1859–1924 · United Kingdom, United States
Victor Herbert (1859–1924) was a cellist, conductor and composer in America who studied in Stuttgart. He became famous for operettas staged on Broadway from the 1890s until the First World War, and the waltz was his most typical kind of song. The site offers pianists his waltzes and other pieces at intermediate+ level.
Herbert was born on 1 February 1859. For a time he lived with his mother in England, in the house of her father, Samuel Lover, a writer, dramatist, poet and composer from Ireland. Musicians, writers and artists were forever calling on Lover, and it was his grandfather who helped the boy's gifts to unfold.
In 1867 Herbert moved to Stuttgart after his mother married a German doctor. The boy attended the local grammar school, whose curriculum included music lessons.
He first meant to become a doctor, but medical training in Germany was costly. His stepfather was related to the German royal family, yet money in the household was short. So Herbert turned to music: he began with piano, flute and piccolo, then settled on the cello and took lessons from Bernhard Cossmann.
After that he entered the Stuttgart Conservatory, where he studied the cello, music theory and composition with Max Seifritz. Herbert received his diploma in 1879.
Herbert began playing in Stuttgart concerts even before his lessons with Cossmann. His first orchestral post was as a flautist and piccolo player, but before long he switched to the cello alone.
By the age of nineteen he had appeared as a soloist with several leading German orchestras. For a few years Herbert was a member of the ensemble kept by the rich Russian baron Paul von Derwies, and in 1880 he was a soloist for twelve months with Eduard Strauss's orchestra in Vienna.
In 1881 Herbert took a place in the Stuttgart court orchestra, where he stayed for five years. His earliest instrumental works date from this time: the cello-and-orchestra suite, Op. 3, and the First Cello Concerto, Op. 8. He took the solo part himself when both were first performed. In 1883 Brahms chose him for a chamber orchestra that played at a celebration of Franz Liszt near Zurich.
In 1885 Herbert grew close to the soprano Therese Förster, who had lately joined the court opera in Stuttgart. They married on 14 August 1886 and went to the United States the same year, since Walter Damrosch and Anton Seidl had invited them both to the Metropolitan Opera. Herbert was taken on as first cellist of the orchestra, and Förster was given leading roles.
Seidl, whom Herbert had befriended on the ship, became his mentor and took particular care over his conducting skills. In New York the couple joined the circle of German musicians. A cellist in the Met orchestra earned 40 to 50 dollars a week, so Herbert hoped to add to his income by teaching and handed out visiting cards in cafés, offering lessons in cello, singing and harmony.
On 8 January 1887 Herbert made his first American appearance as a soloist, playing his own cello-and-orchestra suite, Op. 3, under the baton of Walter Damrosch. The reception was warm, and further solo invitations followed that same year. In the autumn of 1887 he formed an orchestra of forty players, which lasted a single season, and also set up a string quartet in New York, which gave free concerts at Steinway Hall for several years. After that first Metropolitan season the pair chose to remain in America, and in time they became citizens.
That summer, 1888, Herbert was made assistant to Seidl, who ran the ten-week summer concerts of the New York Philharmonic at Brighton Beach. He led an orchestra of eighty players, pairing light pieces with weightier repertoire. He stayed tied to the Philharmonic until 1898, as assistant conductor, guest conductor and cello soloist. In the autumn of 1888 the soprano Emma Juchs invited Herbert to be musical director of a touring concert party through towns of the Midwest that had heard little serious music.
On 1 December 1888 Seidl programmed Herbert's string-orchestra Serenade, Op. 12, for a concert at Steinway Hall, and the composer conducted it himself. In January 1889, together with the violinist Max Bendix, he gave the first performance in the United States of Brahms's Double Concerto. Later in 1889 Herbert started teaching cello and composition at the National Conservatory.
In 1890 he was appointed conductor of the Boston Festival Orchestra, and in 1891 he unveiled "The Captive", a cantata with soloists, chorus and orchestra. His Irish Rhapsody (1892), composed for a New York Gaelic society, enjoyed a short but strong wave of popularity. In 1894 Herbert became leader of the 22nd Regiment band of the state's National Guard in New York, touring extensively with it until 1900; the band played his own pieces as well as orchestral works he arranged for it. In that same year, 1894, his Second Cello Concerto, in E minor, Op. 30, was premiered.
From 1898 to 1904 Herbert directed the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Critics likened the ensemble to the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, and it grew into one of the major American orchestras. In 1901 the orchestra gave the first performance of the Auditorium Festival March, written for an anniversary of the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. After a quarrel with the management, Herbert left in 1904 and created his own ensemble, the Victor Herbert Orchestra, and he led it until he died. It made many records for the Edison and Victor companies.
Herbert's first operetta, "Prince Ananias", dates from 1894 and was written for the well-known Bostonians troupe. Audiences liked it, and three more Broadway operettas came soon after: "The Wizard of the Nile" (1895); "The Serenade" (1897), a success internationally; and "The Fortune Teller" (1898), with Alice Nielsen in the cast.
His first big hit was "Babes in Toyland" (1903). It was followed by "Mlle. Modiste" (1905) and "The Red Mill" (1906), after which Herbert ranked among the best-known composers in America. He was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1908. Two further great successes were "Naughty Marietta" (1910) and "Sweethearts" (1913).
Herbert also wrote two operas. For the first, "Natoma", he spent several years looking for a libretto that appealed to him, and eventually chose one by Joseph Redding, set in California. It was premiered in Philadelphia on 25 February 1911: Mary Garden sang the title part, while the Irish tenor John McCormack, still young, made his American opera debut. The second opera, the one-act "Madeleine", was given at the Metropolitan Opera on 24 January 1914 but was not revived after that season.
Herbert took an ever more active part in the life of the Irish community in America. He entered the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, New York's oldest Irish association, in 1908, and was its president by 1916. Early in 1916 he also served as founding president of the Friends of Irish Freedom. The operetta "Eileen" (1917), set during the Irish rising of 1798, fulfilled his wish to write an operetta on an Irish theme.
In the early twentieth century Herbert defended the right of composers to earn from their work. In 1909 he spoke before the United States Congress, which influenced the copyright law of 1909. That law helped to establish the right of composers to royalties on sales of sound recordings.
On 13 February 1914 Herbert led the composers and publishers who set up ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; he was its vice-president and a director until he died. In 1917 he won a landmark case in the United States Supreme Court: through ASCAP composers gained the right to charge a fee for public performances of their music.
Once the First World War was over, public taste changed, and Herbert, unwillingly, moved to musicals, which asked for plainer ensembles and easier songs than the Europe-style operettas of his earlier career. He also wrote for other people's shows, including ballet music for the big numbers of Broadway revues and for shows by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. From 1917 to 1924 he took part in the Ziegfeld Follies every year. He did not get back to his earlier heights; his best late result was "Orange Blossoms" (1921).
Lake Placid, in New York state, was where Herbert spent summers. There, in 1918, he took up his cello for a Red Cross fundraising concert.
A heart attack ended Herbert's life in New York in May 1924, shortly after tryouts of his final show, "The Dream Girl", had opened in New Haven. His wife and two children survived him. He lies in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx. A bust of him was put up in Central Park in 1927.
Herbert is remembered above all as the author of operettas. In his lifetime he wrote 43 operettas, two operas, a cantata, music for ten stage plays, 31 works for orchestra, nine for band, nine for cello, five for violin with piano or orchestra and 22 for piano. To these are added 12 choral works, a great many songs and orchestrations of other people's music.
The waltz was Herbert's most typical kind of song, and a good many of his waltzes won great popularity, for all their high musical demands. He wrote for companies that played Viennese operettas and Gilbert and Sullivan, and knew Viennese operetta well. He was fond of numbers built on variation: in "Babes in Toyland" he treats the nursery song "Rock-a-bye Baby" as a lively march, then a Neapolitan piece, and lastly a cakewalk. He often conjured up the music of faraway places: Spanish colours in "The Serenade", Italian ones in "Naughty Marietta", Austrian ones in "The Singing Girl", eastern ones in "The Wizard of the Nile". "The Fortune Teller" contains a vigorous Hungarian csárdás. As a rule he did his own orchestrations.
Little of Herbert's instrumental music stayed in the repertoire after his death. The exception is the Second Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 30, first given in 1894: Herbert's National Conservatory colleague Dvořák felt moved to compose a cello concerto of his own once he had heard that premiere. In recent decades other works have been returning to audiences, among them the Suite for cello and orchestra, Op. 3, and the First Cello Concerto. For the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Herbert wrote the symphonic poem "Hero and Leander" (1901).
The site holds Herbert's piano pieces at intermediate+ level: "The Serenade (Waltzes)", "The Singing Girl 1 (Waltzes)", "The Singing Girl 2 (Waltzes)", "The Wizard of the Nile (Waltzes)", "Babes in Toyland 1 (Waltzes)", "The Fortune Teller (Waltzes)", "Six Pieces No.3 - Yesterthoughts" and "Under the Elms (Souvenir de Saratoga)". There is also "Whispering Willows (Intermezzo)" for voice and piano. A good way in is "The Serenade (Waltzes)", then "Six Pieces No.3 - Yesterthoughts" and "The Singing Girl 1 (Waltzes)".