Ben Davies (6 January 1858

1858 in Wales

This article is about the particular significance of the year 1858 to Wales and its people.-Incumbents:*Prince of Wales — The Prince Albert Edward, son of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom*Princess of Wales — vacant-Events:...

 – 28 March 1943

1943 in Wales

This article is about the particular significance of the year 1943 to Wales and its people.-Incumbents:*Prince of Wales - vacant*Princess of Wales - vacant*Archbishop of Wales - Charles Alfred Howell Green...

) was a Welsh

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

 tenor

Tenor

The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...

 singer, who appeared in opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 with the Carl Rosa Opera Company

Carl Rosa Opera Company

The Carl Rosa Opera Company was founded in 1873 by Carl August Nicholas Rosa, a German-born musical impresario, to present opera in English in London and the British provinces. The company survived Rosa's death in 1889, and continued to present opera in English on tour until 1960, when it was...

, in operetta

Operetta

Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...

 and light opera, and on the concert and oratorio

Oratorio

An oratorio is a large musical composition including an orchestra, a choir, and soloists. Like an opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias...

 platform. He was spoken of as a successor of Edward Lloyd

Edward Lloyd (tenor)

Edward Lloyd was a British tenor singer who excelled in concert and oratorio performance, and was recognised as a legitimate successor of John Sims Reeves as the foremost tenor exponent of that genre during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.- Early training in choral tradition :Edward...

, as a leading British tenor, and retained something of his style and repertoire in concert performance.

Training and operatic career, 1881-1891

Ben Davies was born in Pontardawe

Pontardawe

Pontardawe is a town of some 5,000 inhabitants in the Swansea Valley in south Wales...

, Wales. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music

Royal Academy of Music

The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...

 in London under Alberto Randegger

Alberto Randegger

Alberto Randegger was an Italian-born composer, conductor and singing teacher, best known for promoting opera and new works of British music in England during the Victorian era and for his widely-used textbook on singing technique.-Life and career:Randegger was born in Trieste, Italy, the son of...

 and Signor Fiori. He made his debut in 1881 in Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian Girl is an opera composed by Michael William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn. The plot is loosely based on a Cervantes tale, La Gitanilla.The opera was first produced in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on November 27, 1843...

, and in the following ten years devoted himself principally to the operatic stage. In 1883 he created the role of Gringoire in Arthur Goring Thomas

Arthur Goring Thomas

Arthur Goring Thomas was an English composer. He was the youngest son of Freeman Thomas and Amelia, daughter of Colonel Thomas Frederick.He was born at Ratton Park, Sussex, and educated at Haileybury College...

's Esmeralda, in the first Carl Rosa season at Drury Lane Theatre

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is a West End theatre in Covent Garden, in the City of Westminster, a borough of London. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The building standing today is the most recent in a line of four theatres at the same location dating back to 1663,...

: his future wife Clara Perry was in the cast as Fleur-de-lys. In that time he began to assume the mantle of Edward Lloyd

Edward Lloyd (tenor)

Edward Lloyd was a British tenor singer who excelled in concert and oratorio performance, and was recognised as a legitimate successor of John Sims Reeves as the foremost tenor exponent of that genre during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.- Early training in choral tradition :Edward...

, as the leading British operatic tenor.

In 1887 he played Geoffrey Wilder in Alfred Cellier

Alfred Cellier

Alfred Cellier was an English composer, orchestrator and conductor.In addition to conducting and music directing the original productions of several of the most famous Gilbert and Sullivan works and writing the overtures to some of them, Cellier conducted at many theatres in London, New York and...

's Dorothy

Dorothy (opera)

Dorothy is a comic opera in three acts with music by Alfred Cellier and a libretto by B. C. Stephenson. The story involves a rake who falls in love with his disguised fiancée.It was first produced at the Gaiety Theatre in London on in 1886...

, one of his most successful roles, in the re-casting opposite Marie Tempest

Marie Tempest

Dame Marie Tempest DBE was an English singer and actress known as the "queen of her profession".Tempest became the most famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere...

 ('Mr Davies also has a capital song, A Guinea here, a guinea there, which he sang with his eyes shut, but otherwise admirably.'); in 1889 he took the lead in the sequel, Doris

Doris (opera)

Doris is a "comedy opera" in three acts by Alfred Cellier, with a libretto by B. C. Stephenson. After the phenomenal success of Cellier and Stephenson's Dorothy , the pair were hoping for another big hit. Doris turned out to be only modestly successful.It opened at the Lyric Theatre in London on...

, and later that year he starred as Ralph Rodney in The Red Hussar

The Red Hussar

The Red Hussar is a comedy opera in three acts by Edward Solomon, with a libretto by Henry Pottinger Stephens, which opened at the Lyric Theatre in London on 23 November 1889, running for 175 performances. It was the revised version of an opera written several years earlier called The White Sergeant...

. He was chosen by Sir Arthur Sullivan

Arthur Sullivan

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer of Irish and Italian ancestry. He is best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado...

 to create the title role in the opera Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe (opera)

Ivanhoe is a romantic opera in three acts based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott, with music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and a libretto by Julian Sturgis. It premiered at the Royal English Opera House on 31 January 1891 for a consecutive run of 155 performances, unheard of for a grand opera...

in January 1891, at the opening of the Royal English Opera House (Palace Theatre

Palace Theatre, London

The Palace Theatre is a West End theatre in the City of Westminster in London. It is an imposing red-brick building that dominates the west side of Cambridge Circus and is located near the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road...

) - Shaw called him 'a robust and eupeptic Ivanhoe', who 'gets beaten because he is obviously some three stone over his proper fighting weight': and 'his obstreporous self-satisfaction put everybody into good humour.'

In November 1891 he created the tenor lead in the London production of André Messager

André Messager

André Charles Prosper Messager , was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique, had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international...

's La Basoche

La Basoche

La Basoche is an opéra comique in three acts of 1890, with music by André Messager and a French libretto by Albert Carré.-History:Messager's 1889 opérette Le mari de la reine at Bouffes-Parisiens was a disappointment, and the composer and his wife were struggling to afford even basic necessities...

(also at the Royal English Opera House), in which the basso David Bispham

David Bispham

David Scull Bispham was the first American–born operatic baritone to win an international reputation.- Early life and family:...

 made his stage debut, as Duc de Longueville. Shaw remarked,

Mr Ben Davies conquers, not without evidence of an occasional internal struggle, his propensity to bounce out of the stage picture and deliver his high notes over the footlights in the attitude of irrepressible appeal first discovered by the inventor of Jack-in-the-box. Being still sufficiently hearty, good-humored, and well-filled to totally dispel all the mists of imagination which arise from his medieval surroundings, he is emphatically himself, and not Clement Marot; but except in so far as his opportunities are spoiled in the concerted music by the fact that his part is a baritone part, and not a tenor one, he sings satisfactorily, and succeeds in persuading the audience that the Basoche king very likely was much the same pleasant sort of fellow as Ben Davies.

In 1892 Davies made his Covent Garden

Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...

 debut in Gounod's Faust

Faust (opera)

Faust is a drame lyrique in five acts by Charles Gounod to a French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré from Carré's play Faust et Marguerite, in turn loosely based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part 1...

. (His 'Salve, dimora casta e pura' from that opera was recorded.) In 1893 he appeared in Frederick Cowen's Signa there, sung in Italian, with Mme de Nuovina and the baritone Mario Ancona

Mario Ancona

Mario Ancona , was a leading Italian baritone and master of bel canto singing. He appeared at some of the most important opera houses in Europe and America during what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Opera".-Career:Ancona was born into a middle-class Jewish family at Livorno, Tuscany,...

, under Cowen's baton. 'Mr Ben Davies made almost the only hit of the opera by his singing of a song in the first act, which was the most effective number in the work as it stood; but his success would have been greater if a somewhat smarter physical training had made him less obviously a popular and liberally fed London concert singer.'

Concert recital

Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

 was thoroughly impressed by Ben Davies in a performance of Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...

's Elijah

Elijah (oratorio)

Elijah, in German: Elias, is an oratorio written by Felix Mendelssohn in 1846 for the Birmingham Festival. It depicts various events in the life of the Biblical prophet Elijah, taken from the books 1 Kings and 2 Kings in the Old Testament....

under Joseph Barnby

Joseph Barnby

Sir Joseph Barnby , English musical composer and conductor, son of Thomas Barnby, an organist, was born at York. He was a chorister at York Minster from the age of seven, was educated at the Royal Academy of Music under Cipriani Potter and Charles Lucas, and was appointed in 1862 organist of St...

 at the Albert Hall

Albert Hall

Albert P. Hall is an American actor.Born in Brighton, Alabama, Hall graduated from the Columbia University School of the Arts in 1971. That same year he appeared Off-Broadway in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and on Broadway in the Melvin Van Peebles musical Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death...

 in May 1892. In June 1893, sharing that platform with Adelina Patti

Adelina Patti

Adelina Patti was a highly acclaimed 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851 and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914...

 and Charles Santley

Charles Santley

Sir Charles Santley was an English-born opera and oratorio star with a bravuraFrom the Italian verb bravare, to show off. A florid, ostentatious style or a passage of music requiring technical skill technique who became the most eminent English baritone and male concert singer of the Victorian era...

, he was distinguished in Handel

HANDEL

HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....

's Deeper and deeper still - Waft her, angels (Jephtha), and in a monster performance of Sullivan's The Golden Legend at the Crystal Palace, with Mme Albani, George Henschel

George Henschel

Sir George Henschel , was a British baritone, pianist, conductor, and composer of German birth....

 and others.

After 1893, in which year he also appeared with Edward Lloyd at the Norwich

Norwich

Norwich is a city in England. It is the regional administrative centre and county town of Norfolk. During the 11th century, Norwich was the largest city in England after London, and one of the most important places in the kingdom...

 Festival, Davies's career moved largely to the concert platform. In that year he performed at the Chicago World's Fair

World's Columbian Exposition

The World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St...

. In the voyage concert of the Atlantic crossing his piano accompanist was a 14-year-old passenger, Thomas Beecham

Thomas Beecham

Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet CH was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras...

, travelling with his father, who later wrote: 'His was a voice of uncommon beauty, round, full, and expressive, less inherently tenor than baritone, and, like all organs of this mixed genre, thinning out perceptibly on top. Later on, the upper notes disappeared entirely, but the middle register preserved to the end... most of its former opulence and charm.' Davies soon became very popular in the United States, where he toured regularly.

In 1894 he was a soloist at the London Handel Festival alongside Mme Albani, Mme Melba

Nellie Melba

Dame Nellie Melba GBE , born Helen "Nellie" Porter Mitchell, was an Australian operatic soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian Era and the early 20th century...

, Edward Lloyd and Charles Santley: 'Mr Ben Davies, when remorselessly compelled in Waft her, angels, to walk his voice slowly up from A to A so deliberately as to allow every step to be scrutinized, had to confess to a marked "break" on F sharp, or thereabouts.' In July 1896 he took part in the first performance of Liza Lehmann

Liza Lehmann

Liza Lehmann was an English operatic soprano and composer, known for her vocal compositions.-Biography:She was born Elisabetha Nina Mary Frederica Lehmann in London. Her father was the German painter Rudolf Lehmann and her mother was Amelia Chambers, a music teacher, composer and arranger...

's In a Persian Garden, with Mme Albani, Hilda Wilson and David Bispham, the composer accompanying. In the second series of Promenade Concerts, 1896, he made an appearance in a concert of nationalist flavour with the soprano Fanny Moody and organist Walter Hedgecock, and a choir of 400 boys. In 1897, at the sixth concert of the Royal Philharmonic Society

Royal Philharmonic Society

The Royal Philharmonic Society is a British music society, formed in 1813. It was originally formed in London to promote performances of instrumental music there. Many distinguished composers and performers have taken part in its concerts...

 (dedicated to 'Her Majesty's Record Reign'), he sang Frederick Cowen's Scena The Dream of Endymion under the composer's baton. He was with David Bispham at the thirteenth biennial Festival at Cincinnati (under Theodore Thomas), in 1898.

A grand occasion of 1902 was the British and American Festival Peace Concert at The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in...

, London, in commemoration of the South African War, at which Ben Davies was among the British soloists led by Mme Albani, including Clara Butt

Clara Butt

Dame Clara Ellen Butt DBE , sometimes called Clara Butt-Rumford after her marriage, was an English contralto with a remarkably imposing voice and a surprisingly agile singing technique. Her main career was as a recitalist and concert singer.-Early life and career:Clara Butt was born in Southwick,...

 and Charles Santley

Charles Santley

Sir Charles Santley was an English-born opera and oratorio star with a bravuraFrom the Italian verb bravare, to show off. A florid, ostentatious style or a passage of music requiring technical skill technique who became the most eminent English baritone and male concert singer of the Victorian era...

, and (for America) Bispham, Ella Russell and Belle Cole

Belle Cole

Belle Cole was a well-known American contralto.She first achieved success while on a transcontinental tour of the United States with Theodore Thomas in 1883. She later sang in England, performing at The Crystal Palace and many other venues. In 1901, she toured Australia. It is said that musical...

. He and Ella Russell, with Ada Crossley

Ada Crossley

Ada Jemima Crossley was an Australian singer.Crossley was a daughter of E. Wallis Crossley, a farmer. She was born at Tarraville, Gippsland, Victoria...

 and David Ffrangcon-Davies, that year opened the Sheffield

Sheffield

Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...

 Festival (under Henry J. Wood) with a performance of Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...

's Elijah

Elijah (oratorio)

Elijah, in German: Elias, is an oratorio written by Felix Mendelssohn in 1846 for the Birmingham Festival. It depicts various events in the life of the Biblical prophet Elijah, taken from the books 1 Kings and 2 Kings in the Old Testament....

.

Nearly a decade later, he was among the soloists (with Agnes Nicholls

Agnes Nicholls

Agnes Nicholls was one of the greatest English sopranos of the 20th century, both in the concert hall and on the operatic stage....

, Ellen Beck, Edna Thornton, Thorpe Davies and Robert Radford

Robert Radford

Robert Radford was a British bass singer who made his career entirely in the United Kingdom, participating in concerts and becoming one of the foremost performers of oratorios and other sacred music...

) in J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor at the Queen's Hall

Queen's Hall

The Queen's Hall was a concert hall in Langham Place, London, opened in 1893. Designed by the architect T.E. Knightley, it had room for an audience of about 2,500 people. It became London's principal concert venue. From 1895 until 1941, it was the home of the promenade concerts founded by Robert...

, in the penultimate concert of the 1911 London Music Festival.: in May 1912 he was, with Cicely Gleeson-White, Ada Crossley and Herbert Brown, in the soloist group with the London Choral Society

London Chorus

The London Chorus is an amateur choir, under the musical direction of Ronald Corp. It was founded in 1903 by Arthur Fagge as The London Choral Society. Its first concert was a performance of Sullivan's The Golden Legend in October 1903...

 to sing Beethoven's Choral Symphony for the Royal Philharmonic under the baton of Arthur Nikisch

Arthur Nikisch

Arthur Nikisch ; 12 October 185523 January 1922) was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London and - most importantly - Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt...

. In 1916 he sang an aria from Der Freischütz

Der Freischütz

Der Freischütz is an opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber with a libretto by Friedrich Kind. It premiered on 18 June 1821 at the Schauspielhaus Berlin...

under Beecham

Thomas Beecham

Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet CH was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras...

 for the Royal Philharmonic, and he sang in the July 1922 Centenary celebration concerts for the Royal Academy of Music - again in the Queen's Hall.

Recordings

The earliest recordings by Davies are Pathé brown wax cylinders from the mid-1890s http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?query=Ben+Davies&queryType=@attr+1%3D1. Davies had an early start among British singers in making gramophone records, beginning in 1901. Joe Batten noted:

Sir Landon Ronald persuaded [him] to make his first records. He had laughed at the idea of singing into a tin trumpet, but when the test record of Henry Bishop's My Pretty Jane was played back to him, he was inexpressibly delighted.

The 1901 session (Gramophone and Typewriter Company 2-2500/2-2504 Black 'Concert' label) resulted in five titles, including also Schubert's Serenade (Leise flehen), Frederic Clay

Frederic Clay

Frederic Emes Clay was an English composer known principally for his music written for the stage. Clay, a great friend of Arthur Sullivan's, wrote four comic operas with W. S...

's I'll sing thee songs of Araby, Michael Balfe's When other lips and Charles Dibdin

Charles Dibdin

Charles Dibdin was a British musician, dramatist, novelist, actor and songwriter. The son of a parish clerk, he was born in Southampton on or before 4 March 1745, and was the youngest of a family of 18....

's Tom Bowling.

In June 1903 he headed-up the first 12" male solo catalogue list (Black Label 'Monarch') with record 02000 (Charles Dibdin

Charles Dibdin

Charles Dibdin was a British musician, dramatist, novelist, actor and songwriter. The son of a parish clerk, he was born in Southampton on or before 4 March 1745, and was the youngest of a family of 18....

's Tom Bowling

Tom Bowling

Tom Bowling can be:*A character in the novel The Adventures of Roderick Random*An 18th century song by Charles Dibdin.*The fourth movement of the Fantasia on British Sea Songs by Sir Henry Wood, which uses the melody of Dibdin's song....

), with 02003 (I'll sing thee songs of Araby) and 02004 (Gounod, Salve dimora) closely following. At the same time he made five more 10" records (2-2778/2-2783), Maude Valerie White

Maude Valerie White

Maude Valérie White was a French-born English composer who became one of the most successful songwriters of the Victorian period.-Early years:...

's To Mary, Blumenthal's An Evening Song, Yes! Let me like a soldier fall from Maritana

Maritana

Maritana is a grand opera in three acts composed by William Vincent Wallace, with a libretto by Edward Fitzball . The opera is based on the play Don César de Bazan by Adolphe d'Ennery and Philippe François Pinel Dumanoir , which was also the source material for Jules Massenet's opéra comique Don...

, So fare thee well from Cellier's Doris and Sullivan's The sailor's grave. He returned to the Gramophone Company (then HMV) in 1913-1914 to make 12" records of I'll sing thee songs of Araby (02477), Come into the garden, Maud (02482), To Mary (02514), Tosti's My Dreams and Adams's The Star of Bethlehem (02498). (The last two titles were later coupled on HMV D100). The earlier duplications were to make longer versions on 12" discs and the later ones to replace the earlier as the recording quality improved: by November 1914 all but the final four discs had been deleted from the catalogue.

On three two-sided 10" acoustic HMV records he later recorded Purcell

Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...

's 'I attempt from love's sickness to fly, and Schumann

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

's 'Frühlingsnacht' (in English) (E313); Brahms's Die Mainacht and Feldeinsamkeit (also in English) (E349); and two of the 'Elizabethan love songs' arranged by Keel, Go to bed, sweet muse, and When Laura smiles (E364).

For Pathé Records

Pathé Records

Pathé Records was a France-based international record label and producer of phonographs, active from the 1890s through the 1930s.- Early years :...

 ('hill-and-dale' recordings, like Edison Disc Records) he sang duets with Louise Kirkby Lunn

Louise Kirkby Lunn

Louise Kirkby Lunn was an English contralto. Sometimes classified as a mezzo-soprano, she was a leading English-born singer of the first two decades of the 20th century, earning praise for her performances in concert, oratorio and opera.-Training:Kirkby Lunn had her early vocal training in her...

, including Verdi's 'Ai nostri monti' (Il trovatore

Il trovatore

Il trovatore is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the play El Trovador by Antonio García Gutiérrez. Cammarano died in mid-1852 before completing the libretto...

) and The sailor sighs by Dibdin. Among his acoustic Columbia Records

Columbia Records

Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...

 are Tom Bowling, Come into the garden, Maud, I know of two bright eyes, and I'll sing thee songs of Araby. In 1932 he was persuaded by Joe Batten (a Brother Savage) to re-make a small group of his best-known earlier recordings (six) by the electric process, including To Mary, I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby, I Know of Two Bright Eyes and Come Into The Garden, Maud.

In later years he took singing pupils, and played golf a good deal. He was a member of the Savage Club

Savage Club

The Savage Club, founded in 1857 is a gentlemen's club in London.-History:Many and varied are the stories that have been told about the first meeting of the Savage Club, of the precise purposes for which it was formed, and of its christening...

in London.