Geoffrey Toye

Edward Geoffrey Toye (17 February 1889 – 11 June 1942), known as Geoffrey Toye, was an English conductor, composer and opera producer.

He is best remembered as a musical director of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and for his association with Sadler's Wells Theatre. One of his ballets, ''The Haunted Ballroom'' (1934), became popular and was revived several times, and the new overture that he prepared for Gilbert and Sullivan's ''Ruddigore'' in 1919 became the standard version.

Life and career

Born in Winchester, Hampshire, Toye was the younger son of Arlingham James Toye and his wife Alice Fayrer ''née'' Coates. Toye's father was a housemaster at Winchester College, who for many years ran a music society for the boys. His elder brother Francis Toye was also a composer and musician.

Early years

Toye studied at the Royal College of Music, concentrating on composition and conducting. He also displayed such skill as a pianist that he was engaged "when little more than a boy" to accompany the celebrated soprano Luisa Tetrazzini.''The Times'' 12 June 1947, p. 7 As early as 1906 he deputised for André Messager as conductor at performances of Messager's opera '' Mirette'' at Cambridge. Together with his brother Francis he composed incidental music for ''The Well in the Wood'', a "pastoral masque" by C. M. A. Peake; and was sole creator of the scenario and music for a short ballet, ''The Fairy Cap'', first given at His Majesty's Theatre in 1911, revived for charity performance the following year.

By 1913 Toye was conducting in major London theatres – for Maurice Maeterlinck's ''Blue Bird'' at the Haymarket Theatre, Marie Brema's opera season at the Savoy Theatre, and for the première of Bernard Shaw's '' Androcles and the Lion''. In 1914, he was entrusted by Ralph Vaughan Williams with conducting the première of his London Symphony at the Queen's Hall. When the manuscript was lost (having been sent to Fritz Busch in Germany just before the outbreak of the First World War) Toye, together with George Butterworth and the critic Edward J. Dent, helped Vaughan Williams reconstruct the work. Also in 1914, Toye introduced Butterworth's rhapsodies ''A Shropshire Lad'' and ''The Banks of Green Willow'' to London audiences. The night before the première of ''The Planets'', Toye dined with its composer, Gustav Holst, and the conductor Adrian Boult. Boult later recalled that Toye took exception to one bar in "Neptune", where the brass play chords of E minor and G minor together: "I'm sorry, Gustav, but I can't help thinking that's going to sound frightful." Holst agreed, and said it had made him shudder when he wrote it down, but he insisted that it must be that way: "What are you to do when they come like that?"

Toye joined the Army in 1914, first as a private in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and later in the Royal Flying Corps, in which he served in France as a photographic specialist. He retired with the rank of major. For a time after the war he was a member of the insurers Lloyd's of London, where he organised many amateur musical activities and founded the Lloyd's Choir.Scowcroft, Philip L
"Some British Conductor-Composers", part 3
MusicWeb-International.com (1997) He was engaged as assistant conductor of the Beecham Opera Company and also conducted concerts for the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1918 and 1919.Stone, David
"Geoffrey Toye"
''Who Was Who in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company'' (2001)

Rupert D'Oyly Carte, a fellow Wykehamist, appointed Toye as musical director for three D'Oyly Carte Opera Company seasons at the Prince's Theatre in London: 1919–20, 1921–22, and 1924. In his first season there, Toye revised the score of Gilbert and Sullivan's ''Ruddigore,'' cutting some music and writing a new and more dramatic overture that did not use themes from numbers that Toye had cut. Thereafter, Toye's overture was always used by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, even when the cut numbers were restored in the 1970s, and it became the standard performance version. He also arranged a new overture for ''The Pirates of Penzance,'' but that did not remain in use, and no copy of the score is known to have survived. As D'Oyly Carte's musical director, Toye impressed the critics; ''The Musical Times'' wrote, "Mr. Geoffrey Toye is doing his work as conductor conspicuously well. He has made many of us realise afresh how beautifully the operas are scored. He has never-failing vivacity and the right sense of musical humour." In 1925 and again in 1927 the BBC
...