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Home, Sweet Home
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Browse piano sheets by Henry Rowley Bishop on Zen Virtual Piano. Wikipedia records that on 23 February 1809 Henry Bishop’s opera The Circassian Bride was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and that on the following night the theatre burned down, forcing him to rewrite the score from memory. The prima donna of that production, a Miss Lyons, became his first wife. A score lost to a fire and rebuilt from memory suggests a young composer who had to keep going when a plan collapsed, and for whom a theatre career could turn on a single night. Britannica gives his birth as 18 November 1786 in London, and his death there on 30 April 1855, and remembers him as an English composer and conductor for his songs Home, Sweet Home and Lo, Here the Gentle Lark. Payne wrote the lyrics of Home, Sweet Home, the theme song of Bishop’s comic opera based on Payne’s play Clari, or The Maid of Milan. The Dictionary of National Biography says he seems to have received all his instruction in music from Francesco Bianchi, and that his earliest compositions are twelve glees and several Italian songs. A song that was the theme from a comic opera can be read as a single melody carrying a lyric out of the theatre and into other hands. Bishop composed, arranged and conducted dramatic musical productions at Covent Garden Theatre (1810–24), the King’s Theatre, Haymarket (1816–17), Drury Lane (from 1825) and Vauxhall Gardens (1830). Between 1816 and 1828 he composed the music for a series of Shakespearean operas staged by Frederic Reynolds, and in 1825 he moved to Drury Lane, where his opera Aladdin, intended to compete with Weber’s Oberon, failed, and his career as an operatic composer came to an end. He did, however, rework operas by other composers, and edited Handel’s Messiah and many other works. An operatic career that ended with Aladdin, beside a continuing body of reworked and edited music, can be read as two sides of one theatre musician’s working life. He became professor of music at the University of Edinburgh in 1841, resigning in 1843, and at Oxford in 1848, succeeding William Crotch, until 1853. Wikipedia notes that he was knighted in 1842, the first composer ever to receive that honour. A relief sculpture on the Frieze of Parnassus, on the south side of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, commemorates him, and he is the only nineteenth-century British composer represented. A knighthood, two professorships and a place on the Albert Memorial suggest a musician held in high public regard.
Browse piano sheets by Henry Rowley Bishop on Zen Virtual Piano.
Wikipedia records that on 23 February 1809 Henry Bishop’s opera The Circassian Bride was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and that on the following night the theatre burned down, forcing him to rewrite the score from memory. The prima donna of that production, a Miss Lyons, became his first wife. A score lost to a fire and rebuilt from memory suggests a young composer who had to keep going when a plan collapsed, and for whom a theatre career could turn on a single night.
Britannica gives his birth as 18 November 1786 in London, and his death there on 30 April 1855, and remembers him as an English composer and conductor for his songs Home, Sweet Home and Lo, Here the Gentle Lark. Payne wrote the lyrics of Home, Sweet Home, the theme song of Bishop’s comic opera based on Payne’s play Clari, or The Maid of Milan. The Dictionary of National Biography says he seems to have received all his instruction in music from Francesco Bianchi, and that his earliest compositions are twelve glees and several Italian songs. A song that was the theme from a comic opera can be read as a single melody carrying a lyric out of the theatre and into other hands.
Bishop composed, arranged and conducted dramatic musical productions at Covent Garden Theatre (1810–24), the King’s Theatre, Haymarket (1816–17), Drury Lane (from 1825) and Vauxhall Gardens (1830). Between 1816 and 1828 he composed the music for a series of Shakespearean operas staged by Frederic Reynolds, and in 1825 he moved to Drury Lane, where his opera Aladdin, intended to compete with Weber’s Oberon, failed, and his career as an operatic composer came to an end. He did, however, rework operas by other composers, and edited Handel’s Messiah and many other works. An operatic career that ended with Aladdin, beside a continuing body of reworked and edited music, can be read as two sides of one theatre musician’s working life.
He became professor of music at the University of Edinburgh in 1841, resigning in 1843, and at Oxford in 1848, succeeding William Crotch, until 1853. Wikipedia notes that he was knighted in 1842, the first composer ever to receive that honour. A relief sculpture on the Frieze of Parnassus, on the south side of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, commemorates him, and he is the only nineteenth-century British composer represented. A knighthood, two professorships and a place on the Albert Memorial suggest a musician held in high public regard.
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Common questions
Sir Henry Rowley Bishop (1786–1855) was an English composer and conductor remembered for his songs Home, Sweet Home and Lo, Here the Gentle Lark.
It is Bishop’s song with lyrics by John Howard Payne, the theme song from his comic opera based on Payne’s play Clari, or The Maid of Milan.
He composed, arranged and conducted at Covent Garden, the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, Drury Lane and Vauxhall Gardens.
He became professor of music at the University of Edinburgh in 1841 and at Oxford in 1848.