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The Opera Quarterly 18.4 (2002) 484-502



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Balfe in Italy

Basil Walsh

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THE nineteenth-century Irish-born composer and singer Michael William Balfe (1808-1870), best remembered today as the composer of The Bohemian Girl, spent about eight years learning his craft in Italy. Balfe's experience and activities on the peninsula from around 1825 until his final move to London in the 1830s would no doubt have made for a fascinating book of memoirs, but he seems to have been too busy composing operas to find the time to pen his autobiography. Although he evidently kept diaries, none are known to be extant, though a few of his letters do survive in libraries and private collections.

Balfe's early years as a singer and composer in Italy surely played a significant part in molding his long career, yet up to now surprisingly little has been written about the time he spent there or its impact on him. Indeed, by the time the twenty-seven-year-old Balfe emerged as a successful writer of operas in London in the mid-1830s, he had already come in personal contact with composers such as Rossini, Bellini, Cherubini, and probably Donizetti, and sung in a number of their operas as well. Later he also had contact with Verdi. Over the years, he sang or established strong personal ties with several of the greatest singers of all time, including Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran, Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Mario, Antonio Tamburini, Pauline Viardot, Jenny Lind, Giorgio Ronconi, Domenico Donzelli, Henriette Sontag, and Luigi Lablache. Balfe's early years on the continent left him multilingual, fluent in French and Italian in addition to his native English.

Balfe wrote twenty-eight operas for London, Paris, Milan, and Trieste. Several of them were written to French and Italian librettos, while others were revised and translated into German for performances in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere. One of his operas, The Bohemian Girl, became so popular that it was translated into Swedish, Hungarian, and Croatian! 1 He also composed some 250 songs to poems by Longfellow, Tennyson, Moore, and various Italian poets. His other compositions include several cantatas, a symphony, and [End Page 484] vocal scenes and arias, some of which were interpolated into other composers' works.

In 1846 Benjamin Lumley, the manager of Her Majesty's Theatre in London, appointed Balfe musical director of the Italian Opera, a position he held until 1852. During that time he conducted several British premieres, including those of Verdi's Nabucco, Attila, and I dueFoscari. In 1847, when Verdi departed London for Paris after conducting superstars Lind and Lablache in the premiere of I masnadieri, it was Michael Balfe who took over the podium and completed the run.In general, London critics and a number of his peers considered Balfe an outstanding conductor and accompanist. 2

Two biographies of Balfe were published within a few years after his death. 3 Both tend to be highly anecdotal; as a result it is hard to separate fact from fiction, and dates are frequently unreliable. The first significant study of Balfe's music to appear in many years is that of George Biddlecombe. Originally a doctoral thesis, it focuses on nineteenth-century English opera in general, allocating about 10 percent of its contents to a discussion of Balfe; it provides little biographical information, however. 4

Balfe's reputation in America rests principally on the fame of his most enduring work, The Bohemian Girl, and in particular on the song "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls" (famously recorded by Joan Sutherland and lately given even wider exposure via CDs by pop artists Enya and Sarah Brightman). First performed in London in November 1843 and shortly thereafter mounted in Dublin, New York, Philadelphia, Madrid, Vienna, and elsewhere, Bohemian Girl nowadays receives an occasional hearing in Ireland and North America.

On the death of his father early in 1823, the precocious fifteen-year-old Balfe left his hometown of Dublin and went to London to gain more experience and earn an income to help support the mother and two sisters...

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