Auguste van Biene

Van Biene was discovered by Sir Michael Costa, who hired him to play the cello in his Covent Garden orchestra in November 1867, eventually promoting him to principal cellist.

[3] Van Biene found life as a young musician difficult, and he lived for several months in poverty, busking on street corners to pay for rent and food.

[1] He never forgot the help Costa had given him, and for the rest of his life he marked the anniversary of their first meeting by playing in the streets of London's West End, raising money for performers' charities.

In 1878 he succeeded Hamilton Clarke as musical director for Richard D'Oyly Carte's Comedy Opera Company in touring productions of The Sorcerer and H.M.S.

[3] Among his successes as manager were provincial tours of English adaptations of light operas, such as Farnie and Chassaigne's Falka, and Victorian burlesques, such as Lutz, Sims and Pettitt's Faust up to Date and Carmen up to Data.

[10] In 1892 van Biene commissioned and composed incidental music for a three-act play called The Broken Melody by Herbert Keen and James T.

"[9] The show was a huge success, and the tune at the core of the work (also called "The Broken Melody") was a particular hit; van Biene claimed to have performed the number in excess of 6,000 times over his career.

A critic for the Hull Daily Mail wrote that the composer "throws his whole soul into the cello, and makes it speak with sweetness, plaintiveness, passion, and excess of sensitive humanity.

[9] Van Biene was buried in Golders Green Jewish cemetery in London,[3][17] where among the mourners was the cellist and editor W. H. Squire.

Van Biene's only other known recording of his own music is his arrangement of the Jewish prayer Kol Nidre, made in about 1908, with an unidentified pianist.