Fritz Hart

Fritz Bennicke Hart (11 February 1874 – 9 July 1949) was an English composer, conductor, teacher and unpublished novelist, who spent considerable periods in Australia and Hawaii.

A year later Marshall-Hall sent instruction that the Conservatorium was to be closed down, and Scharf found employment with the University, but other staff refused to resign and appointed Hart director.

Their fears were well-founded, as the brilliant pianist Scharf was dismissed on account of his birthplace, and ended up in a camp for enemy aliens.

Nellie Melba established her school of singing there in 1915, and she and her pupils helped shape Hart's work as a composer.

In 1932 the Melbourne University Conservatorium Orchestra and the MSO amalgamated under the joint conductorship of Hart and Bernard Heinze.

[4] Hart was highly regarded as a teacher, his pupils including Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Margaret Sutherland, Hubert Clifford and Robert Hughes.

In 1937 he became permanent conductor of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra and first professor of music at the University of Hawaii, a position he retained until his retirement in 1942.

He was interested in the writers of the Celtic Twilight, and used librettos by W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Augusta Gregory, and George Russell (AE).

He wrote 514 songs, of which about half were composed in Melbourne and a quarter each in England and Hawaii; four large choral works, unaccompanied choruses, and part-songs.

Selected operas: Choral works: In his student days at the Royal College of Music, Hart wrote verse, some of which was set to music by Gustav Holst (the unpublished operas The Revoke (1895) and The Idea (1898); partsong Light leaves whisper (1896), and children's chorus Clouds o'er the summer sky (1898)).