John Braham (tenor)

Braham was a meshorrer (descant singer) at the Great Synagogue, and here his abilities were noted by Lyon, who led a double life as an operatic tenor at the theatre at Covent Garden (under the name of Michaele Leoni).

Braham's first stage appearance was in fact at Leoni's Covent Garden 1787 benefit, when he sang Thomas Arne's The soldier tir’d of war’s alarms.

Rauzzini's other pupils included the celebrated Irish tenor Michael Kelly, creator of Don Basilio in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

Braham certainly benefited from Rauzzini's influence and promotion, and acquired from him the basic precepts of the old Italian school and a virtuoso technique which was thought by some to be surpassed only by the soprano Angelica Catalani.

"[4] At this point, despite the implications of the article, Braham had made no moves toward conversion, although he may well have attended church as required by social custom of the time.

Stephen Storace (1762–1796), the son of an Italian musician based in Dublin, was an accomplished composer; and his sister Anna, known as Nancy (1765–1817), formerly also a student of Rauzzini, a talented soprano.

The long triumphant phase of Braham's career was launched, which in its early years saw him and Nancy singing in every major continental house as well as in Britain, to audiences which included, in Paris (1797), Napoleon, in Livorno (1799), Nelson, and similar notables wherever else they appeared.

In 1809 he sang in Dublin at the unheard of fee of 2000 guineas for fifteen concerts, an indisputable sign both of his fame and popularity, and of the growth of music and entertainment as industries in this period.

Braham's physical appearance made it in any case difficult to disguise his origins, being short, stocky, swarthy and in general the epitome of a caricature Jew.

He would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition.Lamb had earlier attacked Braham rather more personally, and at some length, in the essay The Religion of Actors, not subsequently collected into the 'Elia' series.

[9] While the suit was pending, Braham had the unusual experience of being hissed at during a performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt (the very piece cited by Lamb in his 1821 essay), on which he stepped forward and addressed the audience: I am now before you in a public character.

Lamb clearly carried some baggage regarding Judaism which was not shared by (or at least not as evident in) most other writers of the time; on the three occasions he mentions Braham the latter's Jewish origin is always prominent.

Lamb's friend Leigh Hunt admittedly takes the opportunity for some snide comments in his memories of Braham from the retrospect of 1850, when from [the] wonderful remains of power in his old age we may judge what he must have been in his prime.

[…]He had wonderful execution as well as force, and his voice could also be very sweet, though it was too apt to betray something of the nasal tone which has been observed in Jews, and which is, perhaps […] a habit in which they have been brought up […] it might not be difficult to trace it to moral, and even to monied, causes; those, to wit, that induce people to retreat inwardly upon themselves; into a sense of their shrewdness and resources; and to clap their finger in self-congratulation upon the organ through which it pleases them occasionally to intimate as much to a bystander, not choosing to trust it wholly to the mouth.Other writers, such as Crabb Robinson or Mount Edgcumbe, mention Braham frequently without reference to his religion.

Robinson writes in 1811: His trills, shakes and quavers are, like those of all the other great singers, tiresome to me; but his pure melody, the simple song clearly articulated, is equal to anything I ever heard.

His song was acted as well as sung delightfully; I think Braham a fine actor while singing; he throws his soul into his throat, but his whole frame is animated, and his gestures and looks are equally impassioned.

Mount Edgcumbe, in his memoirs, discriminates Braham's styles more closely: All must acknowledge that his voice is of the finest quality […] he has great knowledge of music and can sing extremely well.

It is therefore the more to be regretted that he should ever do otherwise, that he should ever quit the normal register of his voice by raising it to an unpleasant falsetto […], that he should depart from a good style and correct taste […] to adopt at times the over-florid and frittered Italian manner; at others, to fall into the coarseness and vulgarity of the English.

The fact is, he can be two different singers according to the audience before whom he performs, and that to gain applause he condescends to sing as ill at the playhouse as he has done well at the opera.In 1826 a writer in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, in a letter entitled 'Foreign Instruction and English Judgement', states: We have no English male vocalist who is entitled to the character of impassioned but Braham […] I remember Braham before he went to Italy [i.e. before 1798].

He was bred in the Italian school, but though he sung with great feeling, he was young and exhibited more of what I would call instrumentation than mind before he went abroad.All this is further evidence that Braham's singing showed similar traces of 'otherness' to that of Leoni, whose use of falsetto was also characteristic, and that this relic of Braham's early training was amongst the factors enabling him to present a singing style clearly demarcated, for the cognoscenti, from both the prevalent Italian and home-grown English styles.

Leigh Hunt, writing in 1850, gives an ironic indication of Braham's eventual Anglicization, dropping many of his Jewish mannerisms: Byron would pleasantly pretend that Braham called 'enthusiasm' entoozy-moozy; and in the extraordinary combination of lightness, haste, indifference and fervour with which he would pitch out that single word from his lips, accompanied with a gesture to correspond, he would really set before you the admirable singer in one of his (then) characteristic passages of stage dialogue.

In 1840 he sang in Mendelssohn's Lobgesang (Second Symphony) at Birmingham under the composer's baton, and subsequently undertook a tour of America with his son Charles Braham.

Restoring, with Harcourt, Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill estate, which she had inherited from the Waldegraves, she became one of the leading society and political hostesses of her era.