Carl Rosa

Carl August Nicholas Rosa (22 March 1842 – 30 April 1889) was a German-born musical impresario best remembered for founding an English opera company known as the Carl Rosa Opera Company. He started his company in 1869 together with his wife, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, and popularised opera in Britain and America, performing standard repertory in English, as well as operas by English composers.

Rosa was born Karl August Nikolaus Rose in Hamburg, Germany, the son of Ludwig Rose, a Hamburg businessman, and Sophie Becker. His father subsequently took him to Edinburgh. A child prodigy, Rosa toured in Scotland from age 12 to age 16, eventually earning glowing notices. Beginning in 1859, he studied at the Conservatorium at Leipzig (where he met and became lifelong friends with Arthur Sullivan) and, in 1862, in Paris.

In 1863, Rosa was appointed Konzertmeister at Hamburg, where he had occasional opportunities to conduct. Three years later he visited England, appearing as a soloist at the Crystal Palace. He had considerable success as a conductor both in England and the United States. He travelled to America in 1866 as a member of a concert troupe promoted by the Baltimore impresario Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman that also included the Scottish operatic soprano Euphrosyne Parepa. During this tour, on 26 February 1867 in New York City, he married Parepa, who became known as Madame Parepa-Rosa.

In 1869, in collaboration with the Chicago impresario C. D. Hess, the couple formed the Parepa Rosa English Opera Company in New York and toured in America for three seasons, with Parepa as the star and Rosa as the conductor. It brought grand opera to places in America that had never seen any, performing Italian operas in English, which made them more accessible to American audiences. In 1872, the Rosas returned to England and also visited Europe and Egypt. Rosa changed the spelling of his name after he moved to England, where people took "Rose" as a monosyllable.

In 1873 Rosa and his wife started the Carl Rosa Opera Company (the change in name reflecting her pregnancy) with a performance of William Vincent Wallace's Maritana in Manchester on 1 September, and then toured England and Ireland. Rosa's policy was to present operas in English, and that remained the company's practice. Also in 1873, dramatist W. S. Gilbert approached Rosa about producing a short comic opera based on one of Gilbert's Bab Ballads, "Trial by Jury: An Operetta". Parepa was to play the soprano lead, as part of Rosa's planned season of English opera at the Drury Lane Theatre. Parepa died in January 1874, however, and the project was dropped (until, in 1875, a competing manager, Richard D'Oyly Carte, produced Trial by Jury with music by Arthur Sullivan). Rosa later endowed a Parepa-Rosa scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He married a second time in 1881. With his second wife, Josephine (d. 1927), he had four children.

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