Myer Lyon

Myer Lyon was appointed meshorrer (choirboy) to Isaac Polack, hazzan at the Great Synagogue, London, in 1767 'at a salary of £40 per annum, on the understanding that he was to behave as a Yehudi Kasher (i.e. an observant Jew)'.

[4] The fact that the synagogue was only too happy to dock Leoni's pay by £8 a year in 1772, due to its financial problems, also argues against the congregation's supposed dedication to its cantor.

[1] It is therefore rather more likely that, wherever he was born, he lived in London from an early age and was talent-spotted, perhaps by Polack, in the synagogue (much as Leoni was later to train his own nephew, John Braham).

Between 1770 and 1782 he appeared quite frequently on the stage in London, where he scored great successes in Thomas Arne's Artaxerxes (1775) and, in the same year, as Carlos in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Duenna at the Covent Garden Theatre.

His reputation encouraged a number of Gentiles, including in 1770 the Methodist Thomas Olivers, to come to the Great Synagogue on Friday nights to hear him.

In the standard Church of England hymnal, Hymns Ancient and Modern, the tune of The God of Abraham Praise is still titled Leoni, after its source.

[8]Eventually in 1783 Leoni's success and his limited remuneration at the synagogue led him to change his career and chance his arm as an opera promoter as well as a performer.

Leoni's 1783 season, undertaken jointly with the composer Giordani, proved, however, to be an utter disaster, and some newspaper reviews remarked on the fading of his voice, although he can only have been in his mid-thirties at the most.