John Braham ( – 17 February 1856) was an English tenor opera singer born in London. His long career led him to become one of Europe's leading opera stars. He also wrote a number of songs, of minor importance, although "The Death of Nelson" is still remembered. His success, and that of his offspring in marrying into the British aristocracy, are also notable examples of Jewish social mobility in the early 19th century.
Origins Braham's precise origins are uncertain. The favoured (but specious) present account in contemporary sources of reference is that he was possibly a son of John Abraham or Abrahams, who was possibly an operative at the Drury Lane Theatre who died in 1779 and his wife, who may have been Esther, who may have been a sister of the hazzan at the Great Synagogue of London, Myer Lyon. Braham has also been held to be related to various other London musicians with the surname of Abrahams. There is however no documentary evidence for any of these supposed connections.Conway (2011), 78-82
It is however fairly certain that Braham was left an orphan at an early age. There are stories of his selling pencils in the street as an urchin (a common trade for the Jewish poor at the time). Braham was a meshorrer (descant singer) at the Great Synagogue, and here his abilities were noted by Lyon, who led a double life as an operatic tenor at the theatre at Covent Garden (under the name of Michaele Leoni).
Early career
Braham's first stage appearance was in fact at Leoni's Covent Garden 1787 benefit, when he sang Thomas Arne's The soldier tir’d of war’s alarms. He next appeared in June at the Royalty Theatre, again with Leoni.Conway (2011), 82
After 1788, however, nothing hear of a public performance until Braham appeared at Bath under the aegis of his teacher, the male soprano Venanzio Rauzzini in 1794. This empty period will have coincided with the departure of Leoni and also with Braham's voice breaking. It also therefore suggests a birthdate of around 1774 or 1775, rather than the 1777 date given by nearly all modern sources. During this period, he was supported by the Goldsmid family. The Goldsmids were influential financiers who maintained their friendship with Braham later in his career and also had him entertain at their soirées. Their neighbour and occasional guest there was Horatio Nelson, whose later fate was to prompt Braham's greatest song-writing success, "The Death of Nelson". (It was first sung in the opera The Americans at the (Lyceum Theatre in 1811. Lady Hamilton, who was in a private box for the performance, was reported to have been so overcome that she suffered a fit of hysterics and had to leave the theatre.Conway (2011), 82-3)
Braham was trained by Rauzzini from 1794 to 1796. It is very likely that the Goldsmids paid for Braham to be articled to Rauzzini, who was a leader in Bath's musical society. Rauzzini's other pupils included the celebrated Irish tenor Michael Kelly, creator of Don Basilio in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. Braham certainly benefited from Rauzzini's influence and promotion, and acquired from him the basic precepts of the old Italian school and a virtuoso technique which was thought by some to be surpassed only by the soprano Angelica Catalani.
After his first performance at Bath in 1794, the Bath Chronicle eulogised him as 'a sweet singer of Israel' and explained that he "derived […] from the synagogue, though by the simple expedient of dropping the A at the beginning of his name, he got rid of the patriarchal appellation and Christianized himself."Bath Chronicle, 15 December 1796, cited in James (1987), 31 At this point, despite the implications of the article, Braham had made no moves toward conversion, although he may well have attended church as required by social custom of the time.
Braham and the Storaces This 1794 performance also marked Braham's first encounter with the Storace family. Stephen Storace (1762–1796), the son of an Italian musician based in Dublin, was an accomplished composer; and his sister Anna, known as Nancy (1765–1817), formerly also a student of Rauzzini, a talented soprano. They had already had much experience in Italy and in Vienna, where in 1786 Nancy created the first Susanna in Mozart's Figaro, and both had been friends of the composer. In Vienna Nancy had contracted an unfortunate marriage with the psychopathic English composer John Abraham Fisher, from whom she soon separated. At Braham's début, which was the first of the season at Bath, Nancy also performed, as a soloist and in a duet with him. It was the starting-point of a liaison which was to last for over twenty years, during which Nancy bore Braham a son, Spencer.
Stephen invited Braham to take the lead role in his new opera Mahmoud in 1796; Braham triumphed at the première. Later that year he sang lead roles, also to acclaim, at the Italian Opera in London, an extraordinary attainment for a Briton. In 1797 he appeared in the role created for his mentor Leoni, as Carlos in Sheridan's The Duenna at Covent Garden. The long triumphant phase of Braham's career was launched, which in its early years saw him and Nancy singing in every major continental house as well as in Britain, to audiences which included, in Paris (1797), Napoleon, in Livorno (1799), Nelson, and similar notables wherever else they appeared. Braham became the first English male singer to command a European reputation. In 1809 he sang in Dublin at the unheard of fee of 2000 guineas for fifteen concerts, an indisputable sign both of his fame and popularity, and of the growth of music and entertainment as industries in this period.Conway (2011), 84
Braham the Jew However, both by his own choice and by the sentiments of his audiences in England, Braham's Jewishness remained a prominent feature of his career until his marriage in 1816, and as the most famous English Jew of this period he became a significant incarnation of 'the Jew' in the British consciousness. He also regularly supported Jewish charities and causes.
Braham's physical appearance made it in any case difficult to disguise his origins, being short, stocky, swarthy and in general the epitome of a caricature Jew. The quality of his singing rendered his looks irrelevant to his audience; as was unpleasantly expressed by the satirist John Williams, who at the end of a long catalogue of supposed Jewish malpractices and some lubricious references to Braham's supposed venery, concludes his passage:
His voice and his judgement completely atone
For that heap of repulsion he cannot disown.
[...] When he breathes his divisions and liquidly soars,
'Frigid Science first hears, then bows low and adores!Williams (1797), 99
The writer and essayist Charles Lamb was effusive, if patronising, about Braham in a letter of 1808: Do you like Braham’s singing. The little Jew has bewitched me. I follow him like as the boys follow Tom the Piper. He cures me of melancholy as David cured Saul […]Braham’s singing when it is impassion’d is finer than Mrs. Siddons or Mr. Kemble's acting & when it is not impassion'd it [is] as good as hearing a person of fine sense talking. The brave little Jew!C. and M.Lamb, (1975-8), II, 273
In his published essays, however, Lamb, whilst continuing to profess admiration for Braham, lets his prejudices loose. His attitude does not differ much, in fact, from that of Williams already referred to, accepting Braham's talents only in the context of supposed distasteful practices of his people. In his essay Imperfect Sympathies published in 1821, he wrote:
B–[raham] would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of – Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea!" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. – B– has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is use. He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition.
Braham’s marriage Lamb had earlier attacked Braham rather more personally, and at some length, in the essay The Religion of Actors, not subsequently collected into the 'Elia' series. A celebrated performer has seen fit to oblige the world with a confession of his faith; or, Br–'s RELIGIO DRAMATICI. This gentleman, in his laudable attempt to shift from his person the obloquy of Judaism, with the forwardness of a new convert, in trying to prove too much, has, in the opinion of many, proved too little. A simple declaration of his Christianity was sufficient; but, strange to say, his apology has not a word about it. [….] We can do no less than congratulate the general state of Christendom upon the accession of so extraordinary a convert.C.and M. Lamb (1905), II, 389
It is not known to what statement by Braham Lamb refers in this passage; no document or publication has been identified in which Braham writes of his religion. Nor, as Lamb hints, is there any evidence of Braham's actual conversion. However the passage is undoubtedly associated with Braham's marriage to (the Gentile) Miss Bolton of Manchester in 1816. This followed a traumatic period for Braham in which his personal affairs were often before the public. Having fallen out with, and abandoned, Nancy Storace, he had travelled to France in 1815 with a Mrs. Wright, whose husband sued him for criminal conversation (and eventually was awarded £1000).Conway (2011), 88-89 While the suit was pending, Braham had the unusual experience of being hissed at during a performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt (the very piece cited by Lamb in his 1821 essay), on which he stepped forward and addressed the audience: I am now before you in a public character. If, in that situation, I have given you offence, you have an undoubted right to call for an apology or defence; but if I have erred as a private individual, the nature of that error cannot with discretion come under your notice. It will probably be investigated by a court, constituted to hear both the accuser and the accused, and where justice only can be done.
Contemporary assessments of Braham’s singing Lamb clearly carried some baggage regarding Judaism which was not shared by (or at least not as evident in) most other writers of the time; on the three occasions he mentions Braham the latter's Jewish origin is always prominent. Lamb's friend Leigh Hunt admittedly takes the opportunity for some snide comments in his memories of Braham from the retrospect of 1850, when from [the] wonderful remains of power in his old age we may judge what he must have been in his prime. […]He had wonderful execution as well as force, and his voice could also be very sweet, though it was too apt to betray something of the nasal tone which has been observed in Jews, and which is, perhaps […] a habit in which they have been brought up […] it might not be difficult to trace it to moral, and even to monied, causes; those, to wit, that induce people to retreat inwardly upon themselves; into a sense of their shrewdness and resources; and to clap their finger in self-congratulation upon the organ through which it pleases them occasionally to intimate as much to a bystander, not choosing to trust it wholly to the mouth.
Other writers, such as Crabb Robinson or Mount Edgcumbe, mention Braham frequently without reference to his religion. Robinson writes in 1811: