SCOTT-FENNELL, Elizabeth [née FENNELL] (b Ireland c1840; d 19 Herbert Street, Dublin 31 August 1911)
Elizabeth Fennell grew up, and I assume was born, in Dublin. Booterstown, it seems. The names and quality of her parents is somewhat unsure, but they seem to have been by name John and Elizabeth, and father appears to have been a butcher and a farmer. Or a victualler. She had a number of siblings some rather younger than she – Annie (Mrs Thomas Patrick Gill d Deansgate 3 October 1926), Agnes (Mrs Peter Alfred Lawlor), probably Theresa, Kate (Mrs Thomas Furlong) and maybe John and Ellen (Mrs Thomas Dunphy) and Thomas. Some of them seem to have inhabited number 92 Lower Baggot Street, an address which in modern times has become connected rather with murder rather than music.
Elizabeth attended the Irish Academy of Music, and I spot her first performing, as a student in 1861 ('I Know That My Redeemer Liveth'), 1862 ('her voice is a pure soprano' alongside sister Kate) and in 1863, at the Shane’s Castle Festival, and in church at a benefit for St Catherine’s Orphanage. Still as a soprano. A remembering one later wrote: ‘[she] had a wonderful voice as a girl, a soprano and contralto compass rolled into one. The gifted Irish vocalist was tall for her age, and very stately as a young debutante she looked in her white silk frock ...’
In 1864 I spot her singing with Julia Cruise, Richard W Smith, Edward Peele, and the tenor Topham in the Dublin concerts, duetting with Madame Rudersdorff, and 19 December she took part in the first performance of George W Torrance’s oratorio The Captivity. Over the years that followed, she appeared widely in Ireland, mainly with the other top Irish-based vocalists – Topham and Grattan Kelly in particular – and the occasional visitor such as Madame Lemmens Sherrington or Anna Hiles. Her repertoire at this stage was largely of the soprano bent: I see her singing ‘Should he Upbraid’, 'The beating of my own heart',‘The Captive Greek Girl’, ‘L’Ardita’, Costa’s ‘Morning Prayer’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair’, Abt's 'Oh! ye tears', ‘O vago fior’ but also ‘Nobil donna’ and ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, ‘Araby dear Araby’ and duets from La Favorita. She also featured Irish songs, including those by local composers such as Vincent Wallace, Joseph Robinson, W G Goodwin, Dr Stewart, Blanchard (‘Maura’), William E Hudson (‘Your Loss Will Break My Heart’) and John Dunne, whose cantata Myra she premiered in 1866 (21 May). Needless to say, the repertoire was largely bulked out by the popular ditties of the day – Molloy’s ‘White Daisy’, ‘Ruby’ by Virginia Gabriel, ‘The Children’s Kingdom’ et al.
She ventured to Britain in January 1870, for the Glasgow Saturday Evening Concerts, and was quite eclipsed, along with the other singers, by the top-billed curiosity: Mr Home the spiritualist, making an essay as a reciter. But later in the year (27 May) she visited London and appeared at Ambrose Austin’s concert at St James’s Hall along with Titiens, Sainton-Dolby, Edith Wynne, Graziani, Sims Reeves et al. She gave ‘Savourneen Deelish’ to great applause: ‘a mezzo-soprano voice of great power and beauty, equal in tone, extensive in range and with a fulness in the lower tomes similar to the quality of a contralto and with an equal force and sweetness in the higher notes. In her first song she displayed a compass of two octaves …’
She advertised for engagements (‘the new contralto from Dublin’) but few were forthcoming and her best opportunity came in a performance of Mrs Joseph Robinson’s cantata God is Love at the Hanover Square Rooms (29 June 1870).
In October she again visited Glasgow to sing the contralto role to Blanche Cole’s soprano and Sims Reeves’s tenor in Samson and in January 1872 she was engaged for the Boosey Ballad series at London’s St James’s Hall. London more or less forgot they’d heard her before, and enthused, all over again, over her ‘good voice and intelligence’ and her ‘real talent for singing Irish melodies’. She sang as many English ballads as Irish ones, and found equal success with Virginia Gabriel’s ‘Nightfall at Sea’ and ‘O Willie Boy’, Blumenthal’s ‘The days that are no more’, Louisa Gray’s ‘Then and Now’ or ‘Love’s Young Dream’ as with Wallace’s ‘Why do I weep for thee’, ‘The Harp that once thru Tara’s Halls’ or ‘Escadil Mavourneen shaun’.
She sang her Rinaldo aria at the Monday pops, and at private functions and she also got married (8 August 1872). Her husband was Mr John Scott (d 92 Lower Baggot Street 17 September 1881) and henceforth she was ‘Mrs Scott-Fennell’. In the nine years of their marriage she gave birth to five children, as she continued her career in music, performing and teaching again, largely in Ireland, but with visits to Scotland and to Liverpool and in 1878 to London, where she appeared on Irish Night at the Covent Garden Proms (‘I wish I were on yonder hill’, ‘When the tide comes in’).
Mrs Scott-Fennell became a stalwart of the Irish music scene, teaching at the Royal Irish Academy, and staging her annual concert (1890 was the 18th). In the 1890s, she performed less. She had made one last professional visit to London in 1887 for the Saturday Evening concerts at St James’s Hall. But ‘Mrs Scott-Fennell’s Concert’ continued to the 20th century.
At sometime after the 1901 census, she and her remaining family moved out of the house in Lower Baggot Street which they had occupied so long. Finally, Elizabeth moved in with her youngest sister, Annie, at whose home she died in 1911.
Her elder daughter, Ethel Lillis Scott (b Baggot Street, 3 March 1874) married the vocalist Edward Gordon Cleather.
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