George Leybourne
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George Leybourne
George Leybourne (17 March 1842 – 15 September 1884) was a ''Lion comique'' of the British Victorian music hall who, for much of his career, was known by the title of one of his songs, " Champagne Charlie". Another of his songs, and one that can still be heard today, is "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze". His 1867 hit "Champagne Charlie" led to the first major success of the music hall concept in Britain, and he remains among the best known music hall performers. Early life George Leybourne was born Joseph Saunders in Gateshead; however, at an early age he and his family moved to live in London. Before he went on the music halls he worked as an engineer in, amongst other places, the South West England. For his early music hall appearances in the Northern England, including Liverpool and Newcastle he used his real name - Joe Saunders - a fact which, in the past, caused much confusion as to his real name. His first documented appearance in London using the stage-name ...
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Royal Aquarium
The Royal Aquarium and Winter Garden was a place of amusement in Westminster, London. It opened in 1876, and the building was demolished in 1903. The attraction was located northwest of Westminster Abbey on Tothill Street. The building was designed by Alfred Bedborough in an ornamental style faced with Portland stone. The Aquarium Theatre was located in the west end of the building and was renamed the Imperial Theatre in 1879. Methodist Central Hall now occupies the site. History The Royal Aquarium opened on 22 January 1876. Its board of directors included Henry Labouchère, the financier and journalist; William Whiteley the retailer; and Arthur Sullivan, the composer. It was intended to offer art exhibitions, concerts and plays, among other intellectual entertainments such as The Crystal Palace.''The R ...
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Jules Léotard
Jules Léotard (; 1 August 183816 August 1870) was a French acrobatic performer and aerialist who developed the art of trapeze. He also created and popularized the one-piece gym wear that now bears his name and inspired the 1867 song "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze", sung by George Leybourne. Biography Léotard was born in Toulouse, France, the son of a gymnastics instructor who ran a swimming pool in Toulouse. Léotard would practice his routines over the pool. He went on to study law. After he passed his law exams, he seemed destined to join the legal profession. But at 18 he began to experiment with trapeze bars, ropes and rings suspended over a swimming pool. Léotard later joined the Cirque Napoléon. On 12 November 1859, the first flying trapeze routine was performed by Jules Léotard on three trapeze bars at the Cirque Napoleon. The costume he invented was a one-piece knitted garment streamlined to suit the safety and agility concerns of trapeze performan ...
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Jenny Hill (music Hall Performer)
Jenny Hill (1848 – 28 June 1896), born Elizabeth Jane Thompson, was an English music hall performer of the Victorian era known as "The Vital Spark" and "the Queen of the Halls". Her repertoire of songs included "'Arry", " The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery", "The Little Vagabond Boy", "I've Been a Good Woman to You" and "If I Only Bossed the Show". Hill made her stage début at an early age in a pantomime version of ''Mother Goose'' at the Aquarium Theatre in Westminster. After a difficult apprenticeship at a public house, she embarked on a career in music hall by 1868. She made a success at the London Pavilion, and until 1890 she was at the peak of her fame, enjoying top-billing at music halls across London and in the northern provinces. In 1879 she became the proprietor of her first music hall and later owned or operated several more, but without success. By 1889 her health was declining, and she was forced to cancel a number of theatrical engagements. After a tour of New ...
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Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich Of Russia
Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia (russian: Алексе́й Алекса́ндрович; in St. Petersburg – 14 November 1908 in Paris) was the fifth child and the fourth son of Alexander II of Russia and his first wife Maria Alexandrovna (Marie of Hesse). Chosen for a naval career, Alexei Alexandrovich started his military training at the age of seven. By the age of 20 he had been appointed lieutenant of the Imperial Russian Navy and had visited all Russia's European military ports. In 1871, he was sent as a goodwill ambassador to the United States and Japan. In 1883 he was appointed general-admiral. He had a significant contribution in the equipment of the Russian navy with new ships and in modernizing the naval ports. However, after the Russian defeat in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, and viewed as an incompetent and corrupt dilettante, he was relieved of his command. He died in Paris in 1908. Early life The Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich Romanov of Russia ...
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Jacques Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach (, also , , ; 20 June 18195 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the Romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera ''The Tales of Hoffmann''. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. ''The Tales of Hoffmann'' remains part of the standard opera repertory. Born in Cologne, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach showed early musical talent. At the age of 14, he was accepted as a student at the Paris Conservatoire but found academic study unfulfilling and left after a year. From 1835 to 1855 he earned his living as a cellist, achieving international fame, and as a conductor. His ambition, however, was to compose comic pieces for the musical the ...
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Lydia Thompson
Lydia Thompson (born Eliza Thompson; 19 February 1838 – 17 November 1908), was an English dancer, comedian, actor and theatrical producer. From 1852, as a teenager, she danced and performed in pantomimes, in the UK and then in Europe and soon became a leading dancer and actor in burlesques on the London stage. In 1868, she introduced Victorian burlesque to America with her troupe, the "British Blondes", to great acclaim and notoriety. Her career began to decline in the 1890s, but she continued to perform into the early years of the 20th century. Early years Thompson was born in Brydges Street, Covent Garden, London to Eliza (''née'' Cooper) and Philip Thompson (c. 1801–1842), owner of the Sheridan Knowles, a public house. Thompson was the second of three surviving children, including actress Clara Bracy. Gänzl, Kurt. "Lydia Thompson", ''Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre'', Blackwell/Schirmer (1994) Her father died in 1842, and her mother remarried Edward Hodges. By th ...
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Rex Krewe
Rex (founded 1872) is a New Orleans Carnival Krewe which stages one of the city's most celebrated parades on Mardi Gras Day. Rex is Latin for "King", and Rex reigns as "The King of Carnival". History and formation Rex was organized by New Orleans businessmen in part to put on a spectacle in honor of the New Orleans visit of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia (remembered locally as "Grand Duke Alexis") during the 1872 Carnival season. Also in the minds of the founders of Rex was the desire to lure tourism and business to New Orleans in the years after the American Civil War. Rex has held more parades in New Orleans than any other parading organization. Its official song is " If Ever I Cease to Love", a quirky tune from the 1870s musical "Bluebeard". This was adopted because the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia had a fondness for Lydia Thompson, the actress who sang the song in the musical, which was playing in New Orleans at the time of the first Rex parade in 1872. It h ...
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New Orleans
New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans
Merriam-Webster.
; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nueva Orleans) is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 according to the 2020 U.S. census, it is the List of municipalities in Louisiana, most populous city in Louisiana and the twelfth-most populous city in the southeastern United States. Serving as a List of ports in the United States, major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast region of the United States. New Orleans is world-renowned for its Music of New Orleans, distinctive music, Louisiana Creole cuisine, Creole cuisine, New Orleans English, uniq ...
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Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras (, ) refers to events of the Carnival celebration, beginning on or after the Christian feasts of the Epiphany (Three Kings Day) and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday, which is known as Shrove Tuesday. is French for "Fat Tuesday", reflecting the practice of the last night of eating rich, fatty foods before the ritual Lenten sacrifices and fasting of the Lenten season. Related popular practices are associated with Shrovetide celebrations before the fasting and religious obligations associated with the penitential season of Lent. In countries such as the United Kingdom, Mardi Gras is more usually known as Pancake Day or (traditionally) Shrove Tuesday (derived from the word ''shrive'', meaning "to administer the sacrament of confession to; to absolve"). Traditions The festival season varies from city to city, as some traditions, such as the one in New Orleans, Louisiana, consider Mardi Gras to stretch the entire period from Twelfth Night (the last night of ...
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If Ever I Cease To Love
"If Ever I Cease to Love" is a music hall song published by the English ''Lion comique'' George Leybourne, who was popular in the Victorian music venues, in 1871. It has been performed by several musical artists and theatrical entertainers, including Lydia Thompson, who featured the song in her traveling operetta ''Bluebeard''. Though Leybourne is best known for his composition "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze", the comedic lyrical content and catchy melody of "If Ever I Cease to Love" became tremendously appealing in New Orleans. Since the first Rex parade in 1872, the tune has been ceremoniously played to the krewe's figurehead, Rex, who bears the title "King of Carnival" in New Orleans. Background Leybourne had begun his career in England's northern music halls in 1866. Dressed in formal wear, his performing style helped advance the popularity of entertainers known as ''Lion comiques'' who parodied upper-class swells. His 1867 compositions " Champagne Charlie" and "T ...
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Canterbury Music Hall
The Canterbury Music Hall was established in 1852 by Charles Morton on the site of a former skittle alley adjacent to the Canterbury Tavern at 143 Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth. It was one of the first purpose-built music halls in London, and "probably the largest and grandest concert-room ever attached to a public house" in London. Morton came to be dubbed ''the Father of the Halls'' as hundreds of imitators were built within the next several years. The theatre was rebuilt three times, and the last theatre on the site was destroyed by bombing in 1942. History Establishing the hall Morton and Frederick Stanley, his brother in law, purchased the Canterbury Arms, in Upper Marsh, Lambeth, in 1849. Morton was experienced in presenting 'Gentlemen Only' entertainments in his other pubs, and he had been impressed with the entertainments at Evans Music-and-Supper Rooms in Covent Garden and decided to offer a ''harmonic meeting'', held on Saturdays, in the back room of the public hous ...
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Dandy
A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain. Previous manifestations of the ''petit-maître'' (French for "small master") and the Muscadin have been noted by John C. Prevost, but the modern practice of dandyism first appeared in the revolutionary 1790s, both in London and in Paris. The dandy cultivated cynical reserve, yet to such extremes that novelist George Meredith, himself no dandy, once defined cynicism as "intellectual dandyism". Some took a more benign view; Thomas Carlyle wrote in ''Sartor Resartus'' that a dandy was no more than "a clothes-wearing man". Honoré de Balzac introduced the perfectly worldly and unmoved Henri de Marsay in '' La fille aux yeux d'or'' (1835), a part ...
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