home, she was ‘everybody’s darling,’ Shaw wrote: ‘she broke many hearts, but never her own.’ She longed not for a lover, but for a mother and father: a family. Not finding one, she affected a defensively low opinion of men. ‘Brothers don’t matter to their sisters,’ Shaw commented; ‘at least I didn’t matter to mine: it is the stranger who is loved. The natural dislike for near relatives is ordained to save frightful complications. So presto vivace... and away with melancholy!’
Italian opera seemed what Lucy was heading for even before she sang Amina in Lee’s production, at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Lee had begun to organize musical evenings in the Antient Concert Room at 42½ Great Brunswick Street. These were often in aid of hospitals and would include a popular overture, some ballads and choruses, and the strengthening contribution from a regimental band. For the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864, having worked up a programme of Purcell and Schubert, Lee emerged at the head of his Amateur Musical Society as an orchestral conductor. He had no scholarship but, conducting from a first violin or vocal score, gave the right time to the band. ‘There was practically no music in Dublin except the music he manufactured,’ Shaw wrote.
‘He kept giving concerts... and he had to provide all the singers for them. If he heard a flute mourning or a fiddle scraping in a house as he walked along the street, he knocked at the door & said “You come along & play in my orchestra.” If a respectable citizen came for twelve lessons to entertain small tea parties, he presently had that amazed gentleman, scandalous in tights & tunic, singing as “il rio di Luna” to my mother’s Azucena, or Alfonso to her Lucrezia, as the case might be. He coached them into doing things utterly beyond their natural powers.’
‘This favourite Society,’ reported the Irish Times on 30 May 1865, ‘...includes many of the most distinguished amateur vocalists in the city... On few occasions has the Ancient Concert’s Music Hall contained a larger and more fashionable attendance... and the concert was in every respect most judiciously carried out.’ This was typical of the notices that the Amateur Musical Society received in the late 1860s. But Lee wanted to conduct oratorio festivals and operas; and his ambitions were set upon London.
*
It was probably in 1869 that Lee first began to dream of a conquest of London. He appears to have taken Bessie Shaw into his confidence. On 30 October that year Bessie and her brother made an agreement with their father whereby the son received £2,500 (equivalent to £97,500 in 1997) and Bessie £1,500 paid to her at the rate of £100 a year ‘for her own sole and separate use and free from the debts control or engagements of her husband’. This was in addition to £400 settled on Agnes either through the estate of Ellen Whitcroft or Mrs Shaw’s own trust of 1852. Bessie now had the maximum financial independence it was in her power to command.
Six weeks later, Lee published a book entitled The Voice: Its Artistic Production, Development, and Preservation. Encased between heavy dark green boards elaborately stamped in gold, with a woodcut on its cover from Maclise’s Origins of the Harp, this volume of 130 pages of ‘agreeably tinted’ paper represented Lee’s passport to a larger musical world. It had been ghosted, Shaw tells us, ‘by a scamp of a derelict doctor whom he entertained for that purpose’ – probably Malachi J. Kilgarriff, Demonstrator at the Ledwich School of Anatomy, a Catholic and one-time neighbour of Lee’s in Harrington Street.
Not long after this, while still thirteen, Sonny was sent off to be interviewed by a firm of cloth merchants, Scott, Spain & Rooney, on one of Dublin’s quays. His employment in the warehouse loading bales was on the point of being settled when the senior partner walked in and declared that ‘I was too
Italian opera seemed what Lucy was heading for even before she sang Amina in Lee’s production, at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Lee had begun to organize musical evenings in the Antient Concert Room at 42½ Great Brunswick Street. These were often in aid of hospitals and would include a popular overture, some ballads and choruses, and the strengthening contribution from a regimental band. For the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864, having worked up a programme of Purcell and Schubert, Lee emerged at the head of his Amateur Musical Society as an orchestral conductor. He had no scholarship but, conducting from a first violin or vocal score, gave the right time to the band. ‘There was practically no music in Dublin except the music he manufactured,’ Shaw wrote.
‘He kept giving concerts... and he had to provide all the singers for them. If he heard a flute mourning or a fiddle scraping in a house as he walked along the street, he knocked at the door & said “You come along & play in my orchestra.” If a respectable citizen came for twelve lessons to entertain small tea parties, he presently had that amazed gentleman, scandalous in tights & tunic, singing as “il rio di Luna” to my mother’s Azucena, or Alfonso to her Lucrezia, as the case might be. He coached them into doing things utterly beyond their natural powers.’
‘This favourite Society,’ reported the Irish Times on 30 May 1865, ‘...includes many of the most distinguished amateur vocalists in the city... On few occasions has the Ancient Concert’s Music Hall contained a larger and more fashionable attendance... and the concert was in every respect most judiciously carried out.’ This was typical of the notices that the Amateur Musical Society received in the late 1860s. But Lee wanted to conduct oratorio festivals and operas; and his ambitions were set upon London.
*
It was probably in 1869 that Lee first began to dream of a conquest of London. He appears to have taken Bessie Shaw into his confidence. On 30 October that year Bessie and her brother made an agreement with their father whereby the son received £2,500 (equivalent to £97,500 in 1997) and Bessie £1,500 paid to her at the rate of £100 a year ‘for her own sole and separate use and free from the debts control or engagements of her husband’. This was in addition to £400 settled on Agnes either through the estate of Ellen Whitcroft or Mrs Shaw’s own trust of 1852. Bessie now had the maximum financial independence it was in her power to command.
Six weeks later, Lee published a book entitled The Voice: Its Artistic Production, Development, and Preservation. Encased between heavy dark green boards elaborately stamped in gold, with a woodcut on its cover from Maclise’s Origins of the Harp, this volume of 130 pages of ‘agreeably tinted’ paper represented Lee’s passport to a larger musical world. It had been ghosted, Shaw tells us, ‘by a scamp of a derelict doctor whom he entertained for that purpose’ – probably Malachi J. Kilgarriff, Demonstrator at the Ledwich School of Anatomy, a Catholic and one-time neighbour of Lee’s in Harrington Street.
Not long after this, while still thirteen, Sonny was sent off to be interviewed by a firm of cloth merchants, Scott, Spain & Rooney, on one of Dublin’s quays. His employment in the warehouse loading bales was on the point of being settled when the senior partner walked in and declared that ‘I was too
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