Frederick Solomon

Frederick Charles Solomon (31 August 1853 – 9 September 1924), known variously as Fred Solomon or Frederic Solomon, was a British-born American composer, conductor, actor, librettist, playwright, theatre director, and multi-instrumentalist whose career in American theatre spanned more than three decades. Born in London as one of eleven children of Charles and Cesira Solomon, he grew up in a musical household; his father worked as a music hall pianist, conductor, arranger, and composer. Solomon and his younger brother, the composer Edward Solomon, both learned music from their father and performed in music hall productions throughout their childhoods. Frederick also appeared as a child actor in Christmas pantomimes, including featured vocalist roles at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

As a young adult, Solomon studied at the School of Military Music in Chatham, Kent, and subsequently served in the Royal Marine Band at Chatham, for which he was awarded the Queen Victoria Silver Medal. He was additionally active as a cornetist and drummer in a London orchestra led by W. C. Levey, and performed in touring theatre productions across London and the surrounding provinces. In 1881 he appeared in his brother's opera Billee Taylor at The Crystal Palace, and toured the British provinces in the same work in 1883. That same year, his own comic opera Captain Kidd, or The Bold Buccaneer premiered at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in Liverpool on 10 September 1883.

Solomon emigrated to the United States in 1885, making his American stage debut on 22 September of that year with Lillian Russell's theatre troupe in Cleveland, Ohio, playing Major General Bangs in his brother's comic opera Polly, or the Pet of the Regiment, with Edward Solomon conducting. By January 1886 he had left Russell's company to establish his own acting troupe, directing and starring in a touring production of the farce Inside Out that opened in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He subsequently rejoined Russell's company, portraying Curaso in his brother's Pepita, or The Girl with the Glass Eye in Boston and New York City from March through May 1886, and remained with that company in Erminie, into which two of his original compositions — "The Love Bird" and "When Love Is Asleep" — were interpolated.

Following his appearance as Reverend Thayer in his brother's critical failure The Maid and the Moonshiner, Solomon departed Russell's company and began a six-year tenure as a leading actor under Rudolph Aronson at Broadway's Casino Theatre. There he starred in long-running productions of Erminie, Poor Jonathan, The Brigands, and Nadjy. Concurrently, he composed the music for the 1887 comic opera Pasquillo, or the Bottled Up Kingdom, with a libretto by A. K. Fulton, and wrote music for The Night Owl, a work that toured in vaudeville that same year. In 1887 he married Mamie Sutten, a chorus girl at the Casino Theatre; the couple had one son, William Frederick Solomon, born in 1888. The Casino staged his comic opera Yulee in 1888, with a libretto by Frank Dupree, later revived on Broadway in 1892 under the title King Kaliko. That same year, burlesque star May Howard toured in productions of his works The Roman Fete and Black Sheep.

From 1889 to 1892 Solomon worked as a librettist and occasional composer for productions at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, and from 1892 to 1894 he toured with Pauline Hall's opera company in capacities ranging from performer to conductor and stage director. Several of his original songs were interpolated into that company's productions, and his most prominent success with the troupe was as the leading comic actor in Edgar Stillman Kelley's Puritania.

Following the death of his brother Edward in 1895, Solomon's career shifted increasingly toward composing and conducting, particularly for the Broadway producing firm Klaw and Erlanger. For that partnership he wrote the music and served as music director for four Broadway musicals adapted from fairytales or British pantomimes: The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast (1901), Mr. Bluebeard (1903), Mother Goose (1903), and Humpty Dumpty (1904), for which he also served as lyricist. He served as music director for additional Klaw and Erlanger Broadway productions including The Wild Rose (1902), A Little Bit of Everything (1904, for which he also contributed as composer and lyricist), Lifting the Lid (1905), The White Cat (1905), Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1906), and Oh! Oh! Delphine (1912). Beyond his work with Klaw and Erlanger, Solomon staged the 1899 Broadway revivals of La Belle Hélène at the Casino Theatre and Ludwig Englander's In Gay Paree at the New York Theatre. He was music director for The Cadet Girl at the Herald Square Theatre in 1900 for the Shubert family and A. H. Chamberlyn, and in 1908 he conducted the Ziegfeld Follies for Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. In 1920 he served as music director for the national tour of The Rainbow Girl.

Solomon died in New York City on 9 September 1924, at the age of 71.