Edwin Henry Lemare (9 September 1866 - 24 September 1934)[1] was an English organist and composer who lived the latter part of his life in the United States.
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He was born in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, and received his early musical training as a chorister and organist under his father (a music seller, also called Edwin Lemare) at Holy Trinity Church. He spent three years at the Royal Academy of Music from 1876 on a Goss Scholarship, where he studied under Sir G. A. Macfarren, Walter Cecil Macfarren, Dr Charles Steggall and Dr Edmund H. Turpin. He obtained the F.R.C.O. in 1886. He became an organ professor and examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in 1892.
He gained fame by playing two recitals a day, over a hundred in total, on the one-manual Brindley & Foster organ in the Inventions Exhibition in 1884. He gave bi-weekly recitals at the Park Hall, Cardiff, from 1886; this was followed by further appointments around Great Britain.
After apparently treating church services in London as concerts, he left for a hundred-recital tour of the USA and Canada from 1900–1901, and stayed in North America for most of the remainder of his life. He also toured Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, where he helped to design the organs for Auckland Town Hall and Melbourne Town Hall. He died in Hollywood, California.
As a player, he had a very large repertoire and was in constant demand; he was the most highly-paid organist of his day, and earned previously unheard-of sums when he went to America. He performed to as many as 10,000 people, and travelled the Atlantic so often that crew members of the ocean liners knew him by name. Some evidence of his excellent playing survives to this day: he made 24 player rolls for the Aeolian Company and 96 for Welte in Freiburg, which have been played again and recorded. He was also a very capable improviser; he recorded and transcribed some of his improvisations for publication.
Of his many compositions for the organ, many are 'light music' designed to show off the tone and capabilities of the huge organs of his day, and have fallen out of favour (though Christopher Herrick has recorded much of Lemare's music in his Organ Fireworks series). Unusually, his qualities as a composer are generally thought to have declined rather than improved with age; his first two organ symphonies are considered to rival those of his French contemporaries in quality.
The Andantino in D-flat, known as Moonlight and Roses, op.83 no.2 (1888), is one of Edwin Lemare's few well-known original compositions. It became so popular that he was asked to play it in nearly all his concerts. It sold tens of thousands of copies, though he did not initially make any money out of it; when it was published in 1892 by Robert Cocks in London, he received a flat fee of three guineas. Lemare did not call it Moonlight and Roses nor did he attach any words to the tune; it was American songwriters Ben Black and Charles N. Daniels (under the pseudonym Neil Moret) who added these words to the melody, without permission, in 1921:
Moonlight and roses
Bring wonderful mem'ries of you.
My heart reposes
In beautiful thoughts so true.
June light discloses
Love's olden dreams sparkling anew,
Moonlight and roses
Bring mem'ries of you.
The piece became extremely popular and sold over one million copies. Lemare threatened legal action in 1925, resulting in his obtaining a share of the royalties; he finally profited from his popular tune. The piece uses the technique known as thumbing down; the left hand plays an accompaniment on the choir manual, while the fingers of the right hand play the tune on the solo manual, and the thumb of the right hand simultaneously plays the tune on the great manual, in parallel sixths. The player is thus playing on three manuals at once.[2]
Published as The Organ Music of Edwin H. Lemare, edited by Wayne Leupold (Wayne Leupold Editions/E. C. Schirmer). Series I (Original Compositions): Volume I, II, III and IV; Series II (Transcriptions). He also composed church music and an orchestral symphony.
Edwin Lemare was a prolific transcriber of orchestral music for the organ, for his own performance in concerts. While there was likely an element of pure showmanship to these transcriptions - which allowed Lemare to display his uncanny skill as a transcriber of major symphonic works, as well as his phenomenal technique - Lemare sincerely believed he was also performing a service in letting concert audiences in mid-sized American towns hear important orchestral works from Europe that would otherwise go unknown in locales with no resident symphony orchestra. Many of his transcriptions are still performed today, especially those he did of the works of Wagner.