www.balfebiography.com

Michael William Balfe, achieved fame in London in 1835 immediately after the premiere of his first opera, The Siege of Rochelle. For the 
next thirty-five years this unique Irish born musician was destined to be the most important operatic composer in Britain.

He was to music in Victorian Britain what his renowned contemporary, Charles Dickens was to literature. The popularity of their respective 
works reached far beyond London, Dublin and New York in the English speaking world. The two were good friends. Balfe also achieved great personal success in places such, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Bologna, Palermo, Trieste and St. Petersburg in Russia. Balfe was the only British composer of his era to be invited to compose an opera for the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opéra).

In all, he composed twenty-eight operatic works over his lifetime. However, when his reworked, French, Italian and German language versions are added, he can actually be credited with forty-three operas.  For over 50 years his opera, The Bohemian Girl swept around the globe with great success having been translated into many different languages.  

Balfe had a remarkable career that started off in Italy of the 1820s at the very dawn of the great Belcanto operatic period when Italian masters such as, Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini were paving the way for the next generation of composers. Balfe was there when Norma, La sonnambula, Anna Bolena and other great works had their Milan premieres. Rossini was so impressed with the young man that he became Balfe’s mentor, forging a relationship that changed the young Irishman’s life forever.

The biography unearths many new facts about this important Victorian composer, his music, his family, and his role as a music director at London’s Italian Opera House, where he directed the local premieres of several Verdi operas.  It lists all of his operas with premiere casts and the principal arias. It also identifies, the current location of all known Balfe’s scores and music, including his early Italian operatic compositions which have been deemed “lost” by most scholars. It details information about previously unknown cantatas which were written for famous singers, such as, Duprez, Viardot and Grisi and instrumental works, concert arias and songs. It provides a special insight into his strong family relationships with his wife, Lina Roser-Balfe and two daughters and the ‘cool’ relationship with his ‘rogue’ son, Michael William Balfe junior. The previously unanswered questions of why Balfe never visited America and why he was never knighted are explained, for the very first time.  

This definitive biography of this Irish born composer took seven years of international research. It corrects many anecdotal errors of previous books. It documents Balfe the man, his early life in his native Dublin, his lifetime work, his descendents, his legacy and influence. 

Because so much of the information it contains is not available anywhere else, it should be of great appeal to scholars, musicians, students of the Victorian period and those interested in better understanding this unique composer and the scope of his personal achievements.  
                                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                      Basil Walsh - Author 
                                                                                                                                                                        Palm Beach,  Florida
                                                                                                                                                                        basilwalsh@msn.com

                                                                                                            APPENDICES

                                                                       VIII. Balfe as Musical Director at the Italian Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre London – 
                                                                        operas conducted, dates and casts (1846–1852) 

GENERAL INDEX          

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

   BASIL WALSH is a published author and writer on nineteenth century opera. He was born in Dublin, Ireland but has spent most of his adult life in Florida in the USA.  In 2001 he was invited by the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin to contribute to its multi-volume forthcoming Dictionary of of Irish Biography. His 370 page biography, Catherine Hayes: The Hibernian Prima Donna about the life and times of Ireland's first great international operatic prima donna, was published in Europe and the USA in 2000. He has also contributed to Opera Quarterly (Oxford University Press), the Donizetti Society of London Newsletter. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG-Germany),  and to the forthcoming, Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland (UCD Press), the Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas (ABC-CLIO, California), The Victorian Web and the Princess Grace Irish Library of Monaco. His current work, Michael W. Balfe: A Unique Victorian Composer has recently been being published by Irish Academic Press, Dublin in association with the Arts Council of Ireland  for the composer's bicentenary which will occur in 2008.

        
                                                                             
                                                                                                  Italian Opera - London mid nineteenth century.

                                       Balfe statue at Drury Lane Theatre, London  erected in 1874                           Luigi Lablache creator of Balfe's Falstaff - London 1838.

                                                                 
                 La Bohémienne (The Bohemian Girl) Paris, 1869                           The Prayer of the Nation - London circa 1840                               Die vier Haimonskinder, Vienna 1844

                                                                                         
                                                                                              Playbill for Balfe's The Bohemian Girl from December 1843
                                                                                                                              one week after the opera's outstanding London premiere.