Aria by an American Librettist Became the 19th Century’s International Popular Hit

 

 

                                 Mid-19th Century American sheet music for Home, Sweet Home.

As Mother’s Day nears it is apt to share the story of a sentimental song celebrating home—a place identified with moms.  Perhaps the biggest international hit of the 19th Century made its public bow on May 8, 1823 in London with the premier of the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan.  That opus is long forgotten but one aria leapt to immediate popular acclaim.  The librettist was an American—John Howard Payne.  He was also an actor, poet, and playwright who had taken up residence in England and enjoyed considerable success there.  The aria set to music a poem he had scribbled a year earlier.

Payne’s partner was Englishman Henry Rowley Bishop, a prolific  composer of opera and light opera who in 1842 became the first musician to be knighted for his work.  Bishop also borrowed from his own earlier work, a more elaborate art song which he had published anonymously as A Sicilian Air.

 

                                                 Composer Henry Rowley Bishop saw his tune become a hit twice.

Due to its popularity the simple aria dubbed Home, Sweet Home was rushed to publication in piano sheet music and earned an astonishing £2,100 in its first year—a veritable fortune.  The publisher, the  producer of the opera, and Bishop all did very well.  But the profligate Payne, who had little or no business sense quickly squandered his share.  “While his money lasted, he was a prince of bohemians,”  noted an acquaintance.

The opera quickly jumped the puddle and premiered in Philadelphia on October 29, 1823 at the fashionable Winter Tivoli Theatre and was sung by Mrs. Williams.  Americans quickly took the song to heart and were very proud that a countryman had achieved success at the pinnacle of British high culture.

 

                                                 John Howard Payne won acclaim for his song, but pissed away the fortune it might have brought him

Not long after a broke Payne returned to the United States and Quixotically took up residence with the Cherokee just as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policies were coming into place.  He found new notoriety for his articles in defense of the tribe which hypothesized that they were one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  In 1842 John Tyler, probably in an attempt to shore up shaky Whig support for his Presidency appointed him to the post of American Consul to Tunis, an undemanding sinecure he held until his death on April 10, 1852.

The same year that Payne died in North Africa, Bishop re-introduced the song with a simplified arrangement as a popular parlor piano piece.  The sentimental, family idealizing Victorian Age was in full swing and the song with Payne’s plaintive lyrics  was perfect for family sings after Sunday dinner.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there

Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere

Home! Home!

Sweet, sweet home!

There’s no place like home

There’s no place like home!

 

An exile from home splendor dazzles in vain

Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again

The birds singing gaily that came at my call

And gave me the peace of mind dearer than all

Home, home, sweet, sweet home

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!

The sheet music  flew off of store shelves on both sides of the Atlantic.  It was a bigger hit than the first exposure, much like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody scored higher on the charts in 1992 when it was used in Wayne’s World than on its first release in 1976.

Home, Sweet Home  was taken all over the far flung British Empire where it was sung by homesick colonial officials, soldiers, missionaries, merchants and their families like another sentimental ballad, Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne spread. 

During the Civil War in America it became both a favorite campfire ballad and a song of the families left behind by the troops.  The power of the song was shown  when desertions sky rocketed as the tune swept camps leading some Yankee commanders to ban it from their bivouacs.

 

                                                        A classic Home Sweet Home sampler.

 Home, Sweet Home had an impact on popular culture in many ways.  Notable were the ubiquitous sewing samplers that were made and hung homes humble and grand.   The refrain “There’s no place like home” entered the American vocabulary and was soon being referenced in literature, most famously in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz published in 1900.

In 1909 in the early Edison Studio western The House of Cards when a saloon brawl breaks out a title card was flashed reading “Play Home, Sweet Home!” followed by a shot of a fiddler  and the melee breaking up as men stream out of the tavern, some with tears in their eyes.  That established a tradition of playing the song at last call that persisted in many joints through the Depression years sort of like  Semisonic’s Closing Time is now played by weary bartenders trying to clear the place out.

Home, Sweet Home had a good run—more than a century of popularity during which time just about everyone was as familiar with the lyrics as with Happy Birthday.  But times and tastes change.  It is far too sweet and sentimental to the point of maudlin for a modern culture that favors cool ironic detachment and suspects that every home is just nest of dysfunction and angst.

Folks just don’t sing Home, Sweet Home any more.

 

Valentine the Delisted Saint—or Saints—Whose Feast Day Rolls On

                                       An icon of St. Valentine.

 

So just what do we know about this St. Valentine whose feast day is the occasion of all of today’s romantic hoopla?  Absolutely nothing, nada, zilch.  A Valentine was evidently venerated in the very early Latin Church and likely a martyr.  The name appears in the rolls of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum which was compiled from older and mostly lost local documents between 460 and 544.  In 496 when Pope Gelasius I was regularizing the calendar of saint feast days he assigned Valentine February 14 and listed him among the saints, “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”  In other words at that early date, the Church knew nothing about his life.

Legends grew up about possibly two Saints Valentine who were celebrated on the February date, martyred, and buried somewhere along the Via Flaminia outside of Rome or perhaps they were the same man.  Later hagiographers elaborated on those sketchy oral traditions.  He has been identified as a 3rd Century bishop of Interamna—modern Terni.  He has also been identified as Roman priest of about the same period.

A church window celebrating the Bishop of Terni adopts the theme of secret forbidden weddings usually associated with the Roman priest known as Valentine.

An elaborate story about the Bishop has him held under house arrest by a certain Judge Asterius with whom he discussed his faith.  Asterius challenged Valentine to show the power of God by healing his blind daughter, a miracle the Bishop promptly performed.  In gratitude Asterius, his entire family, and his large household including slaves were all baptized.  He also smashed all of the idols in his villa and released all of his Christian prisoners.  Although the Bishop was off the hook with Asterius, he later fell afoul of other Roman officials, perhaps while visiting Rome itself, was tortured, refused to denounce the Faith, and was then executed in some suitably grizzly manner.

Other tales spoke of the Roman priest among whose crimes may have been marrying either/or Christians or soldiers who were forbidden to wed during their lengthy period of enlistment.  He also may have personally tried to convert the Emperor Claudius Gothicus (Claudius II) who ordered his execution.  Or so the stories went.  And perhaps the priest executed by Claudius was also the Bishop of Interamna…or not.

 

The beheading of St. Valentine from a Medieval illuminated manuscript.

Even if they were not sure who they were venerating, Valentine was one of the more popular saints in the early Middle Ages and his feast was widely celebrated.  He was associated with love as the Patron of Affianced Couples.  That romantic connection may have been as much due to his feast being fixed the day before the pagan Roman festival of Lupercalia which was noteworthy for its sexual excesses.  As we saw in an earlier post this year on Groundhog Day/Candlemas Pope Gelasius also fixed the date of the Feast of the Candles near Lupercalia.  Both Christian feasts were supposedly helpful in luring stubborn pagans to the Church.

In the Age of Chivalry he became identified with courtly love.  Marriage between the feudal nobility and their knights was expected to be a dynastic and business relationship meant to cement alliance, preserve or enhance wealth (estates and land) and produce children and heirs with prestigious blood lines.  Romance or love between the parties of the arranged marriages was neither expected nor encouraged.  For the excitement of love the noble young man or dashing knight was permitted to turn his attention to some lady of his court or some other lord and she was allowed to return his admiration.  The lady might be a maiden but more frequently was the dutiful wife of another.  The gentleman could woo her with poetry, dedicate his victories in battle or tournament often by carrying some token given to him by her, to perform routine acts of gallantry, defend her honor against all who would sully it, and slay any dragons that might annoy her.  In return she was supposed to inspire him to greatness and demurely adore him. 

 

Courtly love and its later fascination for the Romantics helped popularize St. Valentine's Day as a celebration of love in the Victorian  Era.
 
Theoretically this love was pure and chaste with the lady reserving her body for the production of her husband’s heirs.  In reality, of course, things were messier.  Husbands often had their own courtly love interests.  Sometimes everyone whistled and hummed ignoring what was plainly going on and tacitly accepting it.  Other times jealousy or mere possessiveness reared its ugly head—think the nasty Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle.  More than one blood feud, war, or spousal murder was the result.

Either way, bards composed ballads some of which became folk songs and others which became literary epics.

  
All of this happened under the apparent approving eye and protection of good ol’ St. Valentine, whoever he was.  None of it, however, applied serfs, peasants, and other commoners who were supposed to be slaves of carnal desire and indiscriminate rutting barely restrained by church marriages and expected to be fertile and breed in sufficient numbers as to ensure a steady supply of field drudges and expendable levies of ground troops.  Also their wives and daughters were expected to be available for the less noble urges of their overlords.

Courtly love and St. Valentine took a hit with Renaissance, Reformation, and the rise of the absolute monarchs and the nation state.  Those reliable killjoys the English Puritans did their best to stamp out such nonsense as did Protestant Reformers in Germany, the Low Countries, and elsewhere in Europe.  Even in the Catholic Italian states, the, you should pardon the expression, throbbing heart of Valentine veneration things got dialed down for a while.

That changed with the rise of the Romantics and Victorians.  They ate up tales of courtly love and expanding on them in French poetry, Wagnerian opera, and in the insatiable appetite for Arthurian tales and Sir Walter Scott novels in England.  Young girls swooned over knights in shining armor and boys dreamed of winning fair damsels by daring do. 

                                    A Victorian hand made lace Valentine by Esther Howland circa 1870.

 
St. Valentine’s fortunes also rose.  The custom among the better classes of exchanging elaborate handmade Valentines took hold and spread to the rising middle classes who followed the lead of their betters.  By the late 19th Century the development of inexpensive color lithography made commercial valentines available to the masses.  It turned out shop girls and ordinary clerks could dream of romance, too.

Valentine's Day was well on it way to being a commercial bonanza when a young Elizabeth Taylor was featured in this early 1950's Whitman Sampler magazine ad.
 

The discovery of the commercial potential of St. Valentine’s Day and its promotion by the greeting card industry, florists, candy makers, jewelers, restaurants, and entertainment venues is a story in itself.  Suffice it to say that Valentine’s Day has become a very big deal and the second biggest gift giving occasion in the United States.  It has also become an emotional test both embraced and dreaded by couples and lonely singles.

What of the Saint himself?  Well, he seems to have become crowded out of his feast day.  In the U.S. at least hardly anyone even calls it St. Valentine’s Day anymore. 

 
Although the Anglican Communion and Lutherans as well as some Orthodox Churches include St. Valentine’s Day in their calendars, he was dropped by the Catholic Church from the General Roman Calendar in 1969 because so little was known about him that his very existence might be called into questions.  He was not, however, completely erased from the roster of Saints like other popular but probably apocryphal figures like St. Christopher and St. George the Dragon Slayer.  Local Bishops have the option of keeping his Feast Day on February 14.  That was a tribute to his mythic power.

 

A relic supposedly of St. Valentine's skull is preserved at the Santa Maria Basilica in Rome.  Other churches, including one in Dublin, Ireland also claim to have relics.
 

It should not have been a surprise.  In 1960 a St. Valentine’s Church was built to serve the athletes in the Rome Olympic Village.  When the Games were over the Church became the home of a new parish in the Eternal City.  It is one of the most visited churches in the city with a vibrant membership including many young adults and is frequently sought out by tourists. 

 
Proving that you just can’t keep an old Saint down or the romance he invokes.  
 

Opera Aria by American Librettist Became Top 19th Century International Popular Hit

                        Mid-19th Century American sheet music for Home, Sweet Home.

On the eve of Mother’s Day it is apt to share the story of a sentimental song celebrating home—a place identified with moms.  Perhaps the biggest international hit of the 19th Century made its public bow on May 8, 1823 in London with the premier of the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan.  That opus is long forgotten but one aria leapt to immediate popular acclaim.  The librettist was an American—John Howard Payne.  He was also an actor, poet, and playwright who had taken up residence in England and enjoyed considerable success there.  The aria set to music a poem he had scribbled a year earlier.

Payne’s partner was Englishman Henry Rowley Bishop, a prolific  composer of opera and light opera who in 1842 became the first musician to be knighted for his work.  Bishop also borrowed from his own earlier work, a more elaborate art song which he had published anonymously as A Sicilian Air.

                        Composer Henry Rowley Bishop saw his tune become a hit twice.

Due to its popularity the simple aria dubbed Home, Sweet Home was rushed to publication in piano sheet music and earned an astonishing £2,100 in its first year—a veritable fortune.  The publisher, the  producer of the opera, and Bishop all did very well.  But the profligate Payne, who had little or no business sense quickly squandered his share.  “While his money lasted, he was a prince of bohemians,”  noted an acquaintance.

The opera quickly jumped the puddle and premiered in Philadelphia on October 29, 1823 at the fashionable Winter Tivoli Theatre and was sung by Mrs. Williams.  Americans quickly took the song to heart and were very proud that a countryman had achieved success at the pinnacle of British high culture.

                        John Howard Payne won acclaim for his song, but pissed away the fortune it might have brought him

Not long after a broke Payne returned to the United States and Quixotically took up residence with the Cherokee just as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policies were coming into place.  He found new notoriety for his articles in defense of the tribe which hypothesized that they were one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  In 1842 John Tyler, probably in an attempt to shore up shaky Whig support for his Presidency appointed him to the post of American Consul to Tunis, an undemanding sinecure he held until his death on April 10, 1852.

The same year that Payne died in North Africa, Bishop re-introduced the song with a simplified arrangement as a popular parlor piano piece.  The sentimental, family idealizing Victorian Age was in full swing and the song with Payne’s plaintive lyrics  was perfect for family sings after Sunday dinner.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there

Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere

Home! Home!

Sweet, sweet home!

There’s no place like home

There’s no place like home!

 

An exile from home splendor dazzles in vain

Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again

The birds singing gaily that came at my call

And gave me the peace of mind dearer than all

Home, home, sweet, sweet home

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!

The sheet music  flew off of store shelves on both sides of the Atlantic.  It was a bigger hit than the first exposure, much like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody scored higher on the charts in 1992 when it was used in Wayne’s World than on its first release in 1976.

Home, Sweet Home  was taken all over the far flung British Empire where it was sung by homesick colonial officials, soldiers, missionaries, merchants and their families like another sentimental ballad, Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne was spread. 

During the Civil War in America it became both a favorite campfire ballad and a song of the families left behind by the troops.  The power of the song was shown  when desertions sky rocketed as the tune swept camps leading some Yankee commanders to ban it from their bivouacs.

                                A classic Home Sweet Home sampler.

Home, Sweet Home had an impact on popular culture in many ways.  Notable were the ubiquitous sewing samplers that were made and hung homes humble and grand.   The refrain “There’s no place like hope” entered the American vocabulary and was soon being referenced in literature, most famously in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz published in 1900.

In 1909 in the early Edison Studio western The House of Cards when a saloon brawl breaks out a title card was flashed reading “Play Home, Sweet Home!” followed by a shot of a fiddler  and the melee breaking up as men stream out of the tavern, some with tears in their eyes.  That established a tradition of playing the song at last call that persisted in many joints through the Depression years sort of like  Semisonic’s Closing Time is now played by weary bartenders trying to clear the place out.

Home, Sweet Home had a good run—more than a century of popularity during which time just about everyone was as familiar with the lyrics as with Happy Birthday.  But times and tastes change.  It is far too sweet and sentimental to the point of maudlin for a modern culture that favors cool ironic detachment and suspects that every home is just nest of dysfunction and angst.

Folks don’t sing Home, Sweet Home any more.