Mr Green of the Alhambra

 

A lovely discovery today!  And an easy peasy bit of re-research ... only then I went off a tangent ...

Mr R Green. Oh there were several of those, but I know this one. Because he sang with Emily Soldene in the days when she was 'Miss Fitzhenry'. And everyone who even just said 'hello' to Emily got themselves investigated by me decades ago ... pre-Internet.  Alas, many of my notes from those 20th century years got swept away on a tide of Dorper Lamb juice ... and on Microsoft's 'no longer supported' list ... but here's what I saved.

Robert GREEN (b Clitheroe, Lancs 12 June 1829; d Clayton Hospital, Wakefield 14 March 1882) was a son of John Green, a block-cutter, and his wife Sarah née Foulds from Great Harwood. Four sons, four daughters ... and in the 1851 census young Robert is, yes, an apprentice block-cutter. 

I don't know when he got tired of chipping stone, or when he discovered a huge bass-baritone voice, or where and when he first displayed it. The Lancashire press of the time is not forthcoming about concerts in Clitheroe. However, by 1861, while the family was bunkered down in Accrington, he is declaring that he is a professor of music, and that he has a wife named Henrietta. 

Well, my first sighting of him as a vocalist does indeed come in 1861. In October of the year he turns up as a member of the resident company at the top-class Oxford Music Hall, London. He has a solo role in Meyer Lutz's King Christmas, sings Ford in the potted Merry Wives of Windsor, and when the famed Orphée aux enfers mega-selection was produced he sang John Styx and joined 'Miss Fitzhenry' in the Metamorphosis Couplets.

Over the next eight or nine years, he was a regular at the Oxford, but also at the cavernous Alhambra where he could shake the chandeliers with his vast baritone voice.  

This seems to be him 

In 1869, he was among those transported to America by the entrepreneurial gentlemen at Tammany Hall. On opening night, it was he who led the singing of 'The Star Spangled Banner', as well as giving 'She Wore a Wreath of Roses' and playing the Marquis de Longueville in Farnie's burlesquelet The Page's Revel. Tammany was a fairly quick failure, but Green stayed there for at least a couple of months -- I see him giving an 'Anvil Jack, the farrier' by French and Operti at their shortlived Sunday concerts ... and tiens! there is a Mrs Hattie Green singing Rossini. I wasted time on her ...

Green didn't waste time at Tammany either. By June he was headed back to England and the music-hall rounds. When he sang at Vance's Benefit iin April 1870 the press nodded 'His baritone voice is perhaps the strongest and the loudest in the upper notes of any living artist'.  Another press person noted 'without exception the best baritone singer that ever visited this hall.' 'Remarkable vocal powers'. 'He fairly makes the hall ring'.

In 1872 he took over the musical direction of Livermore's 'Court Minstrels' ('Largo al factotum', 'The Scapegrace', The Village Blacksmith', 'The White Squall'. 'Rose of Allandale', 'Le Sabre', 'The Soldier's Tear', 'Honour and Arms' &c), then moved on to Hengler's Cirque in Hull, into pantomime at Leeds (Xmas 1873), to the Cambridge and Crowders's Music Halls ('far above the average of concert hall baritones') ...

In 1879 he was still a 'splendid baritone', but rather less in view ... and in Leeds he got bitten by a dog. He died of rabies/hydrophobia in a hospital in Wakefield aged 52.

I should have left it there.  But I didn't. I noticed how often the name of 'Mademoiselle/Miss Ada Herminie' appeared in conjunction with Green's.  Could she have been 'Henrietta Green'?  So I searched. And I did not find. Because the only clues are behind paywalls ...   and some odd newspaper site ('pay') seems to vouchsafe that she was the wife of, firstly, music-hall comedian 'James Hillier' (1840-1874) and subsequently, in 1876, of his friend George Leybourne.  Errrr. Yes, there's a wrinkle here.  (Ps Ada finally identified!!!!! so, all that is forgotten!)

I'll leave it to the music-hall historians (are there any serious ones?) to suss that one out!