Composer's life wasn't all a bed of roses
ARE they playing your tune? "Moonlight and roses, Bring wonderful mem'ries of you. My heart reposes, In beautiful thoughts so true."
Jim Reeves may have made it famous in recent years but he didn't write it. You may find this hard to believe but the composer Edwin Lemare was once organist at Sheffield Cathedral over a century ago.
"He wrote it while he was here and it came to haunt him. He had to play it all the time," says Anthony Gowing, assistant master of music at Sheffield Cathedral, who will be giving a lecture and recital – including a performance of Moonlight and Roses – on Tuesday.
It marks the 75th anniversary of his death.
Lemare came to Sheffield Cathedral, then the city's parish church, in 1886 as a 23-year-old prodigy. He doubled the job up with being organist at the city's Albert Hall.
Already he was giving indications of being what the Americans would later call "the greatest organist to have walked the planet."
Critics claimed he treated each service as if he was giving a concert. The concerts were soon to include Lemare's Andantino in D Flat to give it its proper name. It wasn't called Moonlight and Roses until American composers added lyrics in the early Twenties.
The composer dedicated it "to my wife" Marion, one of the Broomhead family, who didn't approve of him. They weren't actually married then. "They eloped on Boxing Day when his job came to an end but the marriage was later annulled," says Anthony.
Lemare was a great showman and became very big in America, playing to as many as 10,000 people and crossing the Atlantic so many times the crews on the ocean liners knew him by name.
People wanted to hear the Andantino yet he only got three guineas when it was first published as sheet music in 1892.
It wasn't until 1921 that writers Ben Black and Charles N Daniels added lyrics and title, selling over a million copies.
"It probably peeved him that he didn't make any money out of it and he sued," adds Anthony.
He first came across the piece when listening to The Audience Entertains on Radio 2. "I thought to myself this piece is terribly saccharine but rather lovely. I still think that," he says.
"I have long been interested in him as a celebrity and I've been aware of his music for a number of years. It is the challenge of learning his repertoire which is so different."
He hopes to be playing recordings of Lemare, made on cylinders at the height of his powers in Germany in 1913.
"They are breathtaking," he says.
After Sheffield, Lemare found jobs in London before moving to the United States, taking jobs at Pittsburg's Carnegie Institute, wowing the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 while that city's organist before finally ending up as civic organist in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the Twenties.
And everywhere people called for Moonlight and Roses although if they were tactful they called it the Andantino in D Flat.
He died in 1934 and is buried at Beverly Hills.
- The lecture and recital is in the cathedral at 7.30pm in aid of the building's Friends.
Tickets cost 5 on the door but if you want to sample the buffet call the cathedral first on 0114 275 3434.
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