Edwin Lemare
[2] He gained fame by playing two recitals a day, over a hundred in total, on the one-manual Brindley & Foster organ in the Inventions Exhibition in 1884.
[2] While organist at Sheffield Parish Church, he eloped with Marian Broomhead Colton-Fox because her father, a well-known lawyer, did not approve of him.
[7] Lemare left England for the United States where he married Charlotte Bauersmith, twenty years his junior, shortly after arriving in New York.
[8] After apparently treating church services in London as concerts, he left for a hundred-recital tour of the United States and Canada from 1900/01, and stayed in North America for most of the remainder of his life.
[2] As a player, he had a very large repertoire and was in constant demand; he was the most highly paid organist of his day, and earned previously unheard-of sums when he went to America.
It sold tens of thousands of copies, though he did not initially make any money out of it; when it was published in 1892 by Robert Cocks in London, he received a flat fee of three guineas.
Lemare did not call it Moonlight and Roses nor did he attach any words to the tune; it was American songwriters Ben Black and Charles N. Daniels (under the pseudonym Neil Moret) who added these words to the melody, without permission, in 1921: Moonlight and roses Bring wonderful mem'ries of you.
June light discloses Love's olden dreams sparkling anew, Moonlight and roses Bring mem'ries of you.
Lemare threatened legal action in 1925, resulting in his obtaining a share of the royalties; he finally profited from his popular tune.
While there was likely an element of pure showmanship to these transcriptions – which allowed Lemare to display his uncanny skill as a transcriber of major symphonic works, as well as his phenomenal technique – Lemare sincerely believed he was also performing a service in letting concert audiences in mid-sized American towns hear important orchestral works from Europe that would otherwise go unknown in locales with no resident symphony orchestra.
