Sydney Smith (14 July 1839 – 3 March 1889)"Death of Mr. Sydney Smith", ''The Daily News'' (London, 6 March 1889), p. 3."Death of Mr. Sydney Smith", ''The Guardian'' (6 March 1889), p. 5''. was an English pianist and composer in

Victorian England In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardia ...

Life

Born in Dorchester, Dorset, Smith grew up in a family of musicians. His father, Fredrick William Sydney Smith(married to Helen Boyton) , was the head of a music school and often gave concerts with his two sons Sydney and Boyton. Smith studied piano in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

with Ignaz Moscheles and

Louis Plaidy Louis Plaidy (28 November 1810 – 3 March 1874) was a celebrated German piano pedagogue and compiler of books of technical music studies. Life Born in Hubertusburg, Saxony, Plaidy initially focused on the violin, and toured as a concert violini ...

, cello with

Friedrich Grützmacher Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Grützmacher (1 March 1832 – 23 February 1903) was a noted German cellist and composer in the second half of the 19th century. He composed mostly for cello (including several concertos and many technical studies), but a ...

, and composition with

Julius Rietz August Wilhelm Julius Rietz (28 December 1812 – 12 September 1877) was a German composer, conductor, cellist, and teacher. His students included Woldemar Bargiel, Salomon Jadassohn, Arthur O'Leary, and (by far the most celebrated) Sir Arthur ...

. He returned to England in 1858, settling the following year in London, where he married Annie Birch and remained until his death, highly regarded as a teacher and composer. He died due to an illness and spent all his wealth in an attempt to fix it. He composed or transcribed about 400 works for the piano. These were extremely popular in salons in England in the 19th century, particularly the early works. Many pieces were issued both as solo pieces and as piano duets.

Music

Smith's earliest compositions are piano accompaniments to three concertina pieces by Richard Blagrove. Apart from these, he composed only for solo piano until the last years of his life, when he also wrote a small handful of songs. Amongst his best known works are * ''Tarantelle brillante'', Op. 8 * ''La Harpe aeolienne'', Op. 11 * ''Lily of the Valley'', Op. 14 * ''Le Jet d'eau'', Op. 17 * ''Gaîeté de coeur'', Op. 24 * ''Chanson russe'', Op. 31 * ''The Fairy Queen'', Op. 42 * ''I Puritani'', Op. 85 ''Le Jet d'eau'' was used as the theme for ''The Foley Family'', a drama serial about the comic lives of a Dublin family, which ran on

Radio Éireann Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitt ...

(the former name of the Irish national radio service) from 1952 to the late 1960s. It was written by David Hayes and starred George Green and Peg Monaghan. He wrote many other ''morceaux de salon'' for piano solo and made many arrangements from popular operas. In addition to the works published under his own name, he also published a number of piano works under the names Paul Beaumont and Victor Delacour.

References

External links

The Sydney Smith Archive website
Biography, Discography, and Scores of Smith's music. * 1839 births 1889 deaths 19th-century British composers 19th-century classical pianists 19th-century English musicians Composers for piano English classical composers English classical pianists Male classical pianists People from Dorchester, Dorset 19th-century British male musicians {{UK-composer-stub