Frank Osmond Carr

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frank Osmond Carr (23 April 1858–29 August 1916), known as F. Osmond Carr, was an English composer of musical comedy and comic opera. He was born in Bradford, Yorkshire. He died in Uxbridge, Middlesex.

[edit] Life and career

Jessie Bond in His Excellency

Carr's first produced work (with lyricist Arthur Ropes, who wrote under the name Adrian Ross) was the burlesque Faddimir, or the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 1889, which gained the notice of producer George Edwardes. Edwardes began to commission songs from Carr and Ross, and soon, all the the songs for a burlesque of Joan of Arc (1891), and soon after that, the score for In Town (1892). Carr also wrote Blue Eyed Susan that year. This was followed by the successful Morocco Bound (1893), a piece which crystallized the music-hall influenced "variety musical" form, the musical comedy Go-Bang (1894, with Ross), both for producer Fred Harris, and Inspector (1893), a "musical charade".

1n 1894, Edwardes engaged Carr to collaborate with W. S. Gilbert (then estranged from Arthur Sullivan) on the comic opera His Excellency. Carr's musicals in the late 1890s, including Billy (1895), My Girl, Biarritz (both with Ross in 1896), Lord Tom Noddy (1896, with George Dance), Thrillby (1897) and The Maid of Athens (1897), were all unsuccessful, although a number of individual songs from these musicals became popular.

Carr's post-1900 pieces included The Southern Belle (1901), The Rose of the Riviera (1903), Miss Mischief (1904) and The Scottish Bluebells (1906), all of which had at least a provincial success, but he never regained his early popularity.