Victor Herbert
Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I.
[9] Herbert and his mother lived with his maternal grandfather, the Irish novelist, playwright, poet and composer, Samuel Lover, from 1862 to 1866 in Sevenoaks, Kent, England.
On October 24, 1886, they moved to the United States, as they both had been hired by Walter Damrosch and Anton Seidl to join the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
[13] During the voyage to America, Herbert and his wife became friends with their fellow passenger and future conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Anton Seidl, and other singers joining the Met.
The next season, she repeated the role of Elsa but then left the Met and then sang with the German-language Thalia Theatre, again earning good reviews.
[18] The same year, he founded the New York String Quartet together with violinists Sam Franko and Henry Boewig, and violist Ludwig Schenck.
The group presented their concerts to wealthy patrons at fashionable private parties and at mostly smaller venues to local audiences, educating them about opera, art songs and contemporary music.
[18] Seidl brought Herbert, Förster, Bendix, Juchs, Ohe and Lilli Lehmann, together with a large orchestra and 500-voice chorus, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in May 1889 as part of a big music festival to celebrate the new Exposition Building.
He conducted their programs of light orchestral music paired with more serious repertoire (as he had done earlier with Anton Seidl's Brighton Beach orchestra concerts) at summer resorts and on tours for most of his remaining years.
The piece was well received, and Herbert soon composed three more operettas for Broadway, The Wizard of the Nile (1895), The Serenade (1897), which enjoyed international success, and The Fortune Teller (1898), starring Alice Nielsen.
He searched for several years for a libretto that appealed to him, finally finding one by Joseph D. Redding called Natoma that concerned a historical story set in California.
He composed the work from 1909 to 1910, and it premiered in Philadelphia on February 25, 1911, with soprano Mary Garden in the title role and the young Irish tenor John McCormack in his American operatic debut.
[16] In late 1916 Herbert also orchestrated "Soldiers of Erin",[30] an English language version of what would later be adopted as the Irish national anthem; it was widely performed in the US from early 1917.
[2] By World War I, with the birth of jazz, ragtime and new dance styles like the foxtrot and tango, Herbert reluctantly switched to writing musical comedies.
These featured less elaborate ensembles and simpler songs for less classically trained singers than the European-style operettas that had dominated his earlier career.
Herbert, during the last years of his career, was frequently asked to compose ballet music for the elaborate production numbers in Broadway revues and the shows of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, among others.
[34] A healthy man throughout his life, Herbert died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 65 on May 26, 1924, shortly after his final show, The Dream Girl, began its pre-Broadway run in New Haven, Connecticut.
[39] During World War II the Liberty ship SS Victor Herbert was built in Panama City, Florida, and named in his honor.
[48] Other shows that were popular include It Happened in Nordland (1904),[49][50] Miss Dolly Dollars (1905), Dream City (1906),[51][52] The Magic Knight (1906), Little Nemo (1908),[53] The Lady of the Slipper (1912),[54][55] The Princess Pat (1915) and My Golden Girl (1920).
[56] In addition to composing about 55 full scores for stage works, Herbert produced a considerable body of musical numbers for variety shows such as the Ziegfeld Follies and the sophisticated private entertainments for the Lambs theatrical club.
As Broadway increasingly became essential to commercial theatrical success, Herbert designed his shows to appeal specifically to New York sensibilities.
[61] American musical theatre composers of the late nineteenth century tended to imitate either Viennese operetta or the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Pinafore and The Mikado, and adaptations of Karl Millöcker's operettas, such as Der Bettelstudent, or Franz von Suppé's Boccaccio, all of which became popular in America.
"The Song of the Poet" from Babes in Toyland provides variations on the lullaby "Rock-a-bye Baby" by presenting it first as a brassy march, then in Neapolitan style, and finally as a cakewalk.
The Singing Girl, co-written by Smith and Stanislaus Stange, recalls The Mikado, and includes the plot element of a law against kissing without a licence.
Hammerstein announced, in the April 13, 1907 issue of Musical America, a $1,000 prize for the best libretto submitted, fueling public enthusiasm and high expectations.
[16][75] Madeleine, his only other opera, is based on a French play and tells the equable little story of an operatic prima donna whose friends and acquaintances, one by one, decline her invitation to dine with her on New Years Day.
[16] After Herbert's death, little of his instrumental music continued to be performed, but within the last couple of decades it has begun to enjoy revivals in concert and recordings.
[16][76] The concerto has been recorded by cellists such as Yo-Yo Ma (with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic), Lynn Harrell (with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields), Julian Lloyd Webber (with Sir Charles Mackerras and the London Symphony Orchestra),[1][77] and an early rare recording by Bernard Greenhouse (with Max Schönherr and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra).
[16] On February 12, 1924, Herbert was one of the featured composers at New York's Aeolian Hall, in an evening entitled An Experiment in Modern Music that included the world premiere of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue by the Paul Whiteman orchestra.
