HEALY, Fanny [PAYNE, Eliza Frances] (b Union Street, Shoreditch 22 February 1815; d Richmond Road, Dalston c 27 November 1862)
When Samuel Arnold put together his company for the 1834 season at the English Opera House, he took as his principal ladies – to feature alongside two of the nation’s outstanding male performers, Wilson and Phillips – Miss Emma Romer, twenty years old, yet already more than four years established as a leading lady in the London theatre, and Miss Fanny Healy, aged nineteen, whose stage experience to date was negligible to not admitted, but about whom the buzz was apparently already flying.
For his first big production of the season, Arnold had put together an opera on the story of Nourjahad, with music commissioned from Mr Edward Loder of Bath. Phillips was to take the title role, Wilson would be the tenorious Schemzeddin, and the two principal ladies’ roles would be taken by the two young prime donne. The Times critic passed by the newly rebuilt theatre for a preview, took in a dress rehearsal of the new opera, and remarked with unextravagant enthusiasm ‘Miss F Healey whom we had not previously heard will, we are convinced, prove a most valuable acquisition to the company …’.
As it happened, Nourjahad required a few more rehearsals, so Arnold opened his new theatre on 14 July with a bill of plays instead. Then, on the third night he switched the bill. Mr Serle still gave the ‘opening address', The Yeomen’s Wedding was again played, along with The Quartette, and the vocal troupe were sent into action playing that most warhorsical of English operas, Artaxerxes. Wilson gave his umpteenth Arbaces, Phillips his umpteenth Artabanes, Mr T Millar and Cecilia Novello supported, and the leading role of Mandane was sung by Miss Fanny Heal(e)y ‘her first appearance on the London stage’.
The wording is interesting. Had Miss Healy then already appeared on the stage outside London? Indeed she had. On 10 April 1833, Miss Healy ‘pupil of Signor Lanza’ had appeared in the selfsame role for her ‘debut on the public stage’ at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. And even that was not a real debut, as the Irish press noted ‘her vocal powers have been already appreciated at the Italian operas [at the Adelphi Theatre] in Brunswick Street’, where she had played Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia alongside Mrs Haydn Corri, Antonio Sapio, Latham and Auguste Giubilei, in what were styled the first performances of Italian opera in Dublin, in the previous month. ‘Miss Healy’s singing’, they continued, ‘but confirmed the opinion of her merits which we expressed in a notice of the first of these performances. With a voice of rare extent, though somewhat limited in power, Miss Healy combines taste and cultivation which must place her in the very highest rank amongst English opera singers. The brilliancy and precision of execution, the distinctness with which each note was articulated, in running some of the most difficult passages of the opera could hardly be surpassed …’. She went on to sing alongside Henry Bedford and Brough in Love in a Village (interpolating ‘Lo, here the gentle lark’) in which she ‘drew down the most rapturous applause’ and Cinderella (with ‘Una voce poco fa’, ‘Savourn Deelish’ and ‘Black-Eyed Susan’), and performed at Lanza’s Benefit (6 May, ‘The Smile of Love’ her own ‘True love never dies’) before her engagement ended.
The London critics, however, passed on this Irish phenomenon, and forebore to notice yet another performance of Arne’s elderly opera, so – in spite of a well-noticed performance at Henry Cooper’s concert at Richmond (26 October 1833 ‘A Miss Healy pupil of Signor Lanza was very great, both in power and execution’), and at Oxford in December – and appearances at Mr Vaughan’s concert at the Hanover Square Rooms (29 April 1834) where she was now billed as ‘a pupil of Mr Phillips’ with whom she gave a scene from Tyrannic Love, and J B Sale’s concert giving the Frost Scene from King Arthur (8 May), Miss Healy’s metropolitan debut went apparently unremarked, and she was given print respite until the production of Nourjahad.
So, who was Miss Fanny Healy? The evidence is not great. I have managed simply to discover that her real name was Eliza Payne, that she was born in the East End of London, and that her parents were William Payne and his wife Eliza, née Woods. But that is it. Just names. The Irish advertisements tell us she had drawn her musical knowledge and education from Lanza, with whom I spot her concertising at the Hanover Square Rooms (10 September 1831), in Portsea (22 January) and Oxford in 1833 (‘Miss Healy will introduce ‘The soldier tired’, accompanied on the trumpet by the Infant Prodigy Master Phillips’) and whose continued connection with Dublin was probably the reason for the circumstances of her first debut. And that first debut had been impressive enough to win her a major role at an important London theatre whilst still in her teens. With the buzz flying.
Nourjahad was lavishly staged by its author-producer, and Loder’s music proved to be agreeable and tuneful if not earth-shaking. Phillips and Wilson had good numbers, and Miss Romer had two, Fanny’s first solo was good enough to win her an encore, and she took the top line with the two men in the show’s hit, the trio ‘Soft is the murmur of the summer breeze’.
The Times reported ‘Mandane, the principal female part, was filled by Miss Healey, a new singer, who promises to be an acquisition to the company. She is young, of an agreeable person, and has a very sweet voice, which will probably become still more powerful. We have seen her play the other Mandane in Artaxerxes, although we had not an opportunity of noticing it. That performance was a very respectable one; but there is all the difference in the world between Dr Arne’s music and Mr Loder’s and it is much more pleasant to praise the young lady in Nourjahad’s Mandane than to criticise her in the more arduous part which she had previously undertaken.’
It was a good enough beginning, if not a great one, but for all that Miss Healy was the jeune premiere of the piece, Miss Romer seemed to have as good or better opportunities. But Miss Romer’s turn was coming. The second production at the English Opera House was Barnett’s new The Mountain Sylph, leading lady Miss Romer, second lady Miss Somerville, and the memorable success of The Mountain Sylph quite eclipsed Nourjahad. Fanny had got the wrong show.
Both ladies took part in Arnold’s next piece, a drama (with songs) entitled The Widow Queen. Mrs Waylett played the Queen of France, Emma Romer was a boy, and Fanny was again jeune premiere. The Times was not wholly happy: ‘[she] took part in a duet with Mrs Waylett and sang a solo in excellent taste. We wish when she speaks that she would ‘aggravate her voice’ a little. She mince her words so finely that we could not collect a single sentence uttered by her.’
After a season at the Theatre Royal, Bath, where amongst others she appeared as Fairy Queen to Mrs Woods’s Cinderella, Fanny Healy returned to the English Opera House for the season of 1835. In April she appeared as Lady Anna in The Shadow on the Wall, she played some performance of Nourjahad, and in September she created leading roles in two new musical-dramatic pieces: No Plot Without Danger (Silvia) and The Dice of Death (Louisa). The roles gave her little chance, but she did not come out as a star.
‘Miss Fanny Healy who was to have done wonders which have not been realised, sustained the character of Silvia. She sang prettily but feebly. She is a pleasing singer and, as an actress, would be infinitely better if she would deign to let the audience know what she is trying or meaning to say.’
However, if the Times critic was underwhelmed by Miss Healy, managers seemed to like her. From the English Opera House, before even the season had finished, Fanny Healy emigrated post haste to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to play Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera (6 October) and the heroine, Edith Bellenden, in yet another operatic drama (a strange choice if she really could not speak!) entitled Cavaliers and Roundheads. The musical part of this one was mostly Scottish songs, but Phillips and Seguin got ‘Suoni la tromba’ in, and Fanny was also given a piece of I Puritani: ‘Son vergin versoza’. ‘The [aria] was too much for Miss Healy who has a great deal to do and learn before she can venture on such efforts. In another song, to the air of ‘The Blue Bonnets are over the border’, her voice seemed suddenly to fail her…’ the Times gentleman tutted.
But Mr Bunn was seemingly not unhappy with his vocalist. As proof, he next cast her in the first English opera by an Irish composer by name Michael William Balfe. The opera was The Siege of Rochelle, and at last Fanny Healy was in a hit. The merits of The Siege of Rochelle are discutable, but whatever they were and are, the show caught on and it had a fine run at Drury Lane. From Fanny Healy’s point of view, however, there was just one problem: she was not the leading lady. Jane Shirreff was cast as Clara, the fugitive presumed child-killer, hiding out at the farm of Michel (Phillips). Fanny played Marcella, wife to Michel. She had a duet with her husband and ‘a slight ballad in the second act’, which even the Times admitted that she sang ‘very agreeably’, although the Morning Postsnubbed merely ‘Miss Fanny Healy in Marcella exhibited signs of animation of which we are sure she was never accused before’. She also took part in a quartet ‘Lo the early beam of morning’ and therein, it is said, lurked a problem.
Now, one should not always believe what one reads in the papers, but this is what was reported. Balfe composed the quartet with four vocal lines, and the top line was given to Clara. Fanny, or someone on her behalf, objected to her ‘singing second to Miss Shirreff’ and in the end both women took the top line. When a critic became curious over such an unusual arrangement and made inquiries, the story came out, and the said critic (who had earlier spoken of Fanny as ‘a good voice’ and ‘the most perfect shake I ever heard’) laid into her for vanity.
‘Someone on her behalf’? Well, on the day following her first Drury Lane Beggar’s Opera, Eliza Frances Payne had visited St James’s Church, Westminster, and come out as a 20-year old bride: Mrs George Grosvenor. Mr Grosvenor was a clerk in the bill department of the Bank of England, an employment he would keep for more than twenty years. The other thing he would do for twenty years, was keep his wife almost permanently pregnant.
I may be guessing, but it seems odd that Fanny, who had been pretty patently second to Emma Romer at the English Opera, should suddenly object to singing second to the equally well qualified Jane Shirreff. Could a little husbandly indignation have fuelled this curious contretemps?
Anyway, when the Lane’s next production, a vast spectacular of Auber’s The Bronze Horse, went on (5 January 1836), Miss Shirreff played the Princess and Fanny Healy was her maid! And when Zampa was mounted, Emma Romer played opposite Henry Phillips as the heroine. So pecking order was thoroughly established. Fanny may have started out with potential primadonnadom promised, but it hadn’t happened and now it wouldn’t.
Although she got to share the soprano music with Mme Stockhausen and Miss Shirreff, when Drury Lane hosted a performance of The Creation, her lot in Balfe’s next opera The Maid of Artois was the supporting part of Coralie, alongside the Isoline of Maria Malibran and later Mrs Wood. When The Mountain Sylph was played, she sang Jessie to Romer’s Aeolia. When Barnett’s The Fair Rosamund was premiered she sang the Lady Blanche to Miss Romer’s Rosamond and the Queen of Abbie Betts. And in the performances of The Siege of Rochelle, it was Miss Forde who played Marcella.
She had a moment in the limelight, when she sang Aeolia alongside Frazer and Stretton in a Benefit performance of The Mountain Sylph at the English Opera House (21 November 1837), but back at the Lane it was back to seconds, in spite of a curious casting as Carlos in a revival of The Duenna.
On 11 March 1838 the first English production of The Magic Flute took place. It seems to have been less than properly prepared and spent most of its time being played as a second item, but the cast was a regular Lane one. Miss Romer as Pamina, Templeton as Tamino, Phillips as Sarastro, Anne Seguin as the Queen, Giubilei as Monastatos, Balfe as Papageno. And Fanny Healy as first lady, teamed with Miss Forde and Mrs Mapleson. Their opening trio on opening night was, alas, a disaster: ‘so badly sung as to be unendurable’.
On 17 May 1838 another new Balfe opera, Diadeste, was produced, and once again Fanny Healy was in the cast. Miss Romer was, of course, leading lady, but Fanny had a sufficient role as the Countess Amalfi. It would, however, be her last.
Mr Grosvenor had already served her with Arthur Harry Grosvenor (1837-1897), and, on 21 August 1838, Georgiana Grosvenor was born. William (1840), Eliza (1842), Hugh (1844-1906), Robert (1846), Thomas (1849), Mary Ann (1851-1877), Mark (1853-1929) and Margaret Jane (1857-1871) – and those are just the ones who lived – would follow. And Mrs Fanny Grosvenor became an ex-singer.
Hers had been a strange and, perhaps, disappointing career. She had been good enough to repeatedly win the confidence of Balfe, of Bunn and of Arnold, if apparently not enough to win the whole-hearted approval of the critics. And Edward Fitzball, the librettist of The Siege of Rochelle spoke of her warmly in his memoirs, referring to her as ‘of Siege of Rochelle fame’.
One other important person also gave her his confidence: Henry Phillips. They had duetted together in opera, they had sung together in concert. And, twenty years on, when Fanny had produced her last child, and was purveying occasional entertainments in the provinces, they were still close enough friends for him to persuade her to come out of her virtual retirement and take once more to the stage and the platform, at his side.
In Passion Week of 1858, the Surrey Theatre billed Mr Henry Phillips and Mrs E F Grosvenor in a new entertainment Musical Reminiscences. Henry sang his old hits and Fanny supported. Then, on Easter Monday, they came out in a little burletta, The Farmer of Lyons, followed by a Fitzball piece, Auld Robin Gray in which he played Robin and she Jenny. And then the pair of them set out on tour, carrying another entertainment A Voyage through Life. It couldn’t last, of course. Mrs Grosvenor had perforce to go home to Mr Grosvenor and the children.
But Mr Grosvenor and the children had soon to learn to be without her. ‘Fanny Healy’ died in 1862 at the age of 47. George (d London September 1874) swiftly remarried, to the widowed Hannah Stevenson of Dunstable, and the children carried on the family traditions. Most of the boys went into banks or insurance offices. And the girls, well they didn’t sing as far as I know, but they produced many, many children to, in their turn, carry on the family.
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