| Isaac Nathan | |
| Birth Place: | Canterbury, Great Britain |
| Death Place: | Sydney, New South Wales |
| Occupation: | Composer, musicologist, journalist |
| Relatives: | Barnett Nathan (brother) |
Isaac Nathan (179215 January 1864) was an English composer, musicologist, journalist and self-publicist, who has been called the "father of Australian music".[1] "Known as the Father of Australian Music, Nathan also assisted the careers of numerous colonial musicians during his twenty year residence in Australia"[2] "Nathan's best known for the success of his Hebrew Melodies (1815-1840) in London. However, he made significant contributions as a singing teacher and music historian during his time at St James Palace and as a composer of opera in the Royal Theatres (1823-1833). After emigrating to Australia in 1840, Nathan wrote Australia's first opera's and Australia's first contemporary song cycle which entangled fragments of Aboriginal songlines with european musical traditions. Nathan tailored compositions to the unique individual singing needs of his students and community choirs while using the Neapolitan bel canto pedagogical tradition that he inherited in London. Nathan's best students were Mary Anne Lucy Chambers (1834-1894) "The Australian Nightingale" and Dame Marie Carandini, both of whom became the first teachers of Dame Nellie Melba. [3]
Isaac Nathan was born around c.1791 or 1792 in the English city of Canterbury to a chazzan (Jewish cantor) born in Poland, Menahem Monash "Polack" (the Pole), and his English Jewish wife, Mary (Lewis) Goldsmid (1779–1842). He was initially destined for his father's career and went to the Jewish night school of Solomon Lyon in Cambridge. As a young child, Nathan played violin, piano and organ. Showing an enthusiasm for music, he was apprenticed to the London Italian master singing teacher Domenico Corri. Corri transmitted the Neapolitan bel canto tradition of Nicola Porpora to a younger generation of musicians including Nathan. In 1813 Nathan conceived the idea of publishing settings of tunes from synagogue usage and persuaded Lord Byron to provide the words for these. The result was the poet's famous Hebrew Melodies. Nathan's setting of these remained in print for most of the century and new editions were published throughout his life, the last of which were printed in 1861.
The Hebrew Melodies used, for the most part, melodies from the synagogue service, though few if any of these were in fact handed down from the ancient service of the Temple in Jerusalem, as Nathan claimed. Many were European folk-tunes that had become absorbed into the synagogue service over the centuries with new texts (contrafacta). However they were the first attempt to set out the traditional music of the synagogue, with which Nathan was well acquainted through his upbringing, before the general public. To assist sales, Nathan recruited the famous Jewish singer John Braham to place his name on the title page, in return for a share of profits, although Braham in fact took no part in the creation of the Melodies.
The success of the Melodies gave Nathan some fame and notoriety. Nathan was a singing teacher at the St James Palace for a time, and claimed that one of his students was the Princess Royal, Princess Charlotte, and music librarian to the Prince Regent, later George IV. In support of this claim, examples of Nathan's sheet music has been found in the Royal Archives in the Music folder of Princess Sophia Augusta. It is likely that the singing teacher for the princess chose the music she would sing, and unlikely that any other singing teacher in the country would have chosen Nathan's music (largely because Nathan maintained strict watch over the copyright for his works). His edition of the Hebrew Melodies was dedicated to the Princess by royal permission.[4]
In 1816, Byron left England, never to return (nor to communicate further with Nathan). In 1817 Nathan's royal pupil Princess Charlotte died in childbirth. He thus lost his two major patrons.
Nathan undertook a runaway marriage with a music pupil, and another after his first wife's early death. Both spouses were Christian; however for both, Nathan also undertook and arranged synagogue marriages after the church ceremony. His hot temper probably accounts for a duel he fought over the honour of Lady Caroline Lamb, and his assault on an Irish nobleman who he thought had impugned one of his female pupils. The latter saw Nathan prosecuted, although he was acquitted. Nathan felt a special attachment for Lady Caroline; she was godmother to one of his children and he wrote her an appreciative poem in Hebrew, which he reprints in his Recollections of Lord Byron. Gambling on prize-fights was one cause of his financial problems. He may have spent at least some months in debtors' prisons. His copyright for Hebrew Melodies ought to have brought him income – at one point he sold it to his married sister, presumably to avoid it being lost in bankruptcy – but it became involved in complex legal disputes. He attempted a publishing business in partnership with his brother Barnett Nathan, who later became proprietor of Rosherville Gardens. Nathan fled to the west of England to hide from debt collectors.
In 1823, Nathan's father died, and he returned to London possibly with the aid of an inheritance. Nathan published a history of music (1823), dedicated by permission to King George IV, which shows in its treatment of Jewish music a great deal of understanding of the Bible and of Jewish traditions.[5] The Essay on the History and Theory of Music contains within it 90 pages of exercises in the Neapolitan bel canto tradition which Nathan documented. This work was intended as a prospectus curriculum for the new Royal Academy of Music and probably formed part of an application for the role of Professor of Singing at the newly formed institution which aspired to teach the old Italian tradition of opera singing in London. Nathan's treatise was later copied extensively by others including Domenic Crivelli (who was appointed Professor of Singing in 1824, and given access to Nathan's treatise), and Manuel Garcia II, who was sent a copy in 1836.[6] Nathan was not successful in his aspiration to be the Professor of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music, but he was given a consolation of sorts, being appointed to write opera for the Royal Theatres. Nathan wrote no less than 5 operas between 1823 and 1833, and many of his songs became extremely popular. He also wrote frequently for the popular press in London on boxing and music. Nathan was one of the best singing teachers in the world in the 1830s and by 1836 his Musurgia Vocalis, the second edition of his Essay on the History and Theory of Music established him as a world leading authority on the bel canto tradition. One of his pupils was another great English poet, the very young Robert Browning, who 60 years later recalled: 'As for singing, the best master of four I have, more or less, practiced with was Nathan, Author of the Hebrew Melodies; he retained certain traditional Jewish methods of developing the voice'.[7]
From 1837-1839, Nathan was entrusted by King William IV with an espionage mission and given a letter with Royal Seal guaranteeing his protection and indemnity. He was required to use his charisma and charm to persuade Sarah Woodward (an authoress) to hand over copies of a book called "The Secret History" which proposed to reveal the true identity of a second child of King George IV. The child had never exercised her claim, by blood, to be the rightful air to the throne (ahead of Victoria). The matter was considered to be a scheme but the threat of revelation of the story was likely to stir up the Chartists who were preparing with revolutionary sentiment. Nathan safely retrieved the documents (including a birth certificate and copies of the books). However, King William IV died a month before Nathan could return the documents to the Palace. Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, wanted Nathan to give him the documents. However, Nathan did not trust the man, and instead secretly gave the documents to the King's brother, and they remain in the Royal Archives of Windsor Palace today. When Nathan went to the Treasury to claim his expenses for the mission, Lord Melbourne intervened, took the letter with the Seal of King William IV and refused to pay the balance requested. The letter with King William's Seal can be found in the Melbourne Papers of the Royal Archives. Nathan was left in financial ruin. He sold everything he had and gathered his family and moved to Australia.
Nathan emigrated to Australia with his children, arriving in April 1841. There he became a leader of local musical life, acting as music adviser both to the synagogue and to the Roman Catholic cathedral in Sydney. He gave first or early performances in Australia of many of the works of Mozart and Beethoven.[8] On 3 May 1847, his Don John of Austria, the first opera to be written, composed and produced in Australia, was performed at the Royal Victoria Theatre, Sydney.[9] He was the first to research and transcribe Australian Aboriginal music;[10] he also set lyrics by the poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop.[11]
Nathan wrote Australia's first operas, Merry Freaks in Troublous Times (1843) and Don John of Austria (1847), and Australia's first contemporary Song Cycle "The Australian Melodies". He made significant contributions as a singing teacher, and as one of the countries earliest music journalists. Nathan published prolifically with announcements, advertisements, analysis, context, lyrics and reviews.
The London Jewish Chronicle of 25 March 1864 reported from Sydney:
Mr. Nathan was a passenger by No. 2 tramway car […] [he] alighted from the car at the southern end, but before he got clear of the rails the car moved onwards […] he was thus whirled round by the sudden motion of the carriage and his body was brought under the front wheel.
The horse-drawn tram was the first in Sydney: Nathan was Australia's (indeed the southern hemisphere's) first tram fatality.
He was buried in Sydney; his tomb is at Camperdown Cemetery.[12]
Many of Nathan's descendants became leading Australian citizens. Later descendants include four brothers – the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras; the psephologist Malcolm Mackerras; the headmaster of Sydney Grammar School Alastair Mackerras; the Sinologist Colin Mackerras – and their nephew, the conductor Alexander Briger.
Nathan's Hebrew Melodies was in print in England at least until the 1850s and were known widely across Europe. They were particularly prominent among Jewish circles, probably because they resonate with Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) sentiments.
Nathan can claim some credit as inspiring Byron's texts. These not only in themselves diffused a spirit of philosemitism in cultured circles (indeed they became perhaps Byron's most genuinely popular work); but they were used as the basis for settings by many other composers in the nineteenth century, both Jewish (Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Joachim) and gentile (Schumann, Loewe, Bruch, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, and others).
Nathan's writings on music had little direct influence, small sales, and received no serious reviews in the press. In isolation, he struck upon and highlighted a theme which was at the time a major concern of the Jewish intellectual movement in Germany; the delineation and promotion of a genuine Jewish culture. The same spirit seems to have motivated his pioneering work with the music of the indigenous Australians.[13]
Finally, Nathan's indomitable refusal to admit defeat in life in exile – he undoubtedly paralleled himself with his hero Byron – has enabled him, from his concertising and writings on Aboriginal music, to be justly remembered by antipodean musicologists as "the father of Australian music".[13]
Peter Sculthorpe wrote an orchestral piece in 1988 called "At the Grave of Isaac Nathan".[14]
Portrait of Isaac Nathan held by the National Library of Australia.