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).

 

Songs of famous writers: One that got away (1838)

 

Eliza Cook was a teenager, and already a published poet, when she wrote 'The King of the Wind'. She would go on to pen many, many better and more successful pieces, notably as set to music by Henry Russell

But this one, set to music by Mr W Lovell Phillips, of the Royal Academy of Music, cellist, pianist and composer, seems to have had but a short life.

I'm sure there has been a vast Universitorial eulogy written in this century about Miss Cook ... probably more about her fashionable (now) life and lifestyle as a flagrant lesbian and cross-dresser than her work. If there hasn't, there should have been. Anyway, I sha'n't go into it. Merely say that she was one of the most successful poets-cum-lyricists of her era. And that this piece does not appear to have been one of her successes, in spite of being promoted by the grand bass, Théodore Victor Giubelei, of Drury Lane.

GIUBILEI, Theodore Victor [DAVAUX, Theodore Victor] (b c 1801; d Naples, 4 December 1845)

GIUBILEI, Augusto  (b c 1812; d 63 4th Avenue, New York, 6 December 1851)

Théodore Victor Giubilei ‘an Englishman of Italian extraction, tall and elegant, with flowing black hair, piercing eyes and classical symmetry features. A commanding actor, possessing a superb bass voice and English diction of surpassing purity...’. So spoke The Musical World at the time of his death.

 

A splendid picture. And all the more enjoyable in that, when I read it, I had never seen a picture of him. I have now, there is one in the New York Public Library, but it’s catalogued under wrong spelling. But ‘Italian’ extraction? Oh, dear, no. Italianate in aspect perhaps, but not in extraction. For Théodore, you see, was not born Giubilei. He only had that name thrust upon him. And an Englishman? Perfectly probable, but I can find no evidence or the birth of Theodore, of his half-brother, or of his sister, on Anglican shores. None at all. Not yet, anyway. Théodore was actually born with the surname Davaux. French, not Italian. His mother was, by her Christian names, Geneviève Adelaide. French. But from there on in it gets a bit trickier.

 

The central clue in deciphering who all these folk actually were, comes in the record of a marriage celebrated in Marylebone in 1811 (5 March), when Théodore would have been something like 10 years old. The couple involved are one Luigi Giubilei and the aforesaid Geneviève Adelaide Davaux. Théodore’s mother is making a second marriage and, thus, Giubileising her older children. She bore another son, Augusto, to her new husband, the year following their marriage. At least I think she did.

 

We don’t know who Luigi was. By his name, it would seem that he was Italian. Except that the only other Giubilei in London, at the time, was one Michel Julien Giubilei (d 1860), whose wife Augusta Mary (1815-1892) was, advertisedly, ‘milliner and dressmaker to Her Majesty the Queen’ in the 1840s and 1850s. Michel Julien sounds pretty French. Anyway, he and Augusta had a son, born in 1833, whom they also christened by the unusual name of … Théodore. And of whom more in due course. So a connection of some sort amongst all these fundamentally French folk seems evident. And it appears that Michel may have been Théodore’s half-brother.

 

If their personal history is a little confusing, their professional is no less so. For, all in all, five Giubileis went into music. Three men and two girls. The girls, however, opted each for a stage surname, but that still leaves us with the Giubilei three men, each of whom was liable to describe himself on theatre and concert bills simply as ‘Signor Giubilei’. And, what is worse, it seems that all three were basses. Théodore, Augusto and Theodore.

Fortunately, Theodore the second doesn’t start until the other two have stopped, so unless there is yet another Signor G floating around, all references after 1851 are to him. Similarly, the much younger Augusto doesn’t really get going till well after Theodore the first, so we have something like eight unconfused years to start with. But, between 1833 and 1845, life gets intermittently tricky. Sometimes Augusto bills himself as Signor A, but Theodore sticks, by right of primogeniture, to the simple Signor. Which, unfortunately, it seems that Augusto used from time to time as well. But I’ve done my best to sort all this out. As follows.

 

My first sighting of Théodore Giubilei, as a performer, comes courtesy of the Memoirs of Charles Mathews. Mathews (and/or his wife) describes an amateur performance which was given at the Lyceum in 1822 (26 April). The play is a little piece called Le Comédien d’Etampes and the cast includes Mathews (billing himself as the piece’s Parisian creator, Perlet, who can only do this one performance because he’s got to do it in Paris tomorrow!), dancer Oscar Byrne (1795-1867), W Peake, choreographer James Hervet d’Egville and a Mme Spittallier, who appears to have been the dancer of that season from the Italian opera house. And, finally, Monsieur (!) Giubilei, as Monsieur Duval.

I daresay there were more such amateur efforts – and I’d love to know what Theodore was doing for a day job in his teens and early twenties – but at the age of twenty-fiveish, after a course of singing lessons with no less a basso than Giuseppe de Begnis, he took the big step and turned professional, making his debut at his teacher’s concert at the Argyll Rooms 23 June 1826. And then he moved on. He did it in style, too, for he made his first appearance on any professional stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, alongside, and even duetting with, the tenor of the era, John Braham. The date was 21 October 1826 and the show a revival of the highly successful opera, The Devil’s Bridge, with a score by Charles Horn and with Braham in his role of Count Belino. Miss Graddon appeared as Rosalvina, Miss Kelly, from the original cast, as the soubrette Lauretta and Harley as Michelli.

The Times was not impressed by the debutant: ‘A Mr Giubilei made his first appearance as Florian with moderate success. His voice is a tenor-bass, powerful but coarse, and apparently not under the most efficient control. He sang the air ‘How wretched is the wanderer’s lot’ tolerably well. He was not so happy in his duet [‘Rest, weary traveller’] with Mr Braham. The harshness of his tones were sadly at variance with the full and flexible notes of the latter gentleman. When Mr Braham and Mr T Rovedino executed this duet it was a delicious piece of harmony.’ 

Tomasso Ernesto Gaetano Rovedino (qv), bass singer, son of the more famous Carlo (1752-1822), and a part of London musical life for half a century, had been the original Florian at the Lyceum fourteen years earlier, and the duet in question had been a celebrated success within a success. 

The Times gentleman – as was his wont -- might not have been impressed (and what, pray, is tenor-bass? a barytone?), but down at M Laporte’s Italian opera house in the Haymarket somebody in power must have been, for Signor (now) Giubilei was promptly engaged as a principal basso for the forthcoming season in the hallowed halls of the Italian opera, and on 17 March 1827 he made his Italian opera debut on the stage of the town’s most fashionable theatre. The opera season had been going for getting on for three months, and the first two prime donne, Mesdames Caradori and Ayton, had played their turn. Now came the third, Sra Giacinta Toso, and the opera selected for her debut was a revival of Rossini’s recent Pietro l’eremita. Theodore was cast in the important role of the Hermit of the title, alongside Mme Cornega, Mme Biagioli, the tenor Curioni, plus Torri, Deville and Zorbelli. It seems as if it may have been a little much too soon, for the notices were not kind: ‘it would perhaps be difficult to find a more indifferent substitute for Signor Porto whose deep and sonorous tones gave the utmost effect to the denunciations of the hermit’, ‘[he] has neither power of voice nor sufficient judgement for such a part as that of the hermit. The invocations and denunciations of the leader of the crusaders fall almost stillborn from the lips of Peter’s present representative’.

 

The young bass, however, proved himself a useful member of the company during the remaining five months of the opera season, appearing in supporting roles in five further operas, beginning with Ricciardo e Zoraide with Toso and Curioni, then as Oroe alongside Pasta, Mlle Brambilla and Curioni in Semiramide, in Mayer’s Medea, with Pasta in the title role, in Coccia’s Maria Stuart regina di Scozia with Pasta again starred and, finally, as Araspes in Mercadante’s Didone (5 July with Pasta as Dido to the Aeneas of Madame Puzzi (ex-Toso) at the latter’s Benefit. 

His usefulness thus proven, it would have seemed natural to find Theodore Giubilei back at the King’s Theatre in the following seasons, but that didn’t happen. In fact, through 1828-1830 he is spotted but rarely on British programmes. Did he go overseas?

 

Possibly. Yet there are just a handful of references to and credits for him in Britain during that period. He was announced for an opera company run by the Puzzis at the Pantheon which apparently did not take off, he played with de Begnis at Manchester in an opera company including Torri, the de Angioli spouses and Rubbi (October 1827), he appears on the bill for a modest concert given, on 18 June 1828, at the Argyll Rooms by Mr and the Masters Schulz from Vienna and 30 June for the cellist Polognié, he turns up with an operatic company at the Vauxhall Gardens in June 1829, alongside members of the B team from the Italian opera: Fanny Ayton, Mme Castelli, Mme de Angioli; Torri, de Angioli, Rubbi, Zugeri and Pellegrini, performing Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Cenerentola, and he took part, apparently discreetly, in the 1829 Birmingham Festival.

 

He returns in force only in June of 1831, but not at the Opera House, only on the concert platform. And in the best of company. He appeared at Sedlatzek’s concert at the Opera House Concert Room (8 June 1831), performing a two-bass duet from Il Matrimonio segreto with Lablache, at Liverati’s concert at the home of Lady Beechey (20 June) alongside Pasta, Rubini, Mme Stockhausen and Miss Stephens, and back at the Concert Room at Master Aspull’s Benefit where he was noticed as ‘a bass singer possessing a very fine and well cultivated voice’. Pasta and Rubini again headed the bill when he appeared at again at Signor Torri’s (11 July), Giulio Regondi’s (23 July) and Signor Rubbi’s (29 July), alongside such as de Begnis, Begrez, Curioni and, just occasionally, another English artist, such as Miss Masson, Edward Seguin or Bennett.

In 1832, Theodore Giubilei returned to the King’s Theatre and the Italian opera, and he made his re-debut on 10 March in … Pietro l’eremita starring the former Miss Toso (‘her first appearance for five years’) supported by Joséphine de Méric, Mariani, Winter and Calveri. Once again – in a company which included Lablache, Vincenzo Galli and Mariani -- Theodore played the role which had earned him so much criticism five years earlier, but this time to a very different reaction: ‘Signor Giubilei sustained the character of Peter the Hermit with much ability: he gave the invocation to the Deity ‘Eterno immenso, incomprensibil Dio!’ in a pure, chaste and impressive style. His intonation was beautifully perfect.’

A fortnight later Spontini’s La Vestale was revived, with de Méric as Julia, and Theodore was cast in the bass role of the Pontifex Maximus, and during the course of the season he also appeared as Basilio in Il Barbiere di Siviglia (replacing a Signor Piozzi who had failed), in an indifferent role in the indifferent La Straniera (23 June) and in a performance of Robert le diable played as a Benefit for Adolphe Nourrit. The season, however, finished with rather less aplomb than might have been hoped. Mr Monck Mason, the manager, had gone bankrupt.

 

Theodore, however, celebrated the end of the season in style. On 27 August 1832, at the church of St Mary le Strand he got married. The bride was a member of the King’s Theatre company, one of its most attractive dancers, the French ballerina Augustine Clara Proche. Mlle Proche had made her first appearance with the company in 1831, in the ballet of La Sonnambule, and quickly established herself as a favourite. As Madame Proche Giubilei she would have a fine career as a dancer, as well as bearing four children: Augusta Louisa Davaux (b London 23 February 1834), Alfred Ernesto Davaux (b London 2 May 1835), Victor Henry (b New York; d London 1906) and Célestine Alice Davaux (b 7 January 1843; d Brixton August 1855).

 

The 1833 season at the King’s Theatre was notable for the production of Norma in which Vincenzo Galli took the bass role of Oroveso, and – given also the presence of de Begnis on the prospectus – Giubilei took only a small part in the doings of the season. All three basses appeared in the production of Matilda di Shabran (2 March), and both Giubilei and de Begnis, along with the other Galli, in Le Nozze di Figaro (23 March) but thereafter Galli, de Begnis and Zuchelli took the remaining bass roles, and Theodore spent the rest of the season appearing in a further round of concerts, ranging from Miss Bruce’s classy at-home series, through the programmes mounted by such practised concert-givers as Kiallmark, Mme Cellini, Cipriani Potter, and MM Chelard and Eliason to the Benefits of de Begnis and other of his colleagues, as well as popping out of town for such occasions as the Leicester Winter Concerts (‘Largo al factotum’). He also, in the month of June (Monday morning, June 3), sponsored his own concert, along with the guitarist Italo Augusto Sagrini, at the home of Sir John de Beauvoir in Connaught Place. Pasta, Cinti-Damoreau, de Méric, Rubini, Tamburini, Donzelli and Haitzinger sang, along with a handful of native vocalists (Bishop, Cawse, John Parry jr) and The Morning Herald noted: ‘It must be allowed that Giubilei deserves credit on the score of modesty, since, although now much improved as a vocal artist, and in truth (although over-addicted to the accompaniment of grimace), a very clever singer, he did not exhibit his powers on the opportunity so frequently as he might.’

 

If 1833 had been a little lean, 1834 was certainly not. Theodore Giubilei was on stage at the King’s Theatre on the opening night of the season, and kept busily employed until its close. The opening night’s opera (1 March) was La gazza ladra with Elizabeth Feron as Ninetta and Josephine Anderson as Pippo. Theodore now took the important role of the Podesta, and the same newspaper which had compared him so unfavourably with Porto, in his first season, now reversed his judgement. ‘Guibilei appeared for the first time in the character of the Podesta and satisfied the audience that, if opportunity be given him, he will attain high vocal eminence. Porto who originally sustained the character had a much deeper organ than Giubilei but in purity of voice, distinctness of expression and correctness of intonation, we think the latter has the advantage. The tones of Porto rushed onwards with the rude violence of a mountain torrent, but Giubilei’s approach you with a staid and sober gravity. He displays more dignity and less noise than Porto. We may say of his voice that it is ‘deep, yet clear; without o’erflowing, full’.

On 11 March Semiramide was given for the debut of an out-of-tune Madame Kyntherland, and he repeated his Oroe, on 23 March Il Barbiere returned with Caradori Allan starred and he repeated his Basilio (‘[he] executed the fine air ‘La Calunnia’ very effectively’), but when La gazza ladra was put back in the schedule for Giulietta Grisi the role of the Podesta was taken by Tamburini who, The Times assured, ‘leaves them all far behind’. Later in the season both men were apparently in the cast. When Don Giovanni was mounted (24 April) with Tamburini as the Don and Grisi as Donna Anna, Theodore was cast as Masetto to the Zerlina of Caradori Allan, when La Sonnambula was done he was Rodolpho to the Amina of Caradori Allan, and later of Grisi. Grisi, now thoroughly established for the nonce as the Queen of the King’s Theatre, also took over Semiramide and played the role of Pamira in L’assedio di Corinto (7 July) with Tamburini as Mahomet. Rubini, Ivanhoff and Theodore Giubilei completed the male half of the cast list.

The season, of course, included its usual quantity of concerts, and on 9 May Signor Giubilei gave one of his own at the residence of Admiral Donnelly in Harley Street. Grisi and Tamburini both took part, and the critic rather unkindly summed up ‘[Signor Giubilei] sang in his best manner and was remarkably successful in the execution of a passage in the finale ‘O guardare’. He appears to study Tamburini and he cannot do better…’

 

But Théodore was now to move out of the shadow of Tamburini, de Begnis and Lablache. When the new season’s prospectus went out it included indeed a Signor Giubilei, but it wasn’t him. It was his brother, Augusto. Signor A Giubilei. Signor the elder had moved out of the Italian opera and back into the English theatre, where he had begun as an amateur, and where he had taken his first step as a professional.

 

It started at Covent Garden. I’m not quite sure when, but on 14 October Theodore Guibilei can be pinpointed as part of the Garden company which opened, that night, in a production of Rophino Lacy’s Cinderella. Mrs Wood took the title-role, with Abby Betts and Mrs Crouch as the sisters, Seguin as Dandini, Monsieur (yes!) Giubilei in the part of Pompolino and Mme Proche Giubilei and Miss Ballin as principal danseuses. ‘Mr Seguin as Dandini and M Giubilei as the Baron Pompolino sustained the principal comic force of the opera’, remarked the Times. ‘They sang the parts allotted to them remarkably well and were eminently successful in the duet which they gave to great effect. M Giubilei seems to have talents for comic acting which, if properly cultivated, would make him a very useful performer. To become so, however, he must correct the tendency to coarseness and caricature he displayed last night, and he should recollect that he may be humorous without imitating the clown of the pantomimes.’

 

A fortnight later the Garden opened another new piece. It had been reckoned possible to give some sort of a dramatic representation of Byron’s poem Manfred. To make the said dramatic representation out of the near-to monologous poem, vast amounts of scenery and machinery were employed, and Henry Bishop supplied a substantial score of music which ‘some of the best members of the operatic corps of the theatre were engaged’. The list of names comprised Jane Shirreff, Abby Betts, Mary Cawse, Theodore Giubilei, Edward Seguin, John Templeton and Paul Bedford, through a month of performances.

With the end of Manfred Covent Garden continued with a dramatic programme, and the musical team were deployed, instead, over to Alfred Bunn’s other theatre, Drury Lane, for the production of an adaptation of Marliani’s opera Il Bravo under the title of The Red Mask, or The Council of Three. Miss Shirreff was, of course, the heroine, Templeton the tenor, Seguin the villain, Cooper took the title-role with Miss Tree as his partner, and Theodore was Anselmo, a helpful Carmelite. The Red Mask was well liked, the singers were well liked, and the piece stayed on the bills well into the new year.

With the closure of the year’s pantomime, the operatic team got back into gear at Covent Garden, and their first production was La Sonnambula. With Edward Seguin as Rodolpho. But Theodore was lined up for the next one, Auber’s Lestocq (21 February 1835), a piece with a title-role written for a bass. And which was played by Henry Phillips. Theodore took the heavy villain part of Count Goloffkin, alongside Wilson and the Misses Shirreff, H Cawse and Betts in a production which again found considerable success. Lestocq gave way to Malibran nights, La Sonnambula and Fidelio with Seguin in the bass roles, and Theodore moved sideways into another theatre.

 

This time it was the English Opera House and his first assignment was a new comic opera The Spirit of the Bell by James Kenney with music by G H Rodwell. Theodore played ‘the Grand Duke’ alongside Mr and Mrs Keeley, Oxberry and Miss Romer. This was followed by a revival of Marschner’s successful Der Vampyr with Henry Phillips back in his original vamipirical role. Theodore took the heroine’s father role of Kassova, originally played in England by Mr Thorne. A remake of Mercadante’s Eliza e Claudio as No Plot Without Danger (5 September) had him cast alongside Wilson, Stretton, Fanny Healy and Miss Somerville in a buffo role as Marquis Tricotzatio (‘he gave us great pleasure; his humour was very broad but spirited and natural’). However, his time at the English Opera House was limited. For on 1 October the new season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, opened and thither Mr Guibilei repaired. It was the beginning of a stint of some three and a half years residence at the Lane for him.

 

His first appearance of this season seems to have been on 13th of the month, when he and Edward Seguin appeared in a Walter-Scottish drama, Cavaliers and Roundheads (based on Old Mortality), with Vandenhoff as its star. They seem to have been there solely to give the duet ‘Suoni la tromba’ from I Puritani together. Their next would be of decidedly more moment. The next Drury Lane production was a new English opera by a young Irish composer. Its title was The Siege of Rochelle and the young man’s name was William Balfe. Jane Shirreff and Henry Phillips were cast in the plum parts of the piece, with Wilson as the tenor lover, and Seguin and Giubilei as the heroine’s real and supposed fathers. Montalban, the role created by Theodore, was the mysterious and murdering villain of the piece. The Siege of Rochelle was a decided ‘success’ and set the career of its composer into orbit.

 

Large productions followed one another swiftly at Drury Lane, and on 16 November the house came out with what was dubbed an ‘operatic drama’ based on Scribe’s libretto for the opera La Juive. Vandenhoff and Miss Tree led the cast, Fanny Healey sang, Mme Giubilei danced, and Theodore played the supporting role of the Grand Provost. The Jewess was played on the same bill as The Siege of Rochelle, giving the Giubilei family a full night of work. And when Christmas arrived both pieces were played alongside the annual pantomime!

 

Auber’s Le Cheval de bronze was the first production of 1836, but Phillips and Seguin took the bass roles in that one, and the Giubilei family was represented solely by Madame, but Theodore was kept busy. On 30 January a grand sacred concert was given in which he performed in selections from The Creation and other oratorios, on 19 February he took part in a curious evening entitled Historical Records of Vocal and Instrumental Music, and in March the Lane hosted another oratorio concert. Away from Drury Lane, he took part in a series of chamber concerts at Willis’s Rooms alongside Mrs Shaw and Sophie Ostergaard and other concerts at the King’s Rooms, the Argyll Rooms (Italo Sagrini’s, Mme Bonnias’s, Henry Dulcken’s, Chatterton’s, Sophia Platt’s, Mme Maggioni’s, Signor Marras’s  &c).

In March, however, he returned to the operatic stage, when Drury Lane produced a new version of Zampa under the title The Corsair (21 March). Henry Phillips played the title-role, and Giubilei (Daniel Capuzzi) was paired with Miss Cawse (Ritta) in the piece’s less heroic roles. When Malibran joined the company, he played Pizzaro to her Fidelio, and had Sonnambula nights off, before the production of the chief new piece of the season, Balfe’s made-to-Malibran-measure The Maid of Artois was produced. Giubilei created the role of Sans-Regret, alongside the ill-fated prima donna, Henry Phillips and John Templeton, and Mme Giubilei in the role of Myra. Madame Giubilei had, however, a more exciting new piece to play. The ballet The Devil on Two Sticks, produced in this season, with her in one of the principal girl roles of Paquita, turned out to be the most popular new ballet to be staged at the Lane in a long time.

 

The 1836-7 season brought further performances of The Siege of Rochelle, The Maid of Artois and Fidelio, plus a revival of Cinderella in which Theodore played Pompolino to the Cinderella of Emma Romer; and John Barnett’s new opera The Fair Rosamund (28 February 1837) in which he took the role of Lord de Clifford alongside Phillips, Wilson, Seguin and the Misses Betts, Romer and Healy. More memorable than this, however, was the first English-language production of Bellini’s Norma. Schroeder-Devrient took the title role, supported by Wilson and Miss Betts, and Mr Giubilei was the first English exponent of the role of the Druid, Oroveso.

 

The Siege of Rochelle and The Maid of Artois were played again the following season, and Mr Guibilei was seen regularly in the new productions, beginning with a vastly spectacular drama entitled Caractacus (6 November 1837), in which he appeared as a bard, and led the singing of a huge chorus of other bards singing the incidental music which Balfe had composed to illustrate the work. A highly successful production of Don Giovanni, with Balfe as the Don, had Mr Giubilei as Masetto to the Zerlina of Emma Romer, and Balfe’s latest new piece, an opera on Joan of Arc (30 November), found him cast as Renaud (‘ Mr Giubilei enacted an old soldier, Joan’s uncle, who brandished a stick and gave a battle song with much spirit’). 

 

On 11 March 1838, Drury Lane presented another novelty, the first English version of Der Zauberflöte. The Times recorded the success of what it clearly regarded as an unlikely experiment, and commented ‘Of the singers the greatest meed of praise must be assigned to Phillips, Giubilei, Miss Romer and Mrs Seguin ..’ Phillips was Sarastro, Miss Romer Pamina and Mrs Seguin the Queen. Theodore Giubilei, in blackface, played the moor Monastatos, by the sounds of it, more in a menacing than a comic style. He also appeared in Balfe’s newest work, Diadeste, playing the role of Zambo, a burlesque of the American black-face minstrel (‘Ambo born in Negro land’).

 

Madame Giubilei spent part of this season back at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Having danced the role of Fenella in the opera Masaniello at Drury Lane, she switched theatres and danced in the ballet of Masaniello at the Italian opera.

 

The 1838-9 season was to bring Giubilei’s long stint at Drury Lane temporarily to an end, but it was one of the busiest he had yet known. Don Giovanni and Cenerentola opened the season, with Theodore in his usual roles, before, on 13 October, was put out The Maid of Palaiseau. This was an English version of La gazza ladra, which Mr Giubelei had sung in Italian in his Signor Giubilei days, and he naturally assumed once again the role of the Podesta, here named Lenoir. ‘Mr Giubilei was perfectly at home as Lenoir the village magistrate. He has played the part at the Italian opera with much success but, here, he certainly added to his laurels. His opening aria in which he boasts of his seductive qualifications was truly comic, but his power of voice, perfect knowledge of intonation and purity of taste were shown to perfection in the serious and more impassioned portions of his performance’.

 

On 6 November Francis I was brought out, with Henry Phillips in the title role and Giubilei creating the part of the Count de Chateaubriant, the jealous husband of the object of Francis’s illegal affections (Miss Romer), and on 3 December was given, for the first time, an English version of Rossini’s William Tell. John Braham played William Tell, Miss Romer was Mathilde and Giubilei took the role of Gessler. On the other half of the bill, Mme Giubilei took the title-role in Mons Gilbert’s new ballet, The Spirit of the Air. In the new year Theodore also took up Henry Phillips’s role of Ludovico in performances of The Gipsy’s Warning, played the Jew in The Duenna (and succeeded where the under-singing Buckstone had failed) and created the part of Gil Polo in Barnett’s Farinellialongside Balfe, Stretton and the Misses Romer and Poole. And on the occasion of a royal command performance, on 29 January 1839, he shared a bill with both wife and brother. Theodore played alongside Balfe, Miss Romer and Mr Franks in The Maid of Artois, Augustine danced The Spirit of the Air, and Mr A Guibilei took part in the National Anthem and very probably appeared in a minor role in the opera.

 

Mr A Giubilei had been featuring on the bills of the London theatre now for several years. In fact, when Theodore moved out of the King’s Theatre, he seems almost immediately to have moved in. It is clearly him in March 1835 appearing in unspecified roles in Tancredi and Anna Bolena, and in 1836 in Beatrice di Tenda and as the Prior of the Knights of Malta in La Straniera. It definitely him at the Colosseum in August 1837 playing in The Trophy with Manvers and the Misses Smith, and it has to be him at the St James’s Theatre later that year playing in musical pieces with John Braham’s company (The Cornet, The Eagle’s Haunt). It just says Mr Giubilei, but Theodore is on stage at Drury Lane. In 1839, Augusto returned to what was now Her Majesty’s Theatre, where he played alongside Moncani and Mrs Croft in Belisario on a programme where his sister-in-law was featured as the abbess in a new ballet on Roberto il diablo. He was also seen out in the concert room, but not with nearly such frequency as Theodore, who appeared throughout the season from Willis’s Rooms to the London Tavern to Vauxhall Gardens and back to Drury Lane. 

 

Theodore’s most important concert, however, took place at the English Opera House on 28 June, and it was billed as Mr Giubilei and Mr Stretton’s Benefit. The bill consisted of a performance of The Maid of Palaiseau followed by a concert which featured Julie Dorus Gras, Charlotte Birch, Susan Bruce, Emma Albertazzi, Maria Hawes, Fanny Wyndham, Balfe, Ivanhoff and John Parry. And the cast of the opera? Mrs Martyn (late Miss Inverarity) her last appearance in England previous to her departure for America, Miss Poole, Mr Stretton, Mr Giubilei his last appearance previous to his departure for America …

 

Mrs Eliza Martyn (soprano) and her baritone husband, Charles, Elizabeth Poole (mezzo soprano), Henry Manvers from Covent Garden (tenor) and Mr Giubilei (bass), with Madame Giubilei (premiere danseuse), supported by local singers, made their operatic first appearance in America on 9 September 1839 at the Park Theatre, New York, in Fidelio. Theodore played Pizzaro: ‘Mr Giubilei sings the basso well, and powerfully.  His acting is as good as his singing, and this is much’, reported the Knickerbocker magazine. Miss Poole also won the honours of the critique, and Manvers was well liked too, but Charles Martyn had never been a top vocalist and his wife was at the tail end of her career. Nevertheless, the company did well enough through a repertoire including La Sonnambula (Rodolpho), The Maid of Palaiseau (Lenoir), Fra Diavolo (Beppo), Der Freischütz (Caspar), Masaniello with Mme Guibilei giving her Fenella, and Don Giovanni with Julia Wallack as Donna Elvira. Madame danced starrily in the supporting ballets.

 

Theodore and Augustine Giubelei stayed something like two years in America. When Mr and Mrs Martyn went home, they stayed, and with Miss Poole and Manvers joined forces with another husband/wife baritone/soprano team, a team indeed both younger and more skilled than the Martyns: old Drury Lane colleague Edward Seguin and his wife Anne, the same Mrs Seguin who had been the Queen of the Night to Theodore’s Monastatos in London. 

The company toured, and returned to New York and the Park Theatre for further seasons, adding The Love Spell (ie L’Elisir d’Amore) with Giubilei as Dulcamara, The Postilion of Lonjumeau, Fra Diavolo, Don Giovanni, Il Turco in Italia, Zampa, and Cinderella to their baggage. They also gave (12 October 1840) an ephemeral opera by Charles Horn entitled Ahmed el Kamel, the Pilgrim of Love in which Theodore was cast alongside Miss Poole and Manvers as ‘the Vulture King’ (‘The Carbine’, ‘As Winter Withers all the Leaves’). Later, La Bayadère and Benedict’s The Gipsy’s Warning were also given.Looking backwards, some years later, the New York Times sighed: ‘Giubilei as a basso was unequalled’.

 

Now comes the iffy bit. I cannot yet discover quite when the Giubileis returned to Britain. The first utterly confirmable sighting of Theodore, back home and at work, is 22 April 1842, and it is confirmable because Sara Flower and Mme Huerta’s concert on that date bills both the brothers. But that leaves the Italian Opera season of 1841. Augusto worked at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the early part of the 1840 season. He’s there in the undercooked cast of Torquato Tasso, and in supporting parts in Beatrice di Tenda, La Sonnambula and Lucia di Lammermoor with Persiani. He also puts in appearances at the same house in 1842 (Rochfort in Anna Bolena, Roberto Devereux), depping for Lablache in Semiramide on opening night 1843, and in 1844, rising to roles such as Alidoro in Cenerentola. Gomez in Don Carlos, Carlo in Adelia and Alessio in Sonnambula, again in 1845 (Iago in Ernani) and still as late as 1846 turning up as ‘an Assyrian Priest’ in Ninoand the Tyrant of Antioch in I Lombardi. So is it he who plays there between June and August 1841 alongside Mario, Grisi, Tamburini, Viardot, Rubini, Lablache and co in Semiramide (Oroe), Lucrezia Borgia, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Roberto Devereux, Marino Falieri and La gazza ladra? Or is it Theodore. The bills just say ‘Giubilei’. There’s no sign of Madame. I think I have to punt on Augusto.

 

And, then, what about the Mr Giubilei who appears on 24 March 1842 performing Israel in Egypt with the Sacred Harmonic Society alongside Charlotte Birch, Misses Cubitt and Dolby, J W Hobbs and Henry Phillips? 

 

By 5 May we are back on firm ground, for Theodore is back at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, singing Rodolpho in La Sonnambula for Emma Romer’s Benefit, and at the opening of the new season at Covent Garden (10 September 1842) he is there – ‘his first appearance at this house these five years’ -- playing Oroveso to Adelaide Kemble’s Norma (‘the opera is improved by making Mr Giubilei the representative of Oroveso’, ‘fine voice and excellent schooling .. a very perfect rendering of the music and his action was all that could be desired’), Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro and, on 1 October, when Miss Kemble and Mrs Shaw came out in Semiramide, he was no longer Oroe but Assur (‘played with great spirit, occasionally seeming as if he were getting below the compass of his voice yet always acquitting himself with credit..’, ‘scarcely inferior to some who have enjoyed a loftier reputation and more flattering acceptance’). In November the Garden produced The Secret Marriage, in which Theodore appeared in Lablache’s role of Signor Geronimo and, in February 1843, The Lady of the Lake had Mrs Shaw as Malcolm while he played Duglas. Oberon and The Siege of Rochelle also got a showing as did Cinderella and in each case Theodore was the principal bass.

 

In September of 1843, he visited Birmingham for the Festival, in which he shared the bass music with the Lablaches, Phillips and Machin, returning to town to take up his old place at Drury Lane alongside his wife, and also Augusto, who had become a member of the company. The season started strongly. He gave his Dulcamara alongside Emma Romer and William Harrison, played in the always successful Gustavus III, was Caspar in Der Freischütz with Romer, Abby Betts, Templeton and with brother Augusto as Bernard, and repeated his Pompolino to Mrs Shaw’s Cinderella. 

And then it stops. Drury Lane becomes the home of The Bohemian Girl, with Messrs Stretton and Borrani in its bass roles.

 

In November he sang the role of Sisera in the Sacred Harmonic Society’s performance of Handel’s Deborah, in December he appeared in several concerts, in January 1844 he and Augusto were both seen at Covent Garden in F W Allcroft’s latest concert, and in February he shows up again at the Exeter Hall with the Sacred Harmonic Society in a concert of psalms and a production of Saul. He also sang, for some time, as principal bass, alongside Emma Lucombe, Elizabeth Poole and Wilson at Moorfields Catholic Chapel. But not in the theatre.

 

Theodore’s name did appear again on a Drury Lane bill. On 16 May 1844, the theatre hosted a Benefit for him. The opera The Brides of Venice was played, followed by a concert. The bill was a splendid one: Harrison, Mrs Shaw, Mme Albertazzi and Borrani featured in the opera, Charlotte Dolby, Julie Dorus Gras, Signor Salvi, Miss Rainforth, Maria Hawes, Abby Betts, Sara Flower, Henry Allen, Emma Lucombe, the F Lablaches, Henry Phillips, Bennett, Machin, Manvers, Wilson, Weiss, Miss Poole and Eliza Birch sang, Josef Staudigl gave ‘Revenge’ and John Parry his one-man burlesque of Norma. Camillo Sivori played as did Madame Dulcken and Parish Alvars. Tickets could be had from Mr Giubilei at 2 Charlotte Street, Bedford Square, but he didn’t perform. He would never perform again.

 

It was reported he had gone to Baden Baden ‘for the hot baths’ to recover from ‘his serious and protracted indisposition’. Then he headed for Naples and his sister, but he was stopped short at Milan. The English operatic colony there, including the Birch family and Manvers, helped care for him. But an operation was necessary …

 

When his name appeared once more in The Times, it was in the form of an obituary. Theodore was dead ‘after a second operation for dropsy’ at just 44 years of age. ‘Signor Giubilei, the vocalist, formerly of the Opera House and Drury Lane Theatre died lately at Naples, where he had gone in hopes of improving his health but, in consequence of a second operation for the dropsy, he sunk under it at the residence of his sister. Madame Giubilei, the clever dancer, has been left in London to lament the loss of a kind and affectionate husband who was highly esteemed by his professional brethren...’

 

Augustine continued to dance at Drury Lane, a featured dancer as always, through the 1846 and 1847 seasons. In April 1848 a notice appeared in the Times offering furnished rooms to let at their home in Charlotte Street, Bedford Square. And two months later Augustine Proche Guibilei died. The Gentleman’s Magazine enshrined ‘Madame Proche Giubilei, an admired danseuse of Her Majesty’s Theatre, and the Theatres Royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden, widow of Tomaso Giubilei, the celebrated basso vocalist, who died some three years since at Milan.  She was a native of France, and appeared originally in England at the Italian Opera in 1832’. Well, apart from the fact that he was Theodore, and that her debut in England had been made on 3 February 1831, it was pretty right.

 

After the 1846 season, Augusto finished his time at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and in 1847 he set out for a new venture, on the other side of the Atlantic.

In 1847 he played at the Park Theatre with Manvers and his stepdaughter, ‘Eliza Brienti of La Scala, Milan’, and with Anna Bishop (Marquis de Château-Vieux in The Maid of Artois), in 1848-50 he was part of Max Maretzek’s company at the Astor Place Opera House (Intendante in Linda di Chamonix, Raleigh in Roberto Devereux, Lucrezia Borgia, Basilio in Barbiere di Siviglia, Belisario, De Luze in Maria di Rohan, Iago in Ernani, Bide-the-Bent in Lucia di Lammermoor). I see him 30 November and 21 December 1848 singing at Henri Herz’s mega-concerts at the Tabernacle. In 1851 he is still with Maretzek’s company, at Castle Garden (Der Freischütz, Guido in Gemma di Vergy, Roberto Devereux, Alessio in La Sonnambula). On 5 December 1851, Augusto appeared at the Astor Park Theatre as Alessio in La Sonnambula. On 6 December, he did not perform.

The New York Herald reported: ‘Died. On December 6, Mr Augustus G Giubilei, aged 39 years.  His friends and acquaintances, and the members of the opera company, are respectfully invited to attend his funeral, to-morrow, at 10 o’clock, from his late residence, No 63 Fourth avenue, without further invitation.  His remains will be taken to Greenwood Cemetery for interment.’

 

Although Théodore, Augustine Proche and Augusto were all gone, the name of Giubilei would surface in the news again, in the years to come. In the law courts.

 

The first occasion was during the famous poisoning case of 1857, in which Madeleine Smith was accused of poisoning her lover. Theodore’s daughter, Mrs Louisa Augusta Walcot (née Davaux) or ‘Miss Guibilei’, ‘daughter of an actress’, as she was referred to during the trial, had apparently known Miss Smith while she was a pupil teacher at Miss Gorton’s school at Clapham, in 1852, and was supposed to have had some discussion with the presumed murderess on the uses of arsenic. Which she, of course, denied. But her name has survived 150 years because of her connection with the case. She didn’t. She died in 1868 in Hoxton House Lunatic Asylum.

 

The second occasion was in a celebrated lunacy case, in which Lady Sophia Elizabeth Caroline Giubilei attempted to have her son committed as a lunatic. Lady Giubilei? Yes. Lady Sophia Hervey, sister to the Marquis of Bristol, and the widow of William Howe Windham MP of Felbrigg Hall, aged in her middle forties had, on 10 May 1858, taken as a second husband the 25 year-old ‘professor of singing’ Theodore Maine Guibilei of 16 Portland Road Portland Place, the elder Theodore’s nephew. Her son by her first marriage was a wretched, dissipated creature, and if not clinically insane at the best half-witted, but her attempts to have him certified, in 1861, narrowly failed. Two years later Lady Sophia died, but the name of Giubilei littered the law court schedules for years and years after, as the son’s lawyers bled his fortune from him on useless suits for recovery of costs.

 

Oddly enough, in the early sixties, the name of Giubilei remained on view in one other place. On the racing pages. Mr Giubilei was the owner of a large number of racehorses. Since they had names like Rigoletto, Marco Spada and Gil Blas, it looks as if it may have been our singing widower. Alas, he sang and he raced not for long, for in March of 1870 the Musical World (I wonder why, for he had been a very modest professor of music) reported ‘Died, on 20th inst, after much suffering, Theodore Maine Giubilei’.

 

Junior Theodore’s sisters --the daughters of Michel and the dressmaking Augusta --  also made a career in music, but they shunned the family name and called themselves the Misses Emilie and Constance Georgi.

 

Augusto married Anna Maria Panormo, daughter of Louis Panormo of the musical-instrument-making family, in 1836.

 

Theodore V Giubilei, during the course of his career, penned a number of songs, of which the canzonetta ‘Maiden, weep not!’ sung at a time by Miss Poole and ‘In vano, O Fillide’ were the most in evidence. He is also said to have been, for a time, Miss Poole’s singing teacher.