Michael Balfe

Michael William Balfe, born in Dublin on 15 May 1808, was an Irish composer, singer, and conductor whose career spanned more than four decades and produced at least 29 operas, nearly 250 songs, and several cantatas. He also worked as a Broadway book writer, with credits including the musical Gypsy Blonde. He died on 20 October 1870 at his home in Rowney Abbey, Ware, Hertfordshire, at the age of 62, and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London beside fellow Irish composer William Vincent Wallace.

Balfe grew up on Pitt Street in Dublin, a thoroughfare later renamed Balfe Street in 1917 in his honor. His father was a dancing master and violinist who provided his son's earliest musical instruction, supplemented by lessons from the composer William Rooke. The family relocated to Wexford during his childhood, but Balfe's gifts were already evident: between 1814 and 1815 he played violin for his father's dancing classes, and at age seven he composed a polacca. By 1817 he had made a public appearance as a violinist and composed a ballad eventually performed by Madame Vestris in Paul Pry under the title "The Lovers' Mistake." Following his father's death in 1823, the teenage Balfe moved to London and joined the orchestra of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, eventually becoming its leader. There he studied violin with Charles Edward Horn and composition with Charles Frederick Horn, organist at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, from 1824.

While continuing to perform as a violinist, Balfe pursued a parallel career as an opera singer, debuting unsuccessfully at Norwich in Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz. In 1825, his patron Count Mazzara brought him to Rome for further vocal and musical study and introduced him to Luigi Cherubini. During this Italian period Balfe also composed his first dramatic work, a ballet titled La Perouse, and became a protégé of Rossini. By the close of 1827 he was performing the role of Figaro in The Barber of Seville at the Italian opera in Paris. He returned to Italy for the next eight years, singing and composing, and in 1829 in Bologna he wrote his first cantata for the soprano Giulia Grisi, then eighteen years old, performed with tenor Francesco Pedrazzi to considerable success. That same year he produced his first complete opera, I rivali di se stessi, at Palermo during the carnival season. Around 1831, in Lugano, Switzerland, he married Lina Roser, a Hungarian-born singer of Austrian parentage whom he had met at Bergamo; the couple had two sons and two daughters. He composed further operas at Pavia and Milan, and in 1834 sang in Rossini's Otello with Maria Malibran at La Scala.

Balfe returned to London with his wife and young daughter in May 1835, and his career there gained immediate momentum with the premiere of The Siege of Rochelle on 29 October 1835 at Drury Lane. The following year he produced The Maid of Artois, and a succession of English-language operas followed. In July 1838 he composed Falstaff for the Italian Opera House, setting an Italian libretto by S. Manfredo Maggione based on The Merry Wives of Windsor; the production starred Luigi Lablache, Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, and Antonio Tamburini, the same four singers who had premiered Bellini's I puritani in Paris in 1835. In 1841 Balfe founded the National Opera at the Lyceum Theatre, though the venture failed, and that same year he premiered his opera Keolanthe. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he presented Le Puits d'amour in 1843 and works for the Opéra-Comique and the Opéra, with libretti by Eugène Scribe and others.

The defining achievement of Balfe's career came on 27 November 1843, when The Bohemian Girl premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The opera ran for more than 100 consecutive nights and was subsequently staged in New York, Dublin, Philadelphia, Vienna, Sydney, and across Europe. An Italian adaptation, La Zingara, was mounted in Trieste in 1854 and also performed internationally, and a four-act French version, La Bohemienne, was produced in France in 1862. The work remains his only large-scale composition still performed today and is the source of the well-known song "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls."

From 1846 to 1852, Balfe served as musical director and principal conductor for the Italian Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre, with Max Maretzek as his assistant. In that role he introduced several of Verdi's operas to London audiences and conducted for Jenny Lind at her operatic debut and on numerous subsequent occasions. In 1851, in anticipation of the Great Exhibition in London, he composed the cantata Inno Delle Nazioni, scored for nine female singers each representing a different country. He continued producing new operas in English, including The Armourer of Nantes in 1863, and wrote songs such as "When Other Hearts," "Come Into the Garden, Maud," "Killarney," and "Excelsior," a setting of the Longfellow poem. His final opera, The Knight of the Leopard, was nearly complete at the time of his death and later achieved success in Italian as Il Talismano.

Balfe retired in 1864 to a rented country estate in Hertfordshire. In 1882, a medallion portrait was unveiled in Westminster Abbey, and a London County Council plaque commemorating him was installed in 1912 at 12 Seymour Street, Marylebone.