Composer, conductor, librettist, pianist, teacher and poet.
OVERVIEW
As a conductor, music director, and pedagogue, Fritz Hart played a significant role in the development of Australian art music during the first half of the twentieth century. His creative output included more than twenty operas, six of which were staged in Melbourne, as well as songs, lyrics and poetry. He also wrote several unpublished novels. A volume of his poems was published in 1913, under the title Appassionata: Songs of Youth and Love. At least three of his poems also appear in the Bulletin.
DETAILED BIOGRAPHY
1874-1908: As a child, Fritz Hart was encouraged in his passion for composition and musical performance by his parents' love of music. His mother was a talented pianist and teacher, and his father acted as choirmaster at the local church, where, from age six, Hart began singing. In 1884, aged ten, Hart was accepted for a choristership position at Westminster Abbey. Following the completion of his formal schooling, he first attempted several positions as clerk, before taking up two prestigious offers in 1893. One was to study piano and organ at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London, and the other was as organist for a London church.
This period also saw Hart immersed in the world of composition and performance. While at the RCM, Hart made the acquaintance of fellow students such as Gustave Holst, Vaughan-Williams, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and John Ireland. Hart's friendship with Holst, in particular, played a major influence in his development as both a composer and intellectual. During his time at the college, Hart wrote the libretto for Holst's first opera, The Revoke, along with several other smaller works, including an incomplete score for The Magic Mirror. In the decade or so following his graduation in 1896, he worked primarily as a freelance conductor, an occupation that saw him involved with a variety of musical forms, including musical comedy, operetta, opera, and incidental music for drama, some of which he composed himself.
1909-1914: In 1909, Hart accepted a twelve-month contract with J. C. Williamson to act as music director for the forthcoming Royal Comic Opera Company's Australian season (the contract was later extended for a further three years). Shortly before he left for Australia, however, the London Symphony Orchestra performed his much-acclaimed 'Fantasy Overture'. One of his first works to be staged in Australia was the two-act musical farce A Knight for a Day, co-written with composer Raymond Hubbell and librettist Robert B. Smith. Its premiere was at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney, on 9 June 1910. The Sydney Morning Herald says of the production that, although described as a musical farce,
The term is scarcely comprehensive enough. The play is a sort of olla podrida, for the authors have furnished a mixture embracing burlesque extravaganzas, pantomime, rollicking farce, picturesque ballets and a resplendent transformation scene. It abounds in absurd situations' (11 July 1910, p.3).
Two years later, Hart took up a position at George Marshall-Hall's Conservatorium in Melbourne during the director's prolonged absence overseas. The Sydney Morning Herald reported, in this instance, that Hart's decision to abandon 'the primrose path of dalliance' had been undertaken so as 'to follow his art more seriously' (14 December 1912, p.5). Among his works from this period are two song cycles: one containing fourteen songs written to words by Robert Herrick and the other a seven-song collection to the words of William Blake.
In 1912, Hart was invited to play with the Sydney Amateur Orchestral Society, which was then under the direction of Alfred Hill. The relationship between the two composers was such that they worked together on numerous occasions and later founded the Australian Opera League (AOL) in an attempt to establish not only greater opportunities for local composers and musicians but also an Australian operatic tradition. The following year, the position of Director of the Marshall-Hall Conservatorium was offered to Hart after acting head Eduard Scharf left for the University of Melbourne Conservatorium. The decision to make a commitment to both the Conservatorium and to Australia in effect became a turning point in Hart's professional career. He saw not only the possibility of establishing a truly Australian school of music, in the way that George Grove and Hubert Parry had done for English music with the Royal College of Music, but also saw great opportunity for having his own works performed.
The first of Hart's Australian-written operas, completed in 1913, was Pierrette. This was staged, along with Alfred Hill's opera Giovanni, in Sydney and Melbourne the following year. Both operas were presented under the auspices of the Australian Opera League. Unfortunately, although both works were well received by critics and the public alike, the AOL was put on hold when the war was declared and never managed to be revived afterwards.
1915-1929: By 1915, Fritz Hart's Conservatorium of Music had attracted the patronage of Dame Nellie Melba and, under her guidance, it became an acclaimed singing school. The close professional and personal relationship between Hart and Melba also accounts for the Conservatorium becoming a significant part of the Australian music landscape for many years. Around this time, too, he involved himself in numerous facets of the art music industry, including, for example, acting as a judge for the first Musical Association of New South Wales annual prize for composition (Brisbane Courier 8 Dec. 1917, p.2). He also continued to devote his attention to the Conservatorium, to public performance, and to his own compositions for the remainder of his time in Australia.
In 1927, Hart was appointed conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), a position he held until 1933. The Age wrote of him during his second year at the helm of the MSO:
'impetuous in his ardour, Mr Hart imparts an infectious enthusiasm that lays slack and conventional thinking low. A high standard is clearly regarded as requisite for the presentation of important works to a public certain to find its musical conscience quickened' (16 July 1928, p.11).
Hart's association with the MSO, then still an amateur organisation, saw a variety of innovative ideas put into practice, several of them being supported financially by businessman and philanthropist Sidney Myer. Hart organised regular concerts for the orchestra during this period, with these being well supported by the Melbourne public. Numerous, too, were charity concerts in aid of societies such as the Workless Winter Buffet and the Unemployed Bureau in St Kilda in August 1928.
1930-1949: Despite all his effort, by the early 1930s, competition from the rival Melbourne University Conservatorium (under the directorship of Bernard Heinze), in combination with the effects of the depression, created conditions that led to the gradual decline in the fortunes of Hart's school. The MSO was also later absorbed into the Melbourne University Conservatorium. Thereafter, Hart began a series of visits to Hawaii as guest conductor of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra (HSO), which, in 1936, turned into a permanent position, along with a professorship at the University of Hawaii. He retired as conductor of the HSO in 1949, dying later that same year aged seventy-five.
