; the powerful resonance of his voice came out with advantage in the morceaux d’ensemble’. Finally, in December came a new opera. A Quentin Durward with music composed by Henri Laurent. Borrani played King Louis XI alongside the Durward of Harrison and Mrs Donald King and Sophia Messent in the soprano roles, and he won an opening night encore for his song ‘ They call me here, they call me there, Maitre Pierre’. It was commented, however, that his portrayal of the disguised King was scarcely as per Walter Scott. But the fault seems, there, to have lain largely with librettist Fitzball. Anyway, Quentin Durward put an end to the season. The settled existence of earlier years, it seemed, would not come again.
In July 1849 the Surrey Theatre began its now regular summer season of opera, but this year Borrani was not there. Weiss, Leffler, Horncastle and Delevanti made up the baritone and bass team for a rather unadventurous season of Bohemian Girls and Sonnmbulas and Daughter of the Regiments of which the high spot was the mounting of a version of Les Huguenots. But Borrani was not there. For the next twelve months London would see him not at all.
But it was only temporary. The following season London’s most ubiquitous leading baritone was back to play Arnheim, Rodolfo, Sergeant Sulpice, Ashton in Lucia di Lammermoor, Pietro in Masaniello, Oroveso when Dolores Nau ventured Norma, Iago when Rossini’s Othello was produced with Travers and Annie Romer as the moor and the maiden, and Sir George Walton in an anglicised I Puritani, but when Maritana was staged, he left his original role of the King to Delevanti and took up instead the part of the conniving Don Jose. From here on in, he would keep to the rather more substantial role.
When the Surrey season finished this year, and after a little concertising, Borrani picked up with an English opera troupe setting out to perform a few weeks in the provinces. Rebecca Isaacs was prima donna, Travers was the tenor, Miss E Honner and the bass Kuchler from the German opera company supported, and Conrad got to visit his home town of Cheltenham. A few weeks later, however, he joined up with an altogether more substantial company at the Theatre Royal, Liverpool. This one was headed by his old colleague Harrison, teamed with top soprano Louisa Pyne and baritone Henri Corri, and it was carrying The Crown Diamonds, The Barber of Seville, Maritana, The Bohemian Girl, Fra Diavolo, La Sonnambula, No Song No Supper and The Beggar’s Opera. Once again the tour was a short one, for on 9 June the Surrey Theatre English opera season – the best now that London had to offer – began.
Miss Romer kept the season bubbling along, this year, for some six months, sharing the prima donnaship with Priscilla Horton and Elizabeth Poole (and a brief ‘favourite pupil of Donizetti’ who soon vanished), alongside her brother, Travers, as tenor and with Borrani and Corri taking the lower-voiced roles. This season, alongside his regular Arnheim, Rodolfo, Don Jose, Balthazar, Ramir and Sulpice, Borrani was seen as Marcel in The Huguenots, Caspar in Der Freischütz, Dandini in Cinderella, Hela in The Mountain Sylph, Antonio in Linda di Chamonix, Don Silva in Ernani, Giacomo in Fra Diavolo, Oroveso to the Norma of ‘Mlle Eugenie de Ville of the Royal Opera, Geneva’, in the title role in Don Giovanni and when the Surrey produced Macbeth – the play -- with Creswick starred, he sang Hecate in Locke’s music. Unlike Drury Lane, the Surrey, with a slimmer company, didn’t allow for nights off. Or operas off. It also sometimes played two operas a night. At the end of the season, in December, Borrani took a Benefit and his chosen bill was The Huguenots, No Song No Supper and the play The Golden Farmer.
In the spring he again visited Liverpool for a short season of familiar operas with Travers and Georgina Weiss and, after the odd concert, launched, on Whit Monday, on yet another Surrey season (31 May). Many of the participants and many of the operas were a repeat of those of the previous year’s long and successful season, but Flotow’s Léoline, with Borrani in the role of Frantz (originated in England by Weiss) was an addition to the repertoire and then, on 26 July 1852, manageress Emma Romer launched a brand new Balfe-n-Bunn opera. The Devil’s In It was a new version of the ancient, much re-used and much musicalised musical comedy The Devil to Pay, and Borrani took the central role of the magician Lunastro, who practices a little metempsychosis on a brutal husband and a haughty wife with comical and chastening results. The cast was every bit as good as a Drury Lane one, with such Drury Lane stars as Miss Romer, Miss Poole and Borrani joined by tenor Travers and rising baritone Henri Corri as the two couples who are magically rematched. It was the most notable English operatic event since the demise of the regular London seasons at Drury Lane and the Princess’s Theatre and, the London Illustrated News reported of the opening night, ‘one of the largest and most remarkable audiences ever collected within the walls of the Surrey Theatre - the pit and the galleries were filled with the usual southern aborigines - coatless, and in many cases waistcoatless; but the boxes and private boxes were tenanted by almost every professor and amateur of note in the metropolis, including the principal members of Her Majesty's Theatre'. The music which illustrated the grand old tale (which Bunn had foreborn to alter materially) was shared tidily among the five principals – Borrani’s best moments came in an opening incantation ‘Deep in the fartherest cells of earth’ and a ballad ‘If in the future’s mystic book’ – and The Times judged ‘a more unequivocal success could hardly have been achieved’.
With its new opera as its main attraction, Miss Romer’s season ran through till 13 September, but only weeks after the closure Borrani was back on the boards as chief bass/baritone of yet another opera company. ‘Next week’ announced the Liverpool Amphitheatre, with conscious star billing, ‘Miss Pyne, Mr Harrison and Mr Borrani will appear in a series of English operas’. In week one it was the old round again -- The Bohemian Girl, Maritana, La Sonnambula, The Crown Diamonds – and there was little to say. Borrani was simply voted ‘as effective as ever’. In week two, the programming was a little more novel, and Mendelssohn’s Son and Stranger and Fitzwilliam’s Queen for a Day which Miss Pyne and Harrison had played recently at the Haymarket were brought out, and The Era’s Liverpool reviewer found himself a quibble over Mr Borrani. 'Mr Borrani is a deserved favourite abut even favourites are but mortals and have their failings. Mr Borrani’s chief defect is the frequent flatness of his singing which at times grates very unmusically upon the ear’. The flatness can’t have been that frequent for him to have attained and held for some ten years a position as, or at least among, the foremost English baritone opera singers of the era. Maybe it was just something about Liverpool?
The Pyne-Harrison-Borrani combination, with Susan Pyne and Oliver Summers making up the principal team, moved on to Manchester, Edinburgh and dates beyond, through a tour of some four months, by the end of which the tenor and soprano were announcing the dates and plans they had already worked at together for some time. Worked only, of course, for if Louisa Pyne was still a spinster, Harrison was a married man. And so now, since 1851, was Conrad Boisragon Borrani.
His wife was née Hannah Ball, and she hailed from Worcester, but beyond that, all that I know of her is that she was a musically educated lady who would, over the years, like her husband, pen a number of pieces of published music. The couple would have thirty-seven years of marriage.
The tour over, Borrani joined further with the Pyne sisters and Harrison to take part in a concert mounted at Islington by Mrs Galton (nee a third Miss Pyne), and he appeared at several other London concerts before, come the summer, came the time to return to the Surrey Theatre for the, now annua, Emma Romer season. This season, beyond the usual repeats of the usual roles in the usual operas, including of course Miss Romer’s very own The Devil’s In It, gave Borrani – as unchallenged first bass singer – the opportunity to play Bertram in Robert the Devil and in The Siege of Rochelle between 16 May and 24 September, after which he switched back to the Pyne and Harrison team for a further season of touring with, this time, Henry Horncastle as second bass and the young John Brookhouse Bowler as second tenor. There was no novelty here --Fra Diavolo, The Enchantress, The Crown diamonds, The Bohemian Girl, La Sonnambula, Maritana, The Marriage of Figaro, Guy Mannering, The Waterman – but there was uncontested quality. And then, in March, came the announcement ‘Next week William Harrison and Miss Louisa Pyne will commence a farewell engagement, prior to their departure for America.’ Mr Borrani trundled back to the Surrey, where, this season, he got to play Zachariah in Emma Romer’s production of The Prophet, but he, too, was advertising ‘prior to his departure for America’.
In fact, it was kernel of the group which had completed the last season’s touring,which left, in August, and September for America, and which are credited with, there, creating ‘the Pyne and Harrison Opera Company’: Louisa and Susan Pyne, William Harrison, Mr Borrani, Fullstop. For the not really ‘original’ ‘Pyne and Harrison company’ was not yet a complete company, merely – like their touring efforts in the English provinces over the past couple of years -- a quartet of leading players who, for their performances in America, would pick up local players, choristers and musicians to complete their effective.
The company opened their American tour at New York’s Broadway Theatre on 9 October in La Sonnambula followed on 12th by The Bohemian Girl and a few days later by Maritana with Borrani featured, now, in the role of Don Jose. The New York Times, gave good reviews to Miss Pyne and Harrison, but preferred Borrani’s voice to his performance: “Mr. Borrani, as Don Jose, was sonorous and impressive. There is a peculiar mellowness in his voice that delights the hearer, and improves on acquaintance. He was much applauded, but did not receive the customary encore in ‘Happy Moments,’ nor did he deserve it. We have seldom heard a melody more studiously slaughtered than this.’ It seems to be a repeat of the old complaint about Conrad not being ‘a singer of passion’. But The Era’s New York correspondent reported ‘Mr Borrani has stamped his fame on this side of the Atlantic as an artist of very considerable celebrity’
The company – which was staunchly referred to, both in America and Britain as Pyne, Harrison and Borrani, whatever it later became -- appeared over the months to come, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and around America, in The Enchantress (Ramir), Cinderella (Dandini), The Beggar’s Opera, Guy Mannering (Gabriel), The Daughter of St Mark in which Borrani repeated his original role of Andrea Cornaro and Queen of a Day (Timothy) and became, all three, ‘very great favourites’ but, although the non-chauvinistic amongst the reviews were splendid, and although houses were mostly good enough to great, after a while the transatlantic winter started to wreak havoc with the singers' health and voices. With no alternative soprano, tenor or bass, time and again, performances had to be cancelled. And with the cancellations came losses, followed by the sort of financial fiddle-faddling practised by less well-thought-of managers, and thencefrom, discord. And Borrani, punctiliously sticking by the terms of his contract in the face of non-payment of his guarantees, was at the centre of the discord.
The New York Times of October 29, 1855, reported ‘Discordants in the English Opera. The case of Borrani vs. Harrison, which has been for some time pending before the Chief Justice of the Marine Court, was decided on Saturday. The plaintiff was the basso of the Pyne and Harrison troupe, and claimed to recover $325, under a special contract to perform with the troupe three times a week at the Broadway Theatre. It was in evidence that the requisite number of nights had not been occupied so as to enable the plaintiff to recover, and he proved that on several occasions the prima donna was unable to appear when the plaintiff was ready and willing, but the troupe could not perform. In reply to this it was shown that when the basso was unwell the prima donna was ready and willing to sing, but no performance could take place. The Court, under this state of things, gave judgment for defendant.’
Borrani had already quit the company. Horncastle had joined up previously, and Stretton replaced him for a while, and finally a brute named Stephen W Leach, a former lay vicar of Winchester Cathedral hiding out in America from the British courts and the wife he had deserted and bigamised. Conrad Borrani eventually headed back to Britain, and, of course, to a brisk start in a new company, but the close ties he had had with Miss Pyne and with Harrison were cut for good. The man who would undoubtedly have been the principal bass of the ‘Pyne and Harrison’ company, when the managers set up their prestigious seasons in London, a couple of years later, would never again work with the pair, who, he adjudged, had cheated him.
Borrani hung on a while in America. Reports came out of Boston towards the end of the year that he was launching an opera company on the road with Miss Behrend as his soprano, the young Harrison Millard as tenor and Rip van Winkle as their principal piece. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But it wasn’t long before he crossed the ocean to home and in June 1856 he was ready for a reappearance on the British stage.
He reappeared in no less a venue, it seems, that the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. E T Smith had been running a very presentable English opera season there, and as it wound to a close benefit time came on. Soprano Lucy Escott chose The Bohemian Girl and Borrani came in for his original role, Conductor Tully chose Freischütz and Borrani was Caspar, Smith decided to launch an immediate ‘summer season’ and Borrani was in the company. He launched the season with a new opera, Vincenzo Battista’s version of Victor Hugo, Esmeralda. The splendid Lucy Escott took the title role, the company’s regular baritone Charles Durand was Frollo and Borrani played the role of Quasimodo. The summer season included some performances of The Enchantress and more Bohemian Girls (in which he did not play!), which seem to have been little more than a stopgap, and a means of producing Esmeralda, before the company went out on the road. When it did, Borrani did not go with it. He went out with a different company, managed by tenor Elliot Galer (‘his first appearance in the provinces since his return from Italy’) and with Rebecca Isaacs as prima donna. Borrani was billed ‘his first appearance in the provinces since his return from America’. Galer launched his company at Norwich on 18 august 1856 and an American journalist picked up on it. ‘Borrani the glorious’ he pointed out ‘with his lower G now all right’. I wonder what had been wrong with it. For it does seem that Conrad was now as much a bass as a baritone. Maritana, The Bohemian Girl, La Sonnambula, Lucrezia Borgia (Alphonso), Fra Diavolo, The Beggar’s Opera, The Daughter of the Regiment, Norma, Lucia di Lammermoor, Masaniello made up the repertoire along with the new ‘must have’, Il Trovatore, in which Galer was Manrico, Issacs played Leonora and Borrani the Count di Luna. ‘He obtained great applause’ wrote the Leicester press;‘well known here some years ago … is an accomplished vocalist and still maintains his old position’ noted Birmingham, ‘An established favourite’ assured Leeds, and when he made his first appearance at Sheffield ‘Mr Borrani met with a hearty reception from the recollection on previous occasions of his magnificent rendering of some of the best and most difficult bass music of the operas’. It was Sheffield which was the scene of the most important event of the tour. Galer produced an extra opera, one that had never been adapted for or played in the vernacular on the English stage: Verdi’s Rigoletto. And so, the original Count Arnheim of The Bohemian Girl became the original English Rigoletto, alongside Galer’s Duke and Miss Isaacs’ Gilda.
The Galer tour ended in May, and Borrani, Rebecca Isaacs and second tenor Bowler headed straight for London. William Cooke of Astley’s Theatre had been varying his equestrian programmes by producing Shakespeare in an equified version. Since Il Trovatore was currently the operatic rage, and since it presented the possibility of showing on stage the tournament which was only mentioned in the opera, he had decided to mount Verdi’s opera. He contacted Augustus Braham, the original London Manrico, and Braham pulled back together a number of the members of his touring company, notably contralto Fanny Huddart, summoned Borrani to play Luna and the spectacular, heavily horse-content version of Il rovatore was mounted at Astley’s. ‘The most perfect triumph ever witnessed at this theatre’ trumpeted Cooke in his advertisement, before canning it for Sonnambula and Maritana in a total of six operatic weeks.
In 1858 Borrani went back to the Surrey, where the Romer seasons were a thing of the past, and repeated his Hecate for Creswick, he played in a short opera season at Sadler’s Wells for J H Tully, repeating his Bohemian Girl role fifteen years after the event, playing Alphonse to the Lucrezia Borgia of Marian Enderssohn, and taking the role of Count Walter in a hastily and messily shoved on ‘first’ British performance of Luisa Miller. Later in the year, he joined up with Elliot Galer again and added two new parts to his tally: Germont père in La Traviata and Morenos, the Moorish chief, in an original English opera, Zaida, by Wilhelm Meyer Lutz. The provinces welcomed him fondly: ‘Mr Borrani fully sustained his high reputation and, as usual on his visits here, was heartily welcomed. His song of ‘The Heart bow’d down’ was anxiously expected and listened to with breathless attention. A unanimous encore was demanded’.
When the Galer company fell apart in Leicester in March of 1859, Borrani took a job with the rather less appreciable Henry Manley company, an outfit covering mainly number two dates. Louisa Pyne’s sister, Marian Pyne Galton was the leading lady, Manley of course the tenor. This tour seems to have been the first occasion for him to play the part of Plunkett in Martha.
In between times, however, he took part in some concerts at the Crystal Palace (September 1859) and the musical press took the occasion to remark ‘[he] has been so long away from the stage and appears so rarely in the concert room that he has almost escaped the memory of the musical public.’. The musical press, of course, had its eyes solely on London. Conrad gave his ‘Heart bowed down’ and ‘the pride of stentorian baritones’, Shield’s ‘The Wolf’, and also the ‘Sorgete’ from Semiramide. The musical press found it ‘an eagle’s flight beyond the power of the singer’. He followed up with ‘When I Beheld the anchor weighed’ (The Siege of Rochelle) and was again criticised for, as a ticketed baritone, giving Sarastro’s Magic Flute aria.
In April 1860, Conrad Borrani returned one more time to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for what was to have been an opera season. The manager was conductor James Pech, and he opened with Maritana with Henry and Lizzie Haigh, Emma Heywood and Borrani in the leading roles. Mr Pech’s operation folded quickly, and with it Borrani’s career in the major theatres.
In the following years he put in appearances with a little group called ‘the Boudoir Opera Company’ giving concert performances of operas in the provinces, he appeared in various concerts, and in April 1863 – over fifty years old now -- he was seen one last time on the London operatic stage in a season given by Henry C Cooper at the East End Standard Theatre. Edmund Rosenthal was the company’s principal baritone, but Borrani played his original Arnheim, 20 years on, and also went on in Sonnambula when Rosenthal fell ill. He appeared in a chunk of Lucrezia Borgia at Rebecca Isaacs’s Benefit at the good old Surrey shortly after this, and in 1864 he turned up on the bill at Alhambra Music Hall. This engagement seems to have been his last appearance in London.
However, he still had several more years of career left. At Christmas 1867, he appeared in the annual Christmas season of opera at the Theatre Royal, Cork, organised this year by the company’s star, Florence Lancia. William Parkinson was the tenor, Charles Durand the baritone, and Borrani shared the second line with soprano Blanche Cole, bass James Tempest, comedian Bentley and mezzo Carlotta Zerbini. Durand took most of the roles which Borrani had once played. This seems to have been his last appearance on the operatic stage and, indeed, I have not noticed his name billed anywhere thereafter.
By 1871, at least, he was ‘a retired artist’ for he appears under that description in the census of the year, living with Hannah at Western Lane, Winslow, Shipton in Buckinghamshire. They are clearly not in want, for the have three servants. The also have an unexpected boarder, one Frederick Kearney aged 48 from Earl’s Cloom, Worcs. Perhaps Conrad was giving brother Theodore a helping hand, for Mr Kearney is listed as ‘lunatic’.
In 1881 they are to be found – with no lunatic -- at Melrose Villa, South Norwood Hill, and it seems to be there than Hannah died in 1888, and Conrad two years later at the age of 77.
Hannah’s name is attached to the songs ‘The Sandal Tree’ and ‘Man’s Best Without a Wife’ (as Boisragon) and several collections of children’s songs (as Borrani), and Conrad’s to some piano arrangements.
