You may have enjoyed the singing of Gervase Elwes on the last blog, so here is a little about him:
Gervase Henry Cary-Elwes (15 November 1866 – 12 January 1921), always known as Gervase Elwes, was an English tenor of great distinction, who exercised a powerful influence over the development of English music. His career was cut short in 1921 when he was involved in fatal railroad accident in Boston, Massachusetts.
There is a great Wiki page about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gervase_Elwes
I qoute from that page:
Background to his career
He was born in Billing, Northampton, the son of Alice Geraldine (née Ward) and Valentine Dudley Henry Cary-Elwe.Of the Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire county gentry, he attended The Oratory School (a Roman Catholic school) and moved to Woburn School, Weybridge in 1885, leaving for Christ Church, Oxford in 1885, where he was active as a cricketer and violinist. At the age of 22 he married Lady Winifride Feilding. He first trained as a lawyer and diplomat, spending some years in Brussels. It was there that he began formal singing lessons at the age of 28. However he had to overcome a social convention of resistance to one of his class his making a professional career as a singer, and not until the early 1900s, in his late thirties, did he gave his first professional performances in London. His principal teachers were Jacques Bouhy in Paris (1901–1903), and in London Henry Russell and Victor Biegel, who remained his friend and teacher throughout his life. Bouhy asked him to decide between a baritone career in opera or a tenor career in oratorio and concert (and he chose the latter).
His first professional appearance in London was opposite Agnes Nicholls, in Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar by Engelbert Humperdinck at the St James's Hall, with the Handel Society under J. S. Liddle in late April 1903, and immediately afterwards he appeared at the Westmorland Festival. In June 1903 he was auditioned at the Royal College of Music in London by Charles Villiers Stanford, who left the room and brought Hubert Parry in to hear him as well. The violinist Professor Kruse, who was then attempting to revive the Saturday 'Pops' at the St James's Hall jumped out of his chair and promptly engaged him, and it was Kruse who arranged for his first appearance in Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius early in 1904 as an addition to his Beethoven Festival. Harry Plunket Greene, who had encouraged Elwes through this audition, also remained his lifelong friend.
The character of his voice
Elwes had a voice entirely in the English colouring, but with an unusual quality of sincerity and passion, and of considerable power. His diction and intonation were very secure, his delivery somewhat ‘gentlemanly’ but his phrasing long in conception and serving intense melodic inflections. His singing possessed a spiritual fervour deriving from the religious disposition of his parents, who had taken the unusual step (for their class) of conversion to Catholicism when he was five years old.
Victor Biegel, a 'little round, bald Viennese', was for some time accompanist to the celebrated German lieder singer Raimund von zur-Mühlen and had a special understanding of the songs of Johannes Brahms, which he imparted to Elwes. There was a great rapport, and his teaching, especially during his six-month residence at Billing Hall (an Elwes estate) in 1903, completely freed and relaxed Elwes' voice, opening the way for the sustained power and brilliance of his upper register, and the vocal stamina which enabled him to maintain great oratorio roles (for which he was much in demand) with absolute conviction through a singing career of nearly two decades.
But it was as singer of English art-song, and the friend of many leading English composers, that he left his most permanent legacy. He was the dedicatee and first performer of (and the first person to record) Ralph Vaughan Williams cycle On Wenlock Edge and many of the finest songs of Roger Quilter (including the cycle To Julia), both of whom wrote with his voice in mind In 1912 he gave the first performance of Thomas Dunhill's song-cycle The wind among the reeds for the Philharmonic Society. He had the wholehearted admiration of every generation from Charles Villiers Stanford to Frank Bridge, and their successors still acknowledge the authority of his influence. He was also a wonderful inspiration to leading British singers of his time, as their many private and published memorials of him testify.
His death
Elwes died aged 55, at the height of his powers, in a horrific accident at Back Bay railway station in Boston, Massachusetts, in the midst of a high-profile recital tour of the United States. Elwes and his wife had alighted on the platform when the singer attempted to return to the conductor an overcoat which had fallen off the train. He leaned over too far and was hit by the train, falling between the train and the platform. He died of his injuries a few hours later. The tremendous loss felt by the musical establishment, the churches, and the population in general left the impression not merely of a great singer, but of a great man, whom many who never met him felt they knew personally through his singing. In short, he was loved. A week after the event, Edward Elgar wrote to Percy Hull, 'my personal loss is greater than I can bear to think upon, but this is nothing - or I must call it so - compared to the general artistic loss - a gap impossible to fill - in the musical world.'
Here are some more tracks by him!
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