Lewis Henry Lavenu
Encyclopedia
Life and career
Lavenu was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1818, the only son, by his second wife Eliza, of Lewis Lavenu
Lewis Lavenu
Lewis Augustus Lavenu was a musician, music seller and publisher.He was the second son of John Lavenu, pastry chef to Stephen Fox, Lord Holland . His father had opened a coffee house and tavern in Salisbury where he took over the assembly rooms and held concerts for the local gentry and middle...
, music publisher to the Prince Regent
George IV of the United Kingdom
George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...
. Shortly after his birth, his father died and his mother went into business with the violinist Nicolas Mori
Nicolas Mori
Nicolas Mori was an Anglo-Italian violinist, music publisher and conductor. Once regarded as the finest violinist in Europe, Mori was somewhat overshadowed by the rise of Paganini....
, a pupil of Viotti
Giovanni Battista Viotti
Giovanni Battista Viotti was an Italian violinist whose virtuosity was famed and whose work as a composer featured a prominent violin and an appealing lyrical tunefulness...
by whom she had 5 children, although they weren't married until 1826 (in St. Paul's, Covent Garden).
Lavenu studied at the Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy of Music
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...
, firstly with the French harpist Nicolas-Charles Bochsa
Nicolas-Charles Bochsa
Robert Nicolas-Charles Bochsa was a musician and composer.-Life:...
, and subsequently with Charles Lucas
Charles Lucas (musician)
Charles Lucas was an English cellist, conductor, composer and publisher. He was a Principal of the Royal Academy of Music....
, George Macfarren
George Macfarren
George Macfarren was a playwright and the father of composer George Alexander Macfarren. Macfarren's first play, Ah! What a Pity, or, The Dark Knight and the Fair Lady, was produced on 28 September 1818 at the English Opera House; for the next several decades, a Macfarren play was produced...
, and Cipriani Potter
Cipriani Potter
Philip Cipriani Hambly Potter was a British composer, pianist and educator.-Life and career:Born in London, the son of a piano teacher named Richard Huddleston Potter, Cipriani was named after his godmother...
in composition, cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
and piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
. In 1840 Lavenu arranged two tours of the British Isles for the composer and pianist Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
, accompanied by his half brother Frank Mori, two female singers and John Orlando Parry
John Orlando Parry
John Orlando Parry was an English actor, pianist, artist, comedian and singer.-Early career:Parry, the only son of Welsh musician John Parry , was born in London and, at an early age, was taught by his father to sing and to play the harp and the piano. He also studied the harp under Robert Bochsa...
, an all round musician, singer and entertainer (who vividly recorded the tour in his diary). Between 17 August and 26 September, they gave 50 concerts around England which were generally unsuccessful, having an average attendance of 140. The second tour which encompassed Liverpool, Ireland and Scotland from November 1840- January 1841 was mildly more successful, with audiences of more than 1200 in Dublin. The tour was however a financial failure, and Liszt waived his promised 500 guineas a month fee.
In May, 1844, Lavenu, who had been in partnership with Robert Hodson in the Music publishing business which he had inherited from his mother and stepfather, Mori, Lavenu, & Co. sold the business to Hodson who then went into partnership with Robert Addison forming Addison & Hodson. Addison had formerly been in partnership with Johann Baptist Cramer
Johann Baptist Cramer
Johann Baptist Cramer was an English musician of German origin. He was the son of Wilhelm Cramer, a famous London violinist and musical conductor, one of a numerous family who were identified with the progress of music during the 18th and 19th centuries.-Biography:Johann Baptist Cramer was born in...
and Thomas Frederick Beale in the business of J. B. Cramer, Addison & Beale
Cramer & Co.
J. B. Cramer & Co. was a musical instrument manufacturing, music-publishing and music-selling business in London.It was founded in 1824 by the musician Johann Baptist Cramer in partnership with Robert Addison and Thomas Frederick Beale, the company then being known as Cramer, Addison & Beale...
.
In November, 1846 Lavenu's first major work Loretta; A Tale of Seville, a grand opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in three parts with libretto by Alfred Bunn
Alfred Bunn
Alfred Bunn was an English theatrical manager.He was appointed stage-manager of Drury Lane Theatre, London, in 1823. In 1826 he was managing the Theatre Royal in Birmingham, and in 1833 he undertook the joint management of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, London. In this undertaking he met with...
premiered at Drury Lane
Drury Lane
Drury Lane is a street on the eastern boundary of the Covent Garden area of London, running between Aldwych and High Holborn. The northern part is in the borough of Camden and the southern part in the City of Westminster....
Theatre before a crowded audience. Anna Bishop sung the role of Loretta, and the role of the father Don Juanita was sung by W. H. Weiss. The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, which made an extensive review of the opera described it as showing "but few indications of inexperience", and was rather the "work of a practiced hand", finally describing the opera as "one of the most promising in our recollection".
After falling into insolvency in 1848, Lavenu became the conductor of the Irish singer Catherine Hayes
Catherine Hayes
Catherine Hayes [married name Bushnell] was the first Irish-born opera diva to achieve international acclaim....
, making appearances in Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
, the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
(1851-1852) and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
(1855). Lavenu stayed in Sydney becoming the musical director of the Sydney Theatre and the teacher and conductor of the singer Marie Carandini
Marie Carandini
Marie Carandini, née Burgess, was an English-born Australian opera singer.-Early life:Carandini was born in Brixton, London, the daughter of James and Martha Medwin Burgess and was brought by her parents to Van Diemen's Land in 1833...
. In July 1859 Lavenu (on cello) took part in a grand festival to inaugurate the new Great Hall of the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
with Carandini, Sara Flower
Sara Flower
Sara Elizabeth Flower was a British-born contralto singer now almost forgotten to history who became Australia's first operatic diva...
, Emma Howson
Emma Howson
Emma Howson was an Australian opera singer and actress primarily known as the creator of the principal soprano role of Josephine in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera H.M.S...
, Frank Howson
Frank Howson
Frank Howson has had a career in entertainment. He directed Flynn on the early life of Errol Flynn and Hunting...
and Walter Sherwin but died at the height of the festivities.
in Macquarie Street in 1859, being buried in Camperdown
Camperdown, New South Wales
Camperdown is an inner-city suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Camperdown is located 4 kilometres south-west of the Sydney central business district and is part of the Inner West region...
cemetery alongside his tutor Bochsa
Nicolas-Charles Bochsa
Robert Nicolas-Charles Bochsa was a musician and composer.-Life:...
, and his fellow English composer Isaac Nathan
Isaac Nathan
Isaac Nathan was an Anglo-Australian composer, musicologist, journalist and self-publicist, who ended an eventful career by becoming the "father of Australian music".-Early success:...
.
Lavenu had eight children with Julia, daughter of Colonel John Blossett
John Blossett
Colonel John Blossett was a British soldier who led the second British Legionto aid Simon Bolivar in the wars of independence against Spain.Born in Ireland, the great-grandson of Huguenot Brigadier-General Salomon Blosset de Loche who had assisted William of Orange in the taking of the British...
, the head of the British expedition which aided Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...
in the wars of independence. His daughters Ada, Eliza, Alice and Bessie were actresses in London during the 1860s, Eliza
Ethel Lavenu
Ethel Lavenu was a British stage actress. She was the mother of stage and silent screen actor Tyrone Power, Sr., and grandmother of the Hollywood film star Tyrone Power....
becoming more successful, appearing at the Theatre Royal, Lyceum. She was the mother of the actor Tyrone Power, Sr.
Tyrone Power, Sr.
Frederick Tyrone Edmond Power was an English-born American stage and screen actor, who acted under the name Tyrone Power.-Early life:Power was born in London in 1869, the son of Harold Littledale Power and Ethel Lavenu...
, and grandmother of the Hollywood star Tyrone Power
Tyrone Power
Tyrone Edmund Power, Jr. , usually credited as Tyrone Power and known sometimes as Ty Power, was an American film and stage actor who appeared in dozens of films from the 1930s to the 1950s, often in swashbuckler roles or romantic leads such as in The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand, The Black Swan,...
. His daughter Alice changed her name to Suzanne Madeleine-Julie-Alice Lavenu and married a nobleman, Pedro Alonso Jimenez, the son of Alonso Jimenez, the Marques
Marqués
Marqués and Márquez may mean:People*A. H. de Oliveira Marques*Anderson Luís de Azevedo Rodrigues Marques, Brazilian footballer*Fernando Marqués, Spanish footballer...
de la Granja de San Saturnino in 1875.