1787–1855 · United Kingdom · Romantic
Henry Rowley Bishop was a British composer and conductor, born in London, who worked for all the major theatres of the city. He wrote music for the stage: operas, ballets and cantatas. He is best remembered for the song Home, Sweet Home from the opera Clari. The site offers two of his editions for voice and piano.
Henry Rowley Bishop was born in London on 18 November. His father made watches and also sold haberdashery. At thirteen the boy left ordinary schooling and began working as a music publisher together with a cousin. For a time he also trained as a jockey at Newmarket.
Bishop received his musical education from Francesco Bianchi, an Italian composer who worked in England. The lessons in harmony took place in London. Bishop's first composition was Angelina, which was presented to the public at Margate in 1804. In 1805 he wrote a Grand Sinfonia in C major for orchestra.
In 1806 Bishop first made his name as a ballet composer. His ballet Tamerlan et Bajazet was staged at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, and afterwards the composer received a permanent post. In 1807 he produced a Concertante scored for five instruments: flute, oboe, bassoon, violin and double bass.
Three years later Bishop tried his hand at opera. The Circassian Bride, the first opera he wrote, was staged at Drury Lane's Theatre Royal on 23 February 1809. The following night the theatre burned to the ground. The opera had been performed only once. The score was lost, and the composer had to rebuild it from memory. The leading lady of that staging, Miss Lyons, later became Bishop's first wife.
The second stage success of the composer was The Maniac, or The Swiss Banditti (1810). From 1810 Bishop was conductor at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and for the next fourteen years he remained its music director. In 1813 he became one of the founders of the Philharmonic Society of London.
Bishop belongs to the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Over his career he served many London theatres: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Haymarket and the pleasure garden of Vauxhall Gardens.
Bishop wrote for the stage in a variety of genres. His works include the opera Sadak and Kalasrade, or The Waters of Oblivion (1814), the entertainment Brother and Sister (1815), and the musical dramas The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1819) and Yelva, or The Orphan of Russia (1829). In 1820 he brought out two pieces in the musical romance genre: The Battle of Bothwell Brigg and Henri Quatre, or, Paris in the olden time.
The song Home, Sweet Home was heard in the opera Clari in 1823. The music historian Anne Gilchrist wrote about the history of its melody. In her account, the first version, labelled a Sicilian air, came out long-winded and full of repetition, while in Bishop's later edition, the one known today, it was condensed and gained a great deal. Gilchrist referred to Frank Kidson: Bishop admitted that he had composed the Sicilian melody himself because he lacked a genuine specimen. In Gilchrist's own view, Bishop's idea of Sicilian music came entirely from the hymn tune Sicilian Mariners.
In 1825 Robert Elliston persuaded Bishop to leave Covent Garden for its rival, Drury Lane. There the composer conducted the orchestra and wrote, among other pieces, the opera Aladdin, based on a tale from the Thousand and One Nights. The idea was to rival Weber's Oberon, which the other theatre had ordered. Aladdin failed.
Bishop also reworked operas by other composers. A Covent Garden playbill of 1827 lists The Marriage of Figaro: the overture and music were drawn largely from operas by Mozart, while the new numbers were Bishop's. Miss Paton sang the aria Follow, follow o'er the mountain in that staging.
From 1830 Bishop held the post of music director of the Vauxhall Gardens pleasure garden. Ten years later he took the same post at Covent Garden.
The Reid chair of music at Edinburgh went to Bishop in 1841, and he resigned it in 1843. Oxford's Heather chair of music passed to him in 1848, when he followed William Crotch, and he kept it until 1853.
In 1842 the queen recognised the musician's services, and he was ennobled. Bishop was knighted, the first composer to be so honoured. William Denslow wrote that Bishop was a freemason. His rank was that of Knight Bachelor.
Bishop's last work was an ode, written on commission for the ceremony in 1853 at which Lord Derby took office as chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Earlier Bishop had a first wife, the singer Miss Lyons. His second wife was the singer Ann Rivière, whom he married in 1831; she was Daniel Riviere's daughter and Robert Riviere's sister. She was twenty-three years younger than her husband, and the couple had three children. Anna Bishop, as she came to be known, studied with her husband and later became a famous opera singer.
In 1839 Anna Bishop walked out on her husband and children, leaving with Nicolas Bochsa, a harpist and composer who was her lover and accompanist. The pair left England and toured abroad until Bochsa's death in Sydney. Anna Bishop gave performances on every continent, and she is regarded as the 19th century's most widely travelled opera singer.
Bishop's later years were clouded by scandal. Sir Henry Rowley Bishop died on 30 April in his native London. Although he had a considerable income during his lifetime, he died in poverty. He was born and died in the same city. The composer is buried at East Finchley Cemetery in the north of London.
Bishop's name lives on at the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, on its southern face. A relief there, the Frieze of Parnassus, honours Bishop alongside leading figures of music, architecture, poetry, painting and sculpture. No other British composer of the 19th century appears on it.
Bishop was strongly influenced by Mozart and Rossini. His operas were written to please the audiences of his day. In their design they are closer to the earlier English genre of ballad opera, or to modern musicals, than to the classical opera of continental Europe with its full recitatives.
Among the operas that did best were Clari, or the Maid of Milan (1823), Guy Mannering (1816), The Miller and his Men (1813) and The Virgin of the Sun (1812). Other well-known works include The Maid of the Mill (1814), The Slave (1816), Maid Marian (1822), Cortez (1823), Knights of the Cross (1826) and Under the Oak (1830).
The libretto of Clari was written by the American John Howard Payne. The opera contained the song Home, Sweet Home, which turned into a huge hit. In 1852 Bishop issued it again as a parlour ballad, and in the United States it was loved during the Civil War and after. In 1819 he made a musical-comedy version of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, which included an aria for coloratura soprano, Lo! Here the Gentle Lark.
From 1816 to 1828 Bishop supplied the music for Frederic Reynolds's Shakespearean stagings. Yet these pieces, together with the many other operas, burlettas, cantatas and incidental scores he produced, have largely dropped out of memory. Even his collaborations with Stephen Glover, Thomas Simpson Cooke and Joseph Edwards Carpenter seldom get a mention.
He wrote for more than the theatre. His cantatas include The Jolly Beggars (1817), set to words by Robert Burns, and two sacred cantatas to texts by John Milton: The Seventh Day (1833) and The Departure from Paradise (1836). There are also the Grand Sinfonia in C major for orchestra (1805), a string quartet in C minor from 1816, and the Overture (alla Irlandese) for piano (1823).
The site offers two editions of Bishop's music: Sappho at her Loom and Home, Sweet Home. Both are written for voice and piano, and both are marked with the Advanced level.