1844–1891 · Sweden, United Kingdom · Romantic
Alfred Cellier (1844–1891) was an English composer and conductor who for years conducted Gilbert and Sullivan's operas for the D'Oyly Carte company. His comic opera Dorothy (1886) became the longest-running production in nineteenth-century musical theatre. For a pianist, his music survives mainly in songs for voice and piano.
Alfred Cellier was born on 1 December 1844 in South Hackney, in London. He was the second child and the eldest son of Arsène Cellier, who had come from France and taught languages, and his wife Mary Ann Peterine. He went to school at the grammar school in Hackney. His brother, François, also grew up to be a conductor, and the two would later work side by side more than once.
In the 1850s, still a boy, Cellier was singing in the choir at the Chapel Royal, St James's — the Rev. Thomas Helmore's choir — where one of his fellow choristers was Arthur Sullivan. Once grown up, he married Harriet Emily.
Cellier's earliest regular posts were all connected with church music: in 1862 he took up the organ at All Saints' Church, Blackheath, while also conducting the Belfast Philharmonic Society. In 1866 Dr Chipp's post passed to him — organist and director of the concerts at Belfast's Ulster Hall — and he went on leading the Philharmonic Society there at the same time. By 1868 he had moved back to London to become organist of St Alban's Church, Holborn.
In January 1871 Cellier took up the post of first conductor and music director at London's Royal Court Theatre. From 1871 to 1875 he held the same kind of post at the Prince's Theatre in Manchester — and it was there that his career as a composer for the stage really began.
Those Manchester years were when Cellier started writing for the stage himself. His first comic opera, Charity Begins at Home (1872, with a libretto by B. C. Stephenson), was staged at the Gallery of Illustration in London, did well with the public and ran for more than two hundred performances. The Sultan of Mocha was also well received: it was first put on in Manchester in 1874 and was revived more than once afterwards.
He also wrote several other stage works in these years that did not do nearly as well, among them Topsyturveydom, with a Gilbert libretto, from 1874, The Tower of London, staged in Manchester in 1875, and Bella Donna in 1878. At the same time he turned out individual songs, pieces for orchestra — the Brighton Festival heard his Suite symphonique in 1878 — and piano music, the most popular of which was his Danse pompadour.
In December 1877 Cellier took on the role of music director at London's Opera Comique, the home of the D'Oyly Carte company. His premieres there included The Sorcerer (1877), Trial by Jury (1878) and H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) — for the last of these he wrote the overture himself, built on the opera's own tunes — along with three short pieces of his own. His brother François succeeded him as music director at the Opera Comique in 1879; in those same years Alfred led promenade concerts at the Queen's Theatre and, together with Sullivan, the Covent Garden promenade concerts.
In 1879 Cellier travelled to America with Gilbert, Sullivan and D'Oyly Carte, conducting performances of Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance for Carte's first American touring company, and writing the overture to Pirates himself out of Sullivan's music. Back in London in the summer of 1880, he spent a season at the Opera Comique, then in April 1881 left the D'Oyly Carte company altogether, handing the baton to his brother.
That same year, 1881, his three-act grand opera Pandora, based on Longfellow's poem The Masque of Pandora (libretto by B. C. Stephenson), was staged in Boston: reviewers praised the grace of the music but found the piece short on drama, and it closed after only two weeks. Cellier stayed on in America to conduct the touring Comly-Barton Opera Company, and then returned to work for D'Oyly Carte, serving as music director in New York and on tour for Billee Taylor, for Les Manteaux Noirs and Rip Van Winkle, and for Iolanthe, for which he prepared the New York overture.
In 1883 his setting of Gray's Elegy, written as a cantata, was performed at the Leeds music festival. That same year he left the D'Oyly Carte company for good, though he came back for short spells as music director for the touring productions of Princess Ida (1884) and The Mikado (1885), and in 1885 he also wrote music to accompany a staging of As You Like It. Poor health increasingly kept him based mostly in America, where he sometimes acted as a representative for D'Oyly Carte, and in Australia, conducting for the J. C. Williamson company.
Cellier's greatest success came with the comic opera Dorothy, to a libretto by B. C. Stephenson: part of its score was drawn from his own earlier failure, Nell Gwynne (1876), a piece whose music had been praised even though it did not succeed overall. Dorothy had originally been announced for the Royalty Theatre in 1884, but the producer George Edwardes did not bring it to the stage until 25 September 1886, at the Gaiety Theatre — and Cellier was not there for it, since he was in Australia at the time, conducting The Mikado for J. C. Williamson.
At first, neither the music nor the book won critics over. What turned things around was a single song: Stephenson rewrote the words of an older Cellier number, Old Dreams, as Queen of My Heart, and once that was in, the show transferred that December to the Prince of Wales Theatre and finally found its audience. The following year H. J. Leslie took the production over, brought in new leading performers, among them Marie Tempest and Ben Davies, and takings grew further still. In December 1888 Dorothy moved to the Lyric Theatre, which had been built with the profits it had earned, and it went on running there into 1889.
That first run of Dorothy, 931 performances in all, was the longest any piece of musical theatre had managed up to that time, outlasting even The Mikado, by Cellier's own friend Arthur Sullivan. Some critics later changed their minds about the piece, and it came to be seen as a classic of the Victorian stage. Its success also brought new life to some of Cellier's earlier works — a composer remembered for his melodic generosity and for the elegance and polish of his writing, even if, unlike Sullivan, he could not always bring humour into his music.
Cellier made another trip to Australia in 1888, conducting Dorothy there alongside a revival of Charity Begins at Home; early in 1891, now because of his health, he travelled there once more, for the last time, together with Stephenson. His final comic operas were Doris (1889, again with Stephenson) and The Mountebanks, written to a libretto by W. S. Gilbert; neither achieved more than modest success, and The Mountebanks reached the stage only in January 1892, a few days after Cellier's death — ill health had kept him from finishing the score himself, and it was completed by another composer, Ivan Caryll.
At the age of 47, Alfred Cellier died at his London home in the Bloomsbury district, and his burial took place at West Norwood Cemetery.
Cellier was first and foremost a composer for the stage: he wrote more than a dozen comic operas and operettas, besides music for orchestra and piano. His style owed a great deal to Sullivan: Cellier spent years with the D'Oyly Carte company, which staged Gilbert and Sullivan's operas. He had a generous, easily remembered melodic gift, and his music was marked by elegance and polish. Unlike Sullivan, he could not always bring humour into a score. His best-known work was the comic opera Dorothy (1886): part of its score he drew from his earlier opera Nell Gwynne, which failed overall but was praised for its music. The opera became the longest-running production of nineteenth-century musical theatre, while most of his earlier stage works had only modest success.
Besides his stage works, Cellier wrote individual songs, piano pieces and music for orchestra: a cantata on Gray's Elegy, written for four solo voices with orchestra and heard at the Leeds Festival in 1883, and an orchestral Suite symphonique, performed at the Brighton Festival in 1878. Among his piano pieces, the Danse pompadour was especially well liked. Shorter concert and drawing-room works of this kind are a good way to get to know Cellier's music without taking on a whole comic opera, and they suit anyone looking for a short nineteenth-century piece for a concert programme.
A separate strand of his work as a composer was the overture: he wrote the overture to H.M.S. Pinafore out of the opera's own tunes, and later did the same for The Pirates of Penzance and for the New York production of Iolanthe, drawing on music by Sullivan. This was as much a composer's task as a conductor's — picking out memorable tunes and shaping them into a self-contained orchestral piece.
The site currently offers one piece by Cellier, the song Oh! Woman, Sweet Woman for voice and piano, listed at Advanced level. It suits a pianist who already accompanies a singer with confidence and is ready for a more developed piano part; for now it is the only Cellier piece in the catalogue, and the natural place to start with his music.