"She played the violin ...." or, a fascinating fiddler for Hervé and Offenbach

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Vernet was a very familiar name in the nineteenth-century French theatre. Well-known actors and actresses, designers, singers … from the artist Horace Vernet to the famous comedian Charles Edmée Vernet, by way of Casimir, Thérèse (Mme Rodriquez) otherwise ‘Madame Albert’, her sister Rosalie (‘Mme Lecomte’), Victor, Madame, the three sisters Vernet of the Palais Royal and the Variétés, to Mdlle Léontine Vernet danseuse at the Opéra, Mlle Vernet star dancer of the Gaîté, Mdlle Nancy Vernet, Vernet the dugazon of New Orleans … so when I see a photo labelled ‘Mdlle Vernet’ what do I think? Well, I think youpi! It’s the Mdlle Vernet who created the role of Fleurette in Meilhac, Halévy and Offenbach’s triumphant Barbe-bleue, and of whom I know absolutely nothing more. Maybe now was the time to find out.

But, hang on. The photo is inscribed ‘Mdlle Vernet’ ‘opéra’. Is that opéra as in genre or as in theatre? Better look further. Into the French photo archives. Mdlle Vernet of the Odéon? Clearly a different lady. Ah! Georgette Vernet, dancer and violinist. Thanks. The physiognomy looks the same … but dancer? Well, here are the photos, labelled thus by the Paris museums.

Then I went fact-finding, for alas! nobody seems to have devoted even a small biographical note to this lady, who shone alongside Hortense Schneider, Léa Silly, Dupuis, Paul Hittemans, Hervé et al for half-a-dozen years on the Paris stage and, as we can see, spawned a professional beauty’s quantity of photograph cards.

Well, I’m pretty sure she was in no way related to the comic Charles ‘of the Variétés’, or the artistic Hector, but she was indeed related to the tenor-turned-theatre manager, Casimir Vernet, sometime of Geneva, Bordeaux, Nîmes, Montpellier. She was one of his three theatrical daughters. Marie seems to have been the eldest, Anna the second, and Georgette by some way the youngest. I would estimate that she was born circa 1845. I see the two elder girls in 1857 at Toulouse and 1858 in Le Havre, before they join the company at the Palais-Royal in a modest capacity. Here they are in decorative roles in Le Fils de la Belle Dormante, playing strawberries. They appeared at Strasbourg, and in 1860 at Baden, and at their Benefit they introduced little sister (‘fifteen years old’) in two brief showpieces Il n’y a pas d’enfants and Les enfants terribles. 

Georgette had initially been trained as a violinist, but had turned out to be much more than that: ‘elle chante le couplet à ravir, joue du violin et piano, fume, fait des armes, et par dessus est jolie comme une ange’. The following year, Georgette followed her sisters to Lyon where (‘excessivement jeune’) she appeared in boys’ roles, playing multiple parts in one of those pieces designed to show off versatility, at the Théâtre des Célestins and provoking comparisons with the travesty-player supreme, Déjazet.

She was still a teenager when she was hired for the Théâtre des Variétés to appear in La Liberté des Théâtres, a Cogniard/Clairville ‘pièce’ seeking to repeat the success of the interesting Les Folies Dramatiques. Hervé again provided the music for the show, as he had for his first full-scale show, and in a featured scene he played an enraged musician opposite the ‘jeune et gracieuse’ Georgette and her violin. She stopped the show with her Violon enchanté. ‘What can we send Lyon in exchange’ joked one paper. [She has] a name which cannot fail to being her success at the Variétés’, smiled another. She followed up in Hervé’s operetta Une Fantasia (role of Nefissa), and the Variétés then mounted a special vehicle for her talents. Déjazet had appeared in a compilation under the title Lully ou les petits violons du roi, where a feature of the title-role was a virtuoso violin performance. Played, of course, from the wings. Georgette Vernet had no need of such aid: she played her own violin, as well as acting and singing to equal her illustrious predecessor, and again stopped the show.

If those multi-talented performances were perhaps her most exceptional, she was however a member of the troupe at the Variétés, and the new Offenbach opéra-bouffe, Barbe-bleue, unlike Orphée aux enfers, had no violin-playing character. Especially not a 20 year-old girl. But Georgette was a multi-talent, and she was cast in the role of the little princess Fleurette. She filled it delightfully (‘sympathique au possible’), and that credit is the reason for her entry, even if just as a name, in theatrical history.

She remained at the Variétés thereafter, succeeding Elise Garait as Wanda in La Grande-Duchesse and Silly elsewhere, she was featured as la Reine Caroline in a revival of Le Royaume des Femmes (‘Last Rose of Summer’, songs by Poïse and Lindheim), and got out the violin again for the spectacle Les Thugs à Paris where she played a mechanical doll and attracted the smarty-pants comment ‘Mlle Vernet joue toujours le violin. Est-ce qu’elle ne pourrait pas jouer un peu le trombone’ from a Parisian journo who fancied his ‘ésprit’. He would doubtless have been pleased that, in La Comédie bourgeoise, she played the piano.

In the role of Lully

In 1868, when she played in Les Noces de Merluchet, it was hinted that she was putting on the kilos, but when she crossed to the Menus-Plaisirs for the Figaro-Revue (in which she played five parts) she was still referred to as ‘jeune et jolie’. I think we can see the progress in our photos.

Georgette died in January 1871. It was said that she had had a nervous breakdown, worrying about her father in Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War. What about her mother? Her sisters? Well, whatever she died of, and why at such a young age, we will probably never know. Her death notice claimed she was 22. I think not. That would have made her 11 in Baden, and 15 at the Variétés. Not impossible, but … Another newspaper insisted that she had been married to Edouard Hamburger (d 3 April 1886), the Alvarez of Barbe-bleue in 1866. Not impossible, but unlikely, as he was of staunchly Jewish race and religion …

Well, anyway we know THIS photo is she!

 

Younger and slimmer and no violin?  Photo post-1867 ...

Older and plumper?

Forgotten Savoyards ...

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It was Lilian La Rue who did it.

I was dabbling amongst my plethora of nineteenth-century opera and concert singers, sorting out the ‘mysteries’ – those folk of whom I knew nothing, save about their professional careers – and lit on the ephemeral Miss La Rue. Well, as so often, you could tell by the nom de théâtre that she was sailing under false colours. So I sought out her real identity. It was a bit of a triumph. You can read the story on my blog here.

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2016/09/miss-la-rue-who-are-you-gilbert-and.html

Lilian LaRue

Well, I am by no means a Real Gilbert and Sullivan Scholar. My brief was and is ‘Victorian Vocalists’, and my first volume of a hundred biographies is there to prove it. But, you know, on thing leads to another, and I got sidetracked down Savoy Lane. And there, to my amazement, I found that, in spite of the vast amount of detailed work that has been done on the Savoy canon, and on all those folk who sailed even anywhere near it, there were gaping chasms of knowledge concerning the singers and actors who created and played in the ‘Savoy Operas’ in the nineteenth century. Oh, not insofar as what they played and when: but what is the use of knowing that Tilly Bloggs played Pitti Sing in the original production of The Mikado, if you haven’t the faintest idea who Tilly is? Where she came from, what else she did before and during her Pitti Singing, on and off-stage … Well, I have an aversion to meaningless names in books and articles and especially theses, so ‘bound to a chair is a sunny room, like Andromeda tied to a rock’, I have dug. And I have found the mostly previously unrecorded identities and or/lives of such as sopranos ‘Pauline Rita’, ‘Duglas Gordon’, ‘Emilie Petrelli’, ‘Ethel McAlpine’, ‘Esme Lee’, ‘Ethel Pierson’, ‘Lisa Walton’, ‘Isabel Reddick; mezzos ‘Madge Stavart’, ‘Lilian La Rue’, ‘Kate Talby’, ‘Kate Forster’, ‘Elsie Cameron', baritones ‘Edward Clowes’, ‘Signor Olmi’, the singing grocer ‘T J Montelli’ tenor ‘Henri Laurent’ and his paramour ‘Blanche Corelli’ … Oh, I’m not a magician! Some still so far elude me. Geraldine St Maur grrr! But I plug on, down among the middle and lower regions of the cast lists … and I’m getting to the really hard ones, and those whose professional careers in Cartesian companies may be proficiently recorded but whose personal life and identity are not.

The trouble is, having no intention to write up whole articles on these folks, I’ve got notes on them spread all around my computer, and have made no effort to correlate them. But this week, George J Low Esq, one of the world’s very utmost custodians of G&S-related details, sent me a wee list of puzzles. I love other folks’ puzzles, so I got out my C19th spade … and here are what results haven’t disappeared into the black hole of my computer’s diffident memory, concerning such Cartesian players, largeish and small, as I have exhumed …

MARCHMONT, Herbert [SUMMERS, Francis Herbert Mayne] (b Hull 9 March 1863; d 33 Wharcliffe St 14 December 1942). Son of a Hull lawyer and civic worthy Francis Summers and his wife Anna Maria née Mayne, Francis jr was, like his brother Charles, articled to his father’s legal office. However, he abandoned his office stool to become a singer, and joined the Carte company as a chorister for The Mikado. He made his first mark by scoring 27 runs to lead the Thespian cricket team (D Lely 7, J B Brockbank 4) to victory at Norwood a couple of months later. He would continue his athletic feats in cricket, rowing and above all cricket-ball-throwing, as he worked his way up from depping for Frederic Bovill as Pish-Tush into principal roles with the Carte touring companies. He played with the Carte companies in roles larger and smaller until 1898, when he retired from performing and took up directing small amateur productions of the Savoy operas around Britain. Unmarried, he lived his later life back in Hull with his unmarried sister and brother.

Herbert Marchmont

WYATT, Agnes [Theresa Mary Josephine] (b Clapham 8 February 1866; d Wandsworth 2 March 1932) and her elder sister Ellen Bird WYATT (b Portsmouth 23 July 1863; d ?) both performed with the Carte companies for a number of years. They were the daughters of one Richard John Wyatt, a draughtsman-turned-singer from Portsmouth, whom I have spotted singing with Mrs Alexander Newton and little Miss Blanche Cole, in 1860, on home ground. Mother is Mary Ann née Bird. The 1881 census shows that the family is trying its luck in London, but Nellie and elder sister Mary are working as mantle-makers. However, in the later 1880s, Agnes and Nellie both took to their father’s profession, and joined the Carte companies. Agnes showed up first at the Savoy, in 1877, when she took over the role of Josephine, 7-10 January, during a temporary absence of Geraldine Ulmar. Nellie was on the road with one of the touring troupes.

A few weeks after her stint as prima donna, Agnes married John Ernest Hill, a rising stockbroker from Banbury, and 13 July 1889 gave birth to her first child, Dorothy Charlotte. She later returned to the Savoy to appear in several roles, including that of Gianetta, in The Gondoliers, but a second daughter, Marjorie Agnes was born 17 April 1892 and she appears then to have renounced the stage for a comfortable home life.

Helier Le Maistre

Contralto Nellie married within the company, and consequently stayed with it for over a decade. Her husband (m 13 April 1889) was Jersey-born baritone Helier St Jersey LE MAISTRE (real name, b Jersey 25 August 1866; d Lymington, Hants 1915), a fifteen-year veteran of the organisation. After leaving the Carte organisation, Le Maistre toured in senior role in such musical comedies as The Cingalee, The West End and The Country Girl and succeeded to Fred Emney's role of Joseph in The Girl from Kay's. Ellen appears in the 1911 census as a ‘ladies’ companion’ in Brockenhurst. Of their four children, son Frederick Wyatt Le Maistre (b Islington, x 8 February 1891, d Springwood, NSW 1 March 1939) also became a baritone vocalist in musical comedy, in London, India and Australia, under the name of ‘Eric Masters’, and was latterly attached to the Australian Broadcasting Commission; while daughter Phyllis [Harriet] (b Edmonton 24 May 1896; d Barnstaple 1971) also worked as a singer.

DE PLEDGE, George [James] (b Eastbourne 1862; d Goulburn, Australia 1902) is somewhat of a continuing puzzle. Not only to me, but to the lawyers and detectives of two continents. His birth is registered, but after that I spot him not again until 1885, singing in a concert at Battersea's Albert Palace. He seems to have takn to the stage in March 1887. The occasion in the production at Johnny Toole’s Theatre of a burlesque of Ruddigore, in which the deep-voice Mr de Pledge played a parody Arthur Sullivan. Apparently the Savoy took no offence, because within a few months the young man was playing Go-To in the Mikado, on tour. He remained with the Carte organisation, in town and country, for some four years, deputising in principal roles in The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers and playing Barnabas Bellows-to-Mend in Haddon Hall, before joining such other Savoyards as W H Denny and Jessie Bond in the cast of Poor Jonathan at the Prince of Wales. He moved on to roles in King Kodak and in the disastrous Eastward Ho! in which, however, he scored a personal hit singing ‘I am the Great I am’ in the roles of Muley Mustapha. As a result, he went on the halls featured in the basso scena Dr Jameson’s Last Stand and was cast as King Rat, alongside Maud Holland, in Brighton’s Dick Whittington, before, in 1897, launching a successful double-act with a lady named ‘Ruby Neilson’. The Devil in Love, with George as Mephisto was their best sketch, which they varied with The Red Cross Nurse, with time out for pantomime heavies.
Who was ‘Ruby’? I don’t know. George had married, in Savoy Theatre days, Miss Maggie Letitia Smith of Stepney. Was she a performer? The 1891 census says she was a ‘draper’s assistant’, her father a retired cheesemonger. 26 November 1893, a daughter, Elsie Marguerite, was born. She too would go on the stage. Was Maggie ‘Ruby’? Anyhow, the story would come to an abrupt end. In June 1900, George and Ruby were performing at Nottingham, in June 1901 in Wales. Then they vanish from theatrical annals. George is still around. In the 1901 census, he, Maggie and Elsie are living with her family in London. But then, 16 August, George ('single') sets sail, alone, for Sydney, Australia. And he never returned. And his fate was long unlearned. Maggie remarried, Elsie didn’t, and, when she died 11 November 1951, a search for a blood relative was launched. Failing to find one, Officialdom finally concluded that George had died in 1902 in Australia. And they were apparently right. There must be a tale behind that ...

BARNARD, [Walter] Cecil (b Canonbury 10 August 1866; d Savage Club, London 30 November 1897), in contrast to de Pledge, has a life, and most notably a dramatic death, thoroughly documented in a large obituary in The Era. Son of Hornsey silversmith Walter Barnard ‘of Edward Barnard and sons’ and his wife Ellen, née Rutt, and ‘nephew of Fred Barnard, the celebrated artist, and of the late Professor Faraday’ he was educated at University College, but preferred a life as a pianist, organist and composer to one in commerce. In 1889, he joined the Carte touring companies in some capacity, and was variously called upon as an accompanist, a conductor, and as a performer, deputising for Cairns James as Jack Point and, according to the obit, also as Ko-Ko. In the same year, his musical sketch The Popular Composer was published, and in November 1890 he gave a London concert, playing piano and performing his comic songs. 7 January 1891, he was summoned to replace Frank Wyatt, who had sprained an ankle, as the Duke of Plaza Toro at the Savoy Theatre. Wyatt’s indisposition was more than brief, and Barnard played for three weeks and later for several weeks more. Thereafter he was billed as ‘of the Savoy Theatre’ as he did the rounds of the suburban concerts and institutions, the seaside resorts and home counties towns and villages with his ‘society entertainment’ at the piano (‘an entertainer of the Grossmith type’) and the sketches Breaking Up, Constancy or Two Blighted Lives, Song and Sandwich, Topsyturveydom, Functions and A Perfect Opera. After leaving the Savoy, in 1892, he toured with erstwhile colleagues Adeline Vaudrey, Cissie Saumarez, Broughton Black et al in a group billed as The English Opera Singers, performing his sketches, imitations and coster songs (‘My Old Dutch’)and playing the piano: ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ as a Bach fugue, ‘Daisy Bell’ as an andante religioso, Mendelssohn’s Wedding March metamorphosed into ‘Knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road . He became a regular at the Clarence Pier, St Leonard’s Pier, the Cheltenham Rotunda, and played dates from Llandudno to Belfast, Dublin to Colchester, Knaresborough to Hornchurch and a vast series of dots from Great Totham to Holsworthy, in a manic schedule of touring, which took him in 1895 to the Transvaal and in 1896 to New York. 

Cecil Barnard

30 November 1869, aged 31, he threw himself from the upper window of his second home, the Savage Club.

‘He was of a most mercurial disposition, full of animal spirits and was an immense favourite with all the younger men of his profession ..’ wrote the obituarist. This is supposed to be unopinionated history, but I read that as ‘a bipolar homosexual’.

Well, there, courtesy of George, is a little sample of ‘forgotten Savoyards’. I see there’s another email in my inbox. Maybe I’ll try some more…

Sportsmen of Vienna ... 1933

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A fine bunch of lads. And they are all named on the back of this old photo from my father's papers. I'm curious as to which sport they were playing ... Fritz was a notable skier, gymnast, fencer (Vienna's schools champion) and athlete.  The picture is labelled SS 1933, and what looks like 6 Sem. Well, in 1933, dad would have been 22 ... so?

Well, here are Herren Egon Schmidt, Mehl (coach?), Fohr, Kremsmayer, Höfler, Spielvogel, Amsler, Kattner, Pavlik, Meinhardt, Gottfried, Schmidseder, Heinz Schmidt, Krenn, Kopp (coach, out of photo) // Jorror, Topolansky, Probsch, Birkmayer, Schilder // Streizowsky, Blauhut, Ganzl, Wolfgang, Rauscher, Czerny ..

I see some of the names surfacing in the Vienna press of the 30s, in football and athletics ...  but ...

Anybody recognise an ancestor ...?

A splendid MAGIC FLUTE for my birthday

I made three wishes for my 73rd birthday. Three gifts I wanted. Firstly, that it would rain on our parching fields, secondly, that the proofs of the first ever book from my ‘Gerolstein Press’ would arrive, and, most of all, that our dear friend Brett would come safely through his cancer operation …

Well, it rained twice, the proofs came, and we have just had excellent news from the hospital … so, this morning, I have curled up in my study with my fourth present. From my brother. A German DVD of Die Zauberflöte. Now, I am one of those folk who, except in the line of duty, rarely go to see a show of any kind more than once. I’ve seen it? I’ve seen it. I’d rather see something different than just a repeat. And, over the years, I’ve picked my opera-going outings accordingly. Consequently, I’ve actually seen this endlessly-produced Singspiel, live on the stage, only three times. Once as a student in New Zealand. Once at Covent Garden in 1969. And once a few years back in Berlin (where it was playing at all three opera houses during my residence). And the strange thing is, that I remember very little about the physical productions of what was surely written to be a really spectacular Zauberposse, from its opening hungry Wurm to its trial by fire and water. I remember the performances of some of the singers – from O’Brien/Baillie/Warren Smith/Rogatszy, with the NZ Opera, to te Kanawa/Deutekom/Ward and a telephone box in London, to Tsallagova/Kang/Kehrer/Hutton/Pauly in Germany -- but I could mostly have had my eyes shut, just listening to that glorious score, for all that I recall of the rather simplistic story and its staging. Odd. Because I remember I called the Berlin staging ‘ideal’. Clearly the piece does benefit from an unfussy staging, which throws the singers and the music into high relief.

Which brings me to my DVD. It is a live recording from the Ludwigsburger Schlössfestspiele of 1992. 1992 was my ‘French period’ – Nice opera or none – and the peak volume time of my one-book-after-another writing career. I was no longer casting, nor travelling through Europe to see productions, which means that most of the names on this disc are unfamiliar to me. Johnny, really, I thought, why are you sending me a DVD of My First Opera (I sang the music of the Königin at 11, Papageno at 13, and blossomed as a 16 year-old Sarastro) from a seventeen-year-old German provincial festival? Well, now I know.

Firstly it is staged in a fashion which could not be more simple. There is little that could be called scenery, an inoffensive time-and-place mish-mash of costumes (the Queen and Monastatos’s team win hands down sartorially over buttoned-up Team Temple), and the direction is tidy and sensible and really makes the libretto seem almost coherent. Just one note for the director: it doesn’t matter if a singer stands still to be dramatic, but walking agitatedly across the stage in mid-aria is giggleworthy. But the main thing about this staging is that it made, for me, the characters … what can I say? -- come out differently. I have never thought of the three ladies as being ‘main characters’. Here, they are, and they are superb. I have considered the three ‘knaben’ even less. Here, they have become quite prominent, and I loved how they joined in as the little Papagenos (one, I am sure, was a Papagena). Monastatos has suddenly become someone …

I have just had a wee lie down, to consider all this. Is it I, the director, has the dramaturg been fiddling? But the ‘balance of power’ here seems not only different but apt. Tamino and Pamina are mere pawns in the history, pushed around by Crown and Church. Yet, Tamino seems to be the central character. This probably has something to do with the fact that he is played Deon van der Walt, a tall, boyishly handsome fellow in a gold-trimmed judo outfit, with an extraordinarily sweet tenor voice, which becomes steely bright under ‘emotion’. He has the difficult job of emoting-reacting through some lengthy moments and – apart from the dramatic pacing referred to above – brings it off splendidly. You even forget to think, what a daft fellow, falling in love with a picture!

As his sidekick, Thomas Mohr is a darling Papageno. He reminded me of nothing less than a feathered Zero Mostel. His business with his origami bird was charming, and his duet with the sparky Papagena (Patricia Rozario), with its ring-a-rosies with the children, was a highlight. I don’t think my life is long enough to catch a Papa-pair to equal Pauly and Hutton at the Deutsche Oper, but this was – in a different mode – a very good second.

Having said which, Tamino and Papageno really seem, here, to have picked the wrong team. If I were a betting man, I would back this Team Night to beat this Team Temple hands down. And it isn’t just the Team Captains, although Andrea Frei, an Astrafiammante equipped with all the requisite high notes, a butcher’s knife and a splendid starry super-crinoline, looks to have much more power-potential than the tall, soft-grained, light bass Sarastro of Cornelius Hauptmann, in his unattractive primrose Chinese housecoat.

No, it’s the supporting teams. Team Queen has a perfect powerhouse of deputy-queens! Never, ever have I seen and/or heard the Three Ladies played and sung with such success. They look like a mixture of the Beverley Sisters, Lily Savage and the Supremes (whitewashed), and they sing – oh joy! – wonderfully TOGETHER. Elizabeth Whitehouse, Marina Sandel, Nadia Michael … you knock Il Divo or the Three Tenors into next week! A star act. You would make mincemeat of the selection of pale, bald eunuch-looking wimps, in their drab midi-length housecoats, supporting Sarastro. 

And when the magnificent Monastatos of Kevin Conners defects from the opposition …

One question, though, ladies: the Singspiel is called the Magic Flute. Why did you give Tamino a recorder?

Which leaves the Drei Knaben (even if one isn’t). I don’t care for boy soprano voices. They seem to invariably teeter on the bottom edge of the note. Not these! Beauties! They sound like fresh young children, not the dreaded Cathedral Chorister of yore … and bang in tune! And having fun! 

Oh. I’ve forgotten Pamina. Poor Pamina. If she didn’t have the glorious ‘Ach! Ich fühl’s’, the duet with Papageno, and the thrill line of the night (‘Tamiiiiiiiino mein’) she’d be as much of a dramatic cipher as her Mamma. Shickanader clearly wasn’t much good at writing women. But Mozart made up for him. Ulrike Sonntag is Pamina here, and sings her beautiful music with the purity that is the raison d’être of the role, but the camera isn’t always kind to her, her coiffure or her saggy 1930s frock.

Well, I’ve had a great fun time with this DVD. Thank you Johnny! I shall definitely watch it again, and then send it round my friends … And now I had better get back to the business of publishing your next book (below) … and better than the printing on this. The rather tatty Arthaus Musik booklet does not credit any but the ‘main’ players (and credits 2nd lady differently on cover and in booklet), it holds no information on the singers, and is really an incompetent ‘cheap label’ waste of time. What a let down for a fine disc.

PS I see Ludwigsburg also has a Pumpkin Festival. Maybe we could join that too!

One tenor: fifty years: four continents, umpteen countries, three wives, two fathers …

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I don’t know why the tenor Henry Hallam has never been biographized. Not even, would you believe it, by me. Oh, sure, I’ve written his name dozens of time in articles on other people but … well, I reckon the time has come to put his rather fascinating story on paper.

His career isn’t that difficult to follow, in spite of the fact that it was extremely, widely geographically, spread – Britain, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, both coasts of the United States of America – it just takes a bit of time and a lot of digging to gather all the fragments and jigsaw them together. Even the wives are pretty regular (only a short period of bigamy), but the family … oh. Not so regular. So let’s start with the family.

Henry was born Henry Samuel Hallam Mayer, in Clerkenwell, London on 7 August 1850. His mother was 28 (?) year-old Mrs Elizabeth Mayer, née Williams, the wife of furrier Martin Mayer of 8 Greystoke Place, Fetter Lane, and she had already borne to him three children, Martin Samuel (epileptic, suicidal, d Fitzroy Australia 1913), Hector and Emma, seemingly dead in infancy, since their marriage on 11 June 1839. Strange, then, that 37 Upper Rosoman St, Clerkenwell, in the 1841 census houses Martin Mayer a foreign furrier, his son Martin 2, and his wife … Mary, 20. Strange, too, that in 1848 a Martin Mayer marries a Mary Donoven in Stepney, and that Elizabeth Mayer née Williams marries Henry Richard Hallam (b London 14 February 1820; d Tilehurst 26 April 1893), from Peartree Court, Clerkenwell, on Christmas Day 1854. Three years after the birth of what looks like their pre-marital son who was, nevertheless, christened as the son of Martin Mayer.

And Henry Richard was … guess what, a furrier and son of a furrier. Wife-swapping in Clerkenwell? Whatever the precise answer, there were, it seems, some furry question-marks around the birth of young Henry. Which may be why I can find none of the participants in the 1851 census. But, by 1861, the Hallams are there, still in the fur trade, with Henry (10) and Victoria (8, to be Mrs Hawes).

Over the next decade, I spy very little of young Henry. I have only one piece of ‘information’. His early singing teacher was J Robinson. If true, that would tell us something else. He was in Liverpool, or else Dublin. There practised the two known Mr Joseph Robinsons of the 1850s vocal-coaching world. Joseph Bagot Robinson (d Dublin 1 August 1876), over a decade known as a singer in the midlands, operated from Hope Street, Liverpool, Joseph Robinson was vocal teacher in Dublin. I’m inclined to go for Liverpool. I wonder what Henry was doing as a teenage Liverpudlian.

He was back in London in 1870 ('a tenor of some repute' Australia urged in advance), however, giving a ‘farewell concert’ at the Barnsbury Institute. ‘Farewell’? Yes, Henry was following the latest rush to the diggings of Australia. He arrived in Melbourne 18 August 1870, and a fortnight later, aged 20, made his first appearance as a singer, at Prahran (3 September), alongside Florence Calzado, on a bill topped by ‘the Australian Tom Thumb’. In the next couple of years, he became a familiar name on Victorian bills (‘a young gentleman with a very pretty, very light tenor voice, extremely smooth and pleasing to the ear’), sharing bills with such established stars of the time and place as Sophia Cutter, Amelia Bailey, Mrs Fox, Alice May, Lucy Chambers, Armes Beaumont, a selection of Carandinis, Fanny Simonsen, David Miranda and wife, Mary Ann Christian, Amy Sherwin, ‘Juan de Haga’ et al. He made a first operatic foray at Charles Lascelles’ Benefit (October 1871) singing Tonio in an act of The Daughter of the Regiment, and performed The Messiah in Melbourne at Christmas of the year.

In 1872, he joined the Simonsen opera troupe, appearing as Fritz in The Grande-Duchesse and Manuel in The Rose of Castille, sang in ‘Operatic Concerts’ in Sydney with Agatha States, then switched genre and joined up with music-hall singer Harry Rickards, purveying tenor ballads through Australia and New Zealand (‘The Pilgrim of Love’, ‘The Irish Emigrant’, ‘The Death of Nelson’, ‘Come into the Garden Maud’, ‘Margharetta’, Thou art so near’, ‘Tell me Mary, how to woo thee’, ‘The Anchor’s Weighed’. ‘Molly Bawn’, ‘Happy be thy Dreams’, ‘My Guiding Star’, ‘You’ll remember me’, ‘The Nightingale’s Call’, ‘In this old chair’) between the comicalities. Rickards also popped the occasional short musical into his programme, so Henry got to play Pygmalion and Gala-Dear, Forty Winks, The Blind Beggars and suchlike. 

After a year with Rickards, Hallam decided to branch out as a sharebroker. He lost all in weeks, and hurried back to singing teaching and then performing, in concert with Arabella Goddard and then as a member of the Alice May Opera Company. He also got married (8 November 1873). His bride was Miss Mary Harriet Langmaid or Langmead[e], known to the stage as ‘Hattie Shepparde’, a much-liked soubrette on the Sydney stage.

The Alice May company, visited Wagga Wagga, and the Royal Victoria in Sydney with its repertoire of The Bohemian Girl, La Sonnambula, The Grande-Duchesse, The Daughter of the Regiment, Maritana and turned Geneviève de Brabant into a pantomime for Christmas before continuing with The Blind Beggars, The Lily of Killarney … each with Henry in the lead tenor role, before, in February 1874, the company (and Hattie) sailed for New Zealand. New Zealand had allegedly only once before had a whole opera company and, although much of Alice’s company was fairly average, they were welcomed for an initial five weeks in Dunedin and then around the country. Satanella, Fra Diavolo (a Hallam speciality). Der Freischütz, Cinderella, Martha, La Fille de Madame Angot, The Rose of Auvergne, The Crimson Scarf and Cox and Box (without Henry) swelled the repertoire.

Hattie had left the tour and returned home to give birth to her daughter, Hattie Cynisca Bella Shepparde Hallam in September. The mother died in childbirth and the child as an infant.

The May troupe retuned to Adelaide 6 April 1875, moved to Melbourne and on 10 August sailed for Bombay on the Almora. A fortnight out, a member of the company, gave birth to a daughter, Almora Howell Hallam (14 April 1876). Apparently the mother's’s real name was Margaret Hogan, but she was known on the stage as Maggie Christie, and she had been for several years a minor principal with the company. Anyway they got married 13 January 1877 in Calcutta, while the company was playing the Corinthian Theatre. It was later said the troupe had managed to get to Shanghai, Madras and Allahabad before they crumbled. Some went back to Australia, as best they could, but the Hallams didn’t. They carried on, to Britain.

Henry was swiftly into work, touring with Charles Durand’s opera company, before joining Kate Santley, who was purveying a butchered version of Orphée aux enfers in which Henry was Pluto, and briefly, a little piece entitled Happy Hampstead which is remembered 140 years later simply because it had a scorelet by one R D’Oyly Carte. When Kate went on tour, she added Princess Toto, La Fille de Madame Angot and Trial by Jury to her repertoire. Next, Henry joined Hariel Becker’s touring company, with Rose Bell as star (John of Paris, Fra Diavolo, La Fille de Madame Angot), then visited the Park Theatre to play in Pom, during which time Maggie was delivered of a son, Henry Richard (b Islington, 27 April 1878; d Chicago 3 October 1942). 

He toured as Alain in Babiole, in October 1879 created the lead role in Stanislaus’s The Lancashire Witches, played in a production of Le Voyage en Chine, went on the road with Adelaide Newton and George Mudie (La Fille de Madame Angot, The Blind Beggars, As You Like It) and spent his time, in between, ladding it at the Urban Club. He returned to the West End in 1882, in an amateurish flop named Melita, rose to a leading role in the much happier The Merry Duchess and then to his best London role as Jan in the Alhambra’s Beggar Student. The leading man was played by Fannie Leslie in pants. He played de Lansac in François les bas-bleus, toured in Olivette with Emily Soldene, took a turn with Henry Wardroper in his variety show The Fancy Ball and then made an error. American composer Richard Stahl took the Standard Theatre to present his wife, Bertie Crawford, as a soubrette star of the Lotta species in an American-style ‘musical comedy’, Capers. They were shrieked off the stage, and the reviews were simply deadly; Stahl and wife tempested off to America… and Henry went too. His West End career was over.

He arrived in America on the Aurania on 8 December 1885, thirty-five years old, and began the third slice of his career playing Sylvio to The Enchantress of Alfa Norman (wife of the editor of the New York Dramatic Mirror). She wasn’t admired and the Clipper labelled Henry ‘weak and unsatisfactory’. They switched to The Mikado and The Bohemian Girl and by the time the company collapsed, Henry was off giving his Thaddeus in Baltimore summer season, with an almost entirely English cast. But much better was coming. Henry was picked up by the Casino Theater, to succeed to the juvenile lead, Eugene Marcel, in the musical-theatre hit of the era, Erminie. He was to stay with the Casino, America’s top comic opera management for over three years appearing as Count de Rosen in Nadgy, Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard, the Duke of Mantua in The Brigands, Fritz to the Grande-Duchesse of Lillian Russell, Goncalves in The Brazilian, Ange Pitou in La Fille de Madame Angot et al. The ‘golden’ period ended, however, and he went back on the road in more Erminie and Giroflé-Giroflà, to San Francisco, where he indulged an unfortunate effort in management at the Orpheum, turned up in New York once more, as Risotto in The Mountebanks, and got married again.

Unless I have got it wrong, he married Dutch-Canadian soprano Miss Josie Schoff (recte: Josephine Davidson Schoff) (b McGillivray, Ontario 1867), known for the stage as Josephine Stanton, in Illinois 27 September 1893. Maggie got a divorce 26 July 1895.

The happy couple went on tour with Alfa Norman, still at it, played summer season at Milwaukee, and more Angot with David Henderson. Henry got mixed up with a flop piece called The Isle of Gold, trouped with A Stranger in New York, with Mathilde Cotrelly and with Milton Aborn and a group called ‘the Boston Lyric Company’ with which he played Pietro in Boccaccio, Pippo in La Mascotte, and featured opposite Josie in Fra Diavolo, The Fencing Master, Said Pasha … when their San Francsico season closed in one night, it was time for a change. Slice four was about to begin. On 10 March 1900, the Hallams left America for New Zealand, at the head of a rather motley ‘Josephine Stanton Opera Company’. The only well-known name amongst them was Carl Formes but, alas, it wasn’t the great German bass, only his comprimario son.

They opened in Auckland 28 May with a repertoire of Said Pasha, Fra Diavolo, The Fencing Master, Wang and Dorcas. It appears that they were rather approximate versions. Henry sang ‘Funiculi Funicula’ and his best song from the Lancashire Witches in Said Pasha. They traipsed round smalltown New Zealand – Feilding, Wanganui, Hawera, Napier, Timaru, Oamaru – and, having exhausted their prospects there, they proceeded to Australia and opened at the Sydney Criterion. By May, the splintering company had expired in Adelaide. However, Henry and Josie were employable, even if their company were not, and they were promptly snapped up by George Musgrove. Over the next eighteen months Henry featured as the Emperor Hang Chow in A Chinese Honeymoon, The Lord Mayor in The Thirty Thieves, General Korboy in The Fortune Teller, Tonio in The Daughter of the Regiment, and his regular role of Fra Diavolo, until the company's tour closed. On June 13 1904, they sailed for England.

The English stop-over lasted only a couple of years, during which the couple played sketches in the music-halls, before they sailed for Canada. On the shipping list, they admitted to 57 and 30. However, Henry, who was still looking fine, if a little beefy, would soon start chopping many years off his age.

For the next five years, I lose them. Retired? Oh no! In 1912, slice number five would begin. Henry Hallam, aged 62, but passing for a decade or more younger, made his first (silent) film short . I leave the complete list of his credits to the film historians, but over the next decade I have spotted him in seniorish roles as Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1913), in Home Run Bakers Double, The Brand, The Mystery of the Yellow Sunbonnet, The Scorpion’s Sting, Audrey, as Count Wolfenstein in a celluloid contraction of The Black Crook, The War Bride’s Secret, The Ill Thereof, A Girl Without a Soul, Bonnie Annie Lauri, as Colonel Henry Clay Riesener in Blue Jeans, Carolyn of the Corners, My Little Sister, The Lion and the Mouse, Help Help Police, Phil for Short and Tom Terriss’s 6-reel version of The Heart of Maryland.

Some months after the release of this last, Henry died. Some of the film websites still say that he was fifty-four years old at the time. He wasn’t, of course, he was 71. And he’d been more than half a century in show business.

I haven’t discovered yet what became of Josie. Or Maggie. But I’ve winkled out the children. Almora went on the stage, beginning, with her father, in A Stranger in New York. She toured America in farce-comedy, in comic opera and in vaudeville, and died in December 1918 aged 36. Henry Richard shows up in the census as a switchman on the railroads. It seems that Henry jr married Marjory Prudence O’Connor (Kankakee, 29 November 1910) and they had a daughter named Marjory Louise (b 27 July 1913; d 3 September 1996, Mrs Andrefsky dite Andry). Just before his death, he re-wed his landlady, Mabel Belle Pappas. She shows up still in 1954 in Kankakee, Illinois … I wonder if the line of Henry Mayer dit Hallam still continues.

SUPPÉ … some of the time …

.

Be careful what you wish for, says the old adage. You may get it ... and in spades!

Forty years ago, when, post-the publication of The British Musical Theatre, I was fashionable, I was asked by a Gale Writers’ Almanac how I would like to see the subject continue henceforth. I replied that I would like to see the musical theatre become a respectable area of study and scholarship, its history given the same serious attention that that of other branches of theatre were. Those careless words are reprinted every year, in each of the Almanac’s new editions, and I often rather wish I had kept my mouth shut. In recent years, endless scholarly and pseudo-scholarly theses – some interesting and worthwhile, far too many mere scissors-and-paste jobs, and gushing with the buzz-words of 21st century academia – have flooded out of the world’s Universities … nowadays, you really have to plough through the endless blatantly useless, or mark-scoring, ones to get to the flecks of gold.

I didn’t know what to think when I was presented with 427 pages of Franz von Suppè et l’opérette viennoise à l’ère du libéralisme (1860-1880) by José-Luis Munoz. A work on Suppé, yes, please! And in French! Hurrah! I’ve never been able, with my dogged German, conveniently to get through Schneidereit or Keller. But ‘the era of liberalism’? Sounds like a bit of a tidy academic ‘label’. I don’t think either of my Viennese great-grandfathers – one of whom was heavily involved in the Social Democratic party – would necessarily have agreed that those decades were notably ‘liberal’! ‘Let’s hope there is more Suppé than liberalism’, I mused as I dived in.

Great-grandfather Stojetz, the Viennese social democrat

Well, it’s nip and tuck. There’s a potted history of Vienna by way of introduction; but I’ve just finished reading Ilse Barea’s fine full-scale (left-wing) ‘biography’ of Vienna, and watching Simon Sebag Montefiore’s splendid television series on the same subject, so it was déjà lu for me … Never mind, this time it was in French, and mostly pleasantly readable, though one does trip over words/phrases like ‘socio-idéologique’ too achingly often. And the ‘fonction exo/cataphorique de l’opérette’ has me stonkered.

We don’t get to Suppé proper until page 152, by which time we have had a wisely brief, and eternally doomed, attempt at defining ‘operetta’ (the word opéra-bouffe doesn’t appear anywhere), a sketchy history of the genre, featuring the names of the endless commentators who have been apparently put to contribution for this introduction, and some occasionally rather dubious statements of ‘fact’, all of which come together in a hundred odd pages, in which the most enjoyable parts are those about the supportive Schlesinger family, and other moments when the author frees himself from Schneidereit, Keller et al, and lets himself speak.

Anyway, on page 168, Suppé starts his career in the musical theatre, which is, after all, why he and we are here. Well, I am, anyway. And here follow the most instructive and enjoyable pages of the book: the description and reviews of Jung lustig, Alter traurig, Suppé’s first piece at the Theater in der Josefstadt. I do wish the author had carried on in the same way, following our man through his engagements and works, at and for, the Theater an der Wien, the Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai, and the Carltheater, instead of going off into incidental side-alleys.

We do, however, get a bit on such examples of his works as Das Pensionat and Fatinitza (the libretti of which cannot be called ‘typically Viennese’, being, like those of Die schöne Galathée, Fledermaus and Die lustige Witwe, taken from the French), Leichte Kavallerie, Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann, and even some of the less well-known pieces. I yearn to know more about Gervinus, der Narr von Untersberg, oder eine patriotischer Wunsch! Enjoyable, too, are the tales of the Pokornys, father and son, but I would, personally, have liked more insight into the ‘man who made it all happen’, Karl Treumann.

But, alas, on page 203, it stops. There are, in fact, only thirty-five pages devoted specifically the composer and his works. Just a tenth of the whole. The remainder of the document is devoted to an ‘analyse’ of Die schöne Galathé and, more substantially, of Boccaccio. The 100 pages of this latter ‘analyse’ give every sign of being an original essay, on to which the rest of the work has been tacked, to make it up to a full-sized thesis.

The 'father of the American musical comedy' Adolph Philipp  in Boccaccio in Graz.

And then there is the obligatory thesical ‘conclusion’. A wise lady, last year, sending me her doctoral thesis for a once-over, wrote ‘ignore the introduction and conclusion, they are simple stuck-on to fit into the university’s identikit of a thesis’. She was so right. Her work was outstanding and original, the ‘add-ons’ were wholly unnecessary. But she is now Dr Annie. Is this the same here? Not entirely. New material is introduced in the conclusion, including these key lines:

“Si nous admettons les prises de position “politiques” de l’opérette, certes camouflées par un habillage antique ou renaissant faussement anachronique, employé par exemple dans les deux opérettes travesties La Belle Galathée (1865) et Boccaccio (1879), il existe en revanche un courant de penseurs qui, en se posant comme contempteurs de l’opérette viennoise, ne voient en elle qu’un dérivatif plaisant dévidé de tout contenu politique. Nous mentionnerons à ce sujet notamment Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Egon Friedell, enfin Hermann Broch”.

Zehn Mädchen ... all the same age!

Well, I’ve never thought of myself in the same boat as Nietzsche or Kraus before! Because I don’t admit ‘les prises de position politiques’ in these two Operetten. Of course, many a theatre piece does take some sort of a ‘social stance’—if you only count the easiest and oldest way: making fun of those in power – but just as many are, like these two, simply good, grubby fun. And Bumpti-ra-pa-ta to all that!

So, verdict? Loyally and pretty thoroughly researched. Readably written (give or take the buzzwords). Disappointing to me in its subject matter: I wanted more Suppé, more music, less chit-chat. What is the readership for this? The writer doesn’t seem to be sure. Probably other University folk. But he has the style and, it seems, much of the knowledge to have made it ‘the’ book on Suppé for the French-speaking world, instead of a school exercise. Shame.

PS: Thank you, Mons Munoz, for the information that one Franz Stieger has published a Suppè worklist. In 1978! I didn’t know! Twenty years later, I went to the long, drawn-out trouble of doing the same thing. I could have saved myself the time. Here’s mine. I hope we agree.

(PPS: Dr Albert Gier of Heidelberg, who has a copy of Stieger's monumental but apparently fallible work, tells me that his Suppeschen worklist includes 183 items. This one has 198. But we may each have some the other has not.
PPPS: Dr Hans-Dieter Roser has forwarded to me the deeply researched worklist from his Suppé biography, in which I find several works, notably from out-of-town, not in my list. Adding and altering accordingly!
PPPPS some of the credits in this list refer to incidental music only. Since few reviews credit individual songs, where appropriate, I have simply recorded all dramatic credits which I have found. For further details, see Dr Roser.)

1841 Jung lustig, im Alter traurig (Die Folgen der Erziehung) (C Wallis) Theater in der Josefstadt 5 March
1841 Die Wette um ein Herz (Künstlersinn und Frauenliebe) (Karl Elmar) Theater in der Josefstadt 10 March
1841 Stumm, beredt, verliebt (Franz Xaver Told) Odenburg 1 May, Theater an der Wien 15 July 1856
1841 Die Besturmung von Saida (w Carl Binder, Anton Emil Titl/Told) Arena, Baden bei Wien 3 September; Theater in der Josefstadt 10 September
1841 Der Pfeilschütz im Lerchenfeld (w Josef Lanner/Josef Kilian Schickh) Theater in der Josefstadt 27 October
1841 Der Komödiant (Eine Lektion in der Liebe) (Elmar) Theater in der Josefstadt 14 December
1842 Das grüne Band (Elmar et al) Theater in der Josefstadt 2 July
1842 Das Armband (Friedrich Kaiser) Theater in der Josefstadt 8 September
1842 Die Hammerschmiedin aus Steiermark (Folgen einer Landpartie) (Schickh) Theater in der Josefstadt 14 October
1844 Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien (‘the author of Zauberschleier’) Theater in der Josefstadt 26 February
1844 Die schlimmen Buben (Der Teufel in allen Ecken) (w Witt/Anton von Klesheim) Theater in der Josefstadt
1844 Nella, die Zauberin (Das Maskenball auf Hochgiebel) (Elmar) Theater in der Josefstadt 11 May
1844 Marie, die Tochter des Regiments (ad Friedrich Blum) Theater in der Josefstadt 13 April
1844 Ein Sommersnachts-Traum (Shakespeare ad Emil Straube) Theater in der Josefstadt 31 August
1844 Der Mörder in Einbildung (aka Der Kramer und sein Kommis) (Kaiser) Theater in der Josefstadt 28 September
1844 Dolch und Rose (Das Donaumädchen) (Told) Theater in der Josefstadt 5 November
1844 Zum ersten Mal im Theater (Kaiser) Theater in der Josefstadt 31 December
1845 Die Champagner-Kur (Lebenshass und Reue) (Karl Gruber) Theater in der Josefstadt 20 February
1845 Die Müllerin von Burgos (Josef Kupelwieser) Theater in der Josefstadt 8 March
1845 Der Preussische Landwehrmann und die französischen Bauerin (Kaiser) 1 act Theater in der Josefstadt 22 April
1845 Die Preussen in Österreich (Landmädchen, Volontair und Trompeter) (Elmar) Theater in der Josefstadt 29 April
1845 Der Nabob (Karl Haffner) Theater in der Josefstadt 9 May
1845 Die Industrie-Ausstellung (Reise-Abenteuer in London) (Kaiser) Theater in der Josefstadt 1 August
1845 Des Wanderers Ziel (Karl Meisl) 1 act Theater an der Wien 30 August
1845 Reich an Gelt und arm an Schlaf (Der verkaufte Schlaf) (Told) Theater an der Wien 17 September
1845 Das Lustspiel in Hietzing (Blum) Theater an der Wien 26 September
1845 Sie ist verheiratet (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 7 November
1846 Die Gänsehüterin (ad Georg Ball) Theater an der Wien 11 February
1846 Der Sohn der Haide (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 15 June
1846 Dichter und Bauer (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 24 August
1847 Die Karikaturen (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 8 February
1847 Die Reise nach Grätz mit dem Landkutscher (Die Rauber auf dem Semmering) (Schickh) Theater in der Josefstadt 24 February
1847 Das Menschenherz (Lang) Theater an der Wien 15 March
1847 Liebeszauber, oder Ein Wunder in den Bergen [in der Schweiz] (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 21 April
1847 Das Vaterherz (Wilhelm Just jr) Theater in der Josefstadt 24 April
1847 Zwei Pistolen (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 8 May
1847 Ein Feenmärchen (Kupelwieser) Theater an der Wien 25 May
1847 Das Mädchen vom Lande (Elmar)Theater an der Wien 7 August
1847 Tausend und eine Nacht (w Anton Storch/Told) Theater in der Josefstadt 20 August
1847 Die Schule des Armen, oder Zwei Millionen (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 26 October
1847 Was eine Frau einmal will, oder der Friedrichsdorf (w Heinrich Proch/Heinrich Bornstein) Theater an der Wien 23 November
1847 Hier ein Schmidt, da ein Schmidt, noch ein Schmidt und wieder ein Schmidt (Elmar, Johann Heinrich Mirani) Theater an der Wien 30 December
1848 Männer-Schönheit (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 6 February
1848 Unter der Erde, oder Freiheit und Arbeit (Arbeit bringt Segen) (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 30 May
1848 Eine Petition der Burger einer kleinen Provinzstadt, oder Theolog, Jurist und Techniker (aka Bauer, Burgermeister, Gutsherr) (Josef Böhm) Theater an der Wien 12 July
1848 Wie die Reaktionäre dumm sind! (Elmar) 1 act Theater an der Wien 3 August
1848 Der Bandit (Ein Abentheuer in Spanien) ('A C Ambo') Theater an der Wien 13 August
1848 Der wirklich, überzählige, unbeseldete Wirtschafts-Practikant (Gustav Schönstein) Theater an der Wien 14 September
1848 Ein Traum -- kein Traum, oder Die letzte Rolle einer Schauspielerin (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 2 December
1848 Martl (Der Portiunculatag [or Der Tanzboden] in Schnabelhausen) (Alois Berla) Theater an der Wien 16 December
1848 Nacht und Licht (Kaiser) 1 act Theater an der Wien 31 December
1849 Des Teufels Brautfahrt, oder Böser Feind und guter Freund (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 30 January
1849 Ein Fürst (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 17 March
1849 Gervinus, der Narr vom Untersberg (Ein patriotischer Wunsch) (Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus/Theater an der Wien 1 July
1849 Der Edelstein (Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 17 September
1849 Ein Blatt der Weltgeschichte (Beethoven arr/Otto Prechtler) Theater an der Wien 3 October
1849 Unterthänig und unabhängig (Vor und nach einem Jahre) (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 13 October
1849 's Alraunl (Klesheim) Theater an der Wien 13 November
1850 Deborah (Mosenthal) Stadt-Theater, Leipzig 8 January
1850 Die Philister-Schule (Alles auf ein Mal und nie) (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 17 January
1850 Die Künst zu lieben (Gentil Bernhard) (w Adolf Müller/Ida Schuselka-Brünning) Theater an der Wien 26 February
1850 Liebe zum Volke (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 18 March
1850 Die Assentirung (aka Bürger und Soldat, oder Liebe zum Vaterland) (w Adolf Müller/V W Niklas ad Bohm) Theater an der Wien 26 April
1850 Die beiden Fassbinder (Reflexionen und Aufmerksamkeiten) (Leopold Feldmann) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 16 May
1850 Der Dumme hat's Glück (Er muss tolle Streiche machen) (Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 29 June
1850 Der Mann an der Spitz, oder Alles aus Freundschaft (Anton Bittner) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 19 August
1850 Der Vertrauensmann, oder Wahrheit und Luge (Berla) Theater an der Wien 19 September
1851 Dame Valentin, oder Frauenräuber und Wanderburschen (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 9 January
1851 Fliegende Blätter (pasticcio comp and arr w Müller) Theater an der Wien 22 May
1851 Die Industrie Ausstellung oder Reise-Abenteuer in London (Leopold Feldmann) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 25 May
1851 Waldmärchen (Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 30 July
1851 Angeplauscht (Ludwig Wysber) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 20 August
1852 Der Tannenhäuser (Heinrich von Levitschnigg) Theater an der Wien 27 February
1852 Die Jungfer Mahm von Gmunden (Kola) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 20 May
1852 Ein Filz als Prasser (Leopold Feldmann, Theodor Flamm) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 30 June
1852 Pech! (Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 31 July
1852 Das Beispiel (Franz Nissl, Sigmund Schlesinger) Theater an der Wien 2 October
1852 Der Grabsteinmacher (Wysber) Theater an der Wien 6 November
1853 Die Heimkehr von der Hochzeit (Feldmann) Theater an der Wien 8 January
1853 Der Baum des Lebens, oder Österreichs Eiche (Feldmann) 1 act Theater an der Wien 13 March
1853 Die Irrfahrt um's Glück (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 24 April
1853 Die Steinbrüderln, oder der Traum von Ritterthum (w Carl Binder/Kola) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 5 June
1853 Die weiblichen Jäger (Die Jägermadchen oder Eine moderne Diana) (Feldmann) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 29 July
1854 Die Bernsteinhexe (Heinrich Laube) Theater an der Wien 6 January
1854 Durcheinander (pasticcio arr/Wilhelm Grüner) Theater an der Wien 5 February
1854 Trommel und Trompete (Elmar) Theater an der Wien1 April
1854 Der fidele Christel (Anton Bittner) Theater an der Wien 19 April
1854 Im Bauernhaus -- im Herrenhause (J L Deinhardtstein) 1 act Theater an der Wien 25 April
1854 Der Biberhof (Leopold Feldmann, Moritz Märzroth) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 25 May
1854 Wo steckt der Teufel? (Eduard Breier ad Johann Grün) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 28 June
1854 Mozart (Leonhard Wohlmuth) Theater an der Wien 23 September
1854 Nur romantisch! (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 18 November
1854 Der Jüwelier, oder Der Festmarkt von Kronburg (Franz von Holbein) 6 December
1854 Bum! Bum!, oder Zwei Schlauköpfe und ein Dummkopf (Bittner) Theater an der Wien 9 December
1855 Das Bründl [Schuster] bei Sievring (Ein Blick in die Zukunft) (Hugo Merlin) Theater an der Wien 14 April
1855 Der Teufel hol die Komödie (Merlin) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 17 May
1855 Der Hollenross (Karl Bruno) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 23 May
1855 Die G'frettbrüder (Bittner, Berla) Theater an der Wien 28 June
1855 Märchen, Bilder und Geschichten für kleine und grosse Kinder (Prinz Lilliput und das Schneiderlein) (Klesheim) Theater an der Wien 20 October
1855 Judas im Frack (Ein Judas von Anno neune) (w Müller/Langer) Theater an der Wien 20 December
1856 Die Reise nach Graz mit dem Lohnkutscher (Schick) 2 February
1856 Nur keine Verwandten (Feldmann) Theater an der Wien 12 April
1856 Ein Musikant, oder Die ersten Gedanken (Ludwig Gottsleben) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 7 June
1856 Die Wahrheit auf Reisen (Berg) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 22 June
1856 Der Schuster von Sievring (Merlin) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 16 July
1856 Die Weingeister (Alois Blank, J Bernhofer) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 10 August
1856 Eine ungarische Dorfgeschichte (Bittner, Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 31 August
1856 Die schöne Leni (Julius Findeisen) Theater an der Wien 4 October
1856 Die Kreuzköpfeln (Berg, Grün) Theater an der Wien 22 October
1856 Vertrauen (Moritz Anton Grandjean) Theater an der Wien 22 November
1856 Ein gefährlicher Mensch (Der Bucher-Hausirer) (Wilhelm Tesko) Theater an der Wien 7 December
1857 Im Circus 1 act Theater an der Wien 31 January
1857 Der Faschingsteufel (Berla) Theater an der Wien 23 February
1857 Eine Schlange (Karl Gründorf) Theater an der Wien 18 April
1857 Kopf und Herz (Flamm) Theater an der Wien 9 May
1857 Der Komet vom Jahre 1857 (Feldmann, Weyl) Theater an der Wien 23 May
1857 Ein desparater Kopf (Karl) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 20 June
1857 Die Wäschermadeln (Ritter Bomsen und seine schauderliche Mordthau) (aka Die Hellseherin von Thury) (Berg) Theater an der Wien 29 June
1857 Eine Landpartie (Julius Findeisen) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 17 July
1858 Paragraph drei (Grandjean) Hofoper 8 January
1858 Die Mozart-Geige, oder Der Dorfmusikant und sein Kind (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 27 February
1858 Das tagliche Brot (Berla) Theater an der Wien 13 March
1858 Der Werkelmann und seine Familie (Langer) Theater an der Wien 17 April
1858 Die Firmgodl (Elmar) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 21 May
1858 Die Kathi von Eisen (Berla) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 15 August
1858 Nach der Stadterweiterung (Gans, Schlesinger) Theater an der Wien 11 December
1859 Ein Faschings-Gugelhupf (w Müller/Langer) Theater an der Wien 5 March
1859 Der Teufel im Herzen (Das vierte Gebot) (w Müller/Flamm, Joseph Wimmer ad) Theater an der Wien 18 March
1859 Die Husaren und der Kinderstrumpf (Friedrich Hopp) Stadt Theater, Tirnau (music normally credited to Julus Hopp)
1859 Etwas zum lachen, oder Keine Politik (Feldmann) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 9 July
1859 Eine Wienerin (Flamm) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 23 July
1859 Der Waldteufel (Berla/Tesko) Theater an der Wien
1859 Über Land und Meer (w Müller/Blank) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 21 August
1859 Eine Judenfamilie (Mirani) Theater an der Wien 22 October
1859 Die Zauberdose, oder Um zehn Jahre zu spät (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 19 December
1860 Meister Winter (Berla) Theater an der Wien 13 March
1860 Das Pensionat (C K) 1 act Theater an der Wien 24 November
1860 Mein ist die Welt (Kaiser) Theater an der Wien 16 December
1861 Ein Loch in der Hölle (Johann Schonau) Theater an der Wien 1 February
1861 Ein Faschingsdonnerstag in Venedig (J Golinelli) (pantomime divertissement) Theater an der Wien 9 March
1861 Ein Kapitalist, der einen Dienst sucht (aka Ein Ratzelhafter Freund, oder Kapitalist und Kammerdiener) (Scribe ad Carl F Stix) 1 act Theater an der Wien 26 May
1861 Der politische Schuster (Berg) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 1 June
1861 Der Höllen-Kandidat (Bernhofer, Blank) Sommer-Theater in Fünfhaus 26 July
1861 Wiener Nachtfalter (Gottsleben) Theater an der Wien 3 October
1861 Ein Schwindler (Mirani) Theater an der Wien 12 October
1861 Die Wunderkinder aus Californien (Elmar) Theater an der Wien 29 November
1862 Ein Mann dreier Weiber, oder Ein alter Tarockspieler (w Müller/Blank, J L Harisch) Theater an der Wien 22 April
1862 Die Kartenschlägerin 1 act Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai 26 April
1862 Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann (W Friedrich) 1 act Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai 25 October
1862 Baedekers Reisenhandbuch (w C F Conradin/G Belly) 1 act Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai 27 December
1862 Werners Vergnügungszügler 1 act Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai 27 December
1863 Der Herr Vetter (Berla) Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai 28 February
1863 Flotte Bursche (Josef Braun) 1 act Theater am Franz-Josefs-Kai 18 April
1863 Der Selbstmörder (w Karl Kleiber/Blank) 1 act Fursts Singspielhalle 21 June
1863 Etwas für alle Jahreszeiten (w J Hopp, Müller/ad Blank) Theater an der Wien 5 September
1863 Überall Geister (Langer) 1 act Carltheater 23 September
1863 Christkindl (Langer) 1 act Carltheater 26 December
1864 Das Corps der Rache (Harisch) 1 act Carltheater 5 March
1864 Franz Schubert (Schubert arr/Hanns Max) 1 act Carltheater 10 September
1864 Der Schwiegerpapa aus Krems (Langer) Carltheater 19 November
1865 Dinorah, oder Die Turnerfahrt nach Hütteldorf (Friedrich Hopp as ‘Julius Cäsar’) Carltheater 4 May
1865 Die schöne Galathé[e] ('Poly Henrion') 1 act Meysels Theater, Berlin 30 June
1865 Der Ehemann in der Baumwolle (ad Bittner) 1 act Carltheater 4 November
1865 Die alte Schachtel (Berg) 1 act Carltheater 2 December
1866 Leichte Kavallerie (Karl Costa) Carltheater 21 March
1866 Der letzte Gulden (Berg) Carltheater 18 August
1866 Ein patriotische Dienstbot (Berg) Carltheater 18 August
1866 Theatralische Ausverkauft Carltheater 25 August
1866 Es wird annektiert! 1 act Carltheater 20 September
1866 Die Freigeister (Costa) 2 act then 1act Carltheater 23 October
1867 Banditenstreiche (B Boutonnier) 1 act Carltheater 27 April
1868 Die Frau Meisterin (Costa) Carltheater 20 January
1868 Schlechte Mittel, gute Zwecke (Kaiser) Carltheater 5 March
1868 Tantalusqualen 1 act Carltheater 3 October
1869 Isabella (Josef Weyl) 1 act Carltheater 6 November
1870 Vineta, oder Die versunkene Stadt Theater im Gärtnerplatz, Munich 10 February
1870 [Lohengelb, oder] Die Jungfrau von Dragant (Nestroy ad [Costa], M A Grandjean) Stadttheater, Graz 23 July; Carltheater 30 November
1871 Centifolie (Langer) Carltheater 9 February
1871 Eine schöne Wirtschaft (Flamm) Carltheater 15 November
1872 Ein weibliche Dämon (Langer) Carltheater 13 April
1872 Cannebas (Josef Doppler) 1 act Carltheater 2 November
1873 Tricoche und Cacolet (Henri Meilhac, Ludovic Halévy ad Treumann) Carltheater 3 January
1873 Wolfgang und Constanze (Mozart arr/Langer) Carltheater 3 May
1875 Fräulein Schwarz (Langer) Carltheater 11 March
1875 Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen (Jules Verne, Adolphe d'Ennery ad Karl Treumann) Carltheater 28 March
1876 Fatinitza (F Zell, Richard Genée) Carltheater 5 January
1876 Zahnarzt und Magnetiseur (A Reichenbach) 1 act Carltheater 4 February
1876 Nach dem Mond und unterm Meer (Verne ad Adolphe L'Arronge, Zell) Carltheater 25 March
1876 Die Frau Baronin vom Ballet (Berg) 1 act Carltheater 2 December
1876 Die treulose Witwe (Berg) 1 act Carltheater 2 December
1877 Unsere Handwerk (Berg) 1 act Carltheater 1 April
1878 Der Teufel auf Erden (Julius Hopp, Carl Juin) Carltheater 5 January
1879 Boccaccio (Zell, Genée) Carltheater 1 February
1880 Donna Juanita (Zell, Genée) Carltheater 21 February
1880 Die Schwestern (Held) Carltheater 19 October
1881 Der Gascogner (Zell, Genée) Carltheater 22 March
1882 Das Herzblättchen (Karl Tetzlaff) Carltheater 4 February
1883 Die Afrikareise (Moritz West, Genée) Theater an der Wien 17 March
1887 Bellman (West, Ludwig Held) Theater an der Wien 26 February
1887 Joseph Haydn (Haydn arr/Franz von Radler) Theater in der Josefstadt 30 April
1888 Die Jagd nach dem Glück (Genée, Bruno Zappert) Carltheater 27 October
1895 Das Modell (Victor Léon, Held) Carltheater 4 October
1898 Die Pariserin (Léon, Held) revised Die Frau Meisterin  Carltheater 26 January

Massé or Suppe´? Fun, anyhow!