Carl August Nicholas Rosa
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Carl August Nicholas Rosa, born Karl August Nikolaus Rose (22 March 1842, Hamburg – 30 April 1889, Paris), was a German-born musical impresario best remembered for founding an English opera company known as the Carl Rosa Opera Company.
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[edit] Early career
He started as a solo violinist, studying at Leipzig (where he met and became lifelong friends with Arthur Sullivan) and Paris, and also had considerable success as a conductor both in England and America. In New York in 1867, he met and married the famous operatic soprano Euphrosyne Parepa. She was later known as Madame Parepa-Rosa.
In 1869, Carl and Parepa opened a small opera company in New York and toured in America for three seasons, with Parepa as the star and Carl as the conductor.
[edit] Carl Rosa Opera Company
In 1873 they started the Carl Rosa Opera Company (the change in name reflecting her pregnancy) and begain to tour, aiming to produce operas in English versions. Later in 1873, dramatist W. S. Gilbert approached Rosa about writing the music for a comic opera based on one of Gilbert's Bab Ballads, Trial by Jury: An Operetta. Parepa was to play the soprano lead, as part of Rosa's planned season of English opera at the Drury Lane Theatre. Parepa died in childbirth in 1874, and the project was temporarily dropped (until a competing manager, Richard D'Oyly Carte, produced Trial by Jury in 1875, with music by Arthur Sullivan). Rosa later endowed a Parepa-Rosa scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Carl Rosa married a second time in 1881.
For the next fifteen years, with Rosa at the helm, the company prospered with provincial tours and London seasons frequently in conjunction with Augustus Harris at the Drury Lane Theatre. Minnie Hauk, Georgina Burns, Charles Santley, Joseph Maas, Barton McGuckin, and William Ludwig were some of the famous singers associated with the company during these years.
English composers were encouraged. Pauline in 1876 (Frederic Hymen Cowen), Esmeralda in 1883 (Arthur Goring Thomas), Colomba in 1883 (Alexander Mackenzie), and The Canterbury Pilgrims in 1884 (Charles Villiers Stanford) were but four of the operas commissioned by the company. When Rosa died suddenly in 1889, he had demonstrated that English opera could be an artistic and financial success. Both during his life and after his death, his company had much to do with popularizing good music in England, encouraging native composers and training a number of excellent singers.
[edit] Rosa's legacy
The company was later permitted to use the royal title, becoming the "Royal Carl Rosa Opera Company". Unlike many other opera companies, the Carl Rosa survived the First World War, but financial difficulties forced liquidation in 1920. Four years later, control had passed to H. B. Phillips, whose own opera company had merged with the Carl Rosa a few years earlier. Another financial crisis in 1951 prompted the Arts Council subsidy to support further tours in an uneasy alliance with the Carl Rosa Trust. In 1958, the Arts Council controversially withdrew its subsidy, and Carl Rosa merged with Sadlers' Wells Opera.
[edit] The revived Carl Rosa Opera Company
The New Carl Rosa Opera Company was revived in 1988, and has toured the UK and internationally, offering a new repertoire of light operas, including Gilbert and Sullivan, and continental operettas.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
