Charles King Hall

Charles King Hall (1845-1895), often credited as King Hall, was a versatile English composer of both sacred and secular music. He favored the sentimental ballad and the church anthem. He specialized in arranging for piano and voice the works of famous composers such as Gounod and Mendelssohn. In addition, he wrote primers for the harmonium. Active in the London theatre, he contributed regularly to the popular German Reed Entertainments at St. George's Hall, Langham Place.

King Hall was born 17 August 1845, St Pancras, London. His father, Charles Frederick Hall, played violin in the Drury Lane Theatre orchestra and was later musical director at the Adelphi Theatre. King Hall's mother, Eleanor Eliza Jane Vining, came from a family of actors. She was cousin to George James Vining (1817-1875), the London actor and theatre manager, and Fanny Elizabeth Vining (1821-1891), the actress and mother of the American actress Fanny Davenport (1850-1898).

In 1876, King Hall married Isabel Maud Penton (1852-1932) at All Saints Church, Gordon Square. They had five children. The eldest, (b. 1877), wrote children's books, including Adventures in Toyland; their younger son, Ernest Vincent (1885-1941), married Hylda May Shallard, who sang in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the early 1900s. The only one of King Hall's children to follow in his footsteps was Lucy Harriet Greenfield (1879-1900), a student at the London Conservatory at the time of her early death.

King Hall composed of both sacred and secular music. He favored the sentimental ballad and the church anthem. In addition, he wrote primers for the harmonium. He contributed regularly to the popular German Reed Entertainments at St. George's Hall, Langham Place. In its obituary, The Musical Times (1 October 1895) called King Hall's German Reed music "his most popular works." He composed the scores for librettists Frank Burnand, Arthur Law, Gilbert Arthur à Beckett, and J. Comyns Carr to the following operettas: "A Happy Bungalow" (1877), "Foster-brothers," "Doubleday's Will" (1878), "A Tremendous Mystery" (1878), "Grimstone Grange" (1879), "A Christmas Stocking" (1880), "A Strange Host" (1882), "The Automaton," "The Naturalist" (1887), "The Verger" (1889), and "Missing" (1894). King Hall published throughout his adult life. From 1867 ("Golden Moments Gallop for the Pianoforte") to the year of his death ("An Emblem of Life; A Duet for Female Voices"), his work appeared regularly in both England and America.

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