Berthold Tours

Berthold Tours (Rotterdam, Dec 17, 1838 – London, Mar 11, 1897) was a Dutch-born English violinist, composer and music editor.

His first music teacher was his father, Barthelemy Tours (1797-1864), who was organist of the Groote or St Laurens Kerk in Rotterdam for thirty years, a conductor, and a violinist of European wide reputation, while he studied composition with Johannes Verhulst.

[1] In Leipzig, Tours received an invitation from Prince George Galitzin, a fellow student, to go to Russia as second violinist in a string quartet that would be engaged by the tsar.

The works he edited included Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris and Orpheus by Gluck; L'Étoile du nord by Meyerbeer; Il seraglio and Zauberflöte by Mozart; Guillaume Tell by Rossini; Der Fliegender Holländer and Lohengrin by Wagner; Euryanthe by Weber;[2] Mendelssohn's Elijah; Gounod's Mors et Vita and Redemption,[3] numerous piano albums, and many others.

His son and pupil Frank Tours (1877-1963) became a noted theatrical conductor, composer, and arranger in London and New York, and eventually became a studio musical director in Hollywood; he did most of the orchestrations for Irving Berlin's score for The Cocoanuts (1925) starring the Marx Brothers, and was musical director for the 1929 screen version of the play.