William Furst

[2] By the 1880s, he was composing theatrical music for productions starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, William Faversham, Viola Allen and Mrs. Leslie Carter.

[4] In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Furst was the orchestra director at the Tivoli Theatre in San Francisco, California.

In 1893, he published "The Girl I Left Behind Me" and moved to New York City, becoming the music director at the now-demolished Empire Theater.

[4] In 1898, he composed another such piece for the Empire, A Normandy Wedding (an adaptation of the French Papa Gougon), which received an enthusiastic reception in New York at the Herald Square Theatre.

[7] By 1900, Furst also had fairly steady work as a composer/arranger of incidental music to accompany theatrical productions.

Two plays by Belasco which had Furst's musical accompaniments, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, were made into operas by Giacomo Puccini who attended their New York productions.