Gervase Elwes

Gervase Henry Cary-Elwes, DL (15 November 1866 – 12 January 1921), better known as Gervase Elwes, was an English tenor of great distinction, who exercised a powerful influence over the development of English music from the early 1900s up until his death in 1921 due to a railroad accident in Boston at the height of his career.

Elwes was born in Billing Hall, Northampton, the son of Alice Geraldine (née Ward) and Valentine Dudley Henry Cary-Elwes, a descendant of John Elwes. Of the Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire county gentry, he attended The Oratory School (a Roman Catholic school) and moved to Woburn School, Weybridge in 1885, from whence he enrolled at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was active as a cricketer and violinist. At the age of 22 he married Lady Winifride Feilding. He was initially trained as a lawyer and diplomat, spending some years in Brussels where he began his first formal singing lessons at the age of 28. However he had to overcome a social convention of resistance to one of his class making a professional career as a singer, and not until the early 1900s, in his late thirties, did he give his first professional performances in London. His principal teachers were Jacques Bouhy in Paris (1901–03), and in London Henry Russell and Victor Biegel, who remained his friend and teacher throughout his life. Bouhy asked him to decide between a baritone career in opera or a tenor career in oratorio and concert (and he chose the latter).

His first professional appearance in London was opposite Agnes Nicholls, in Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar by Engelbert Humperdinck at the St James's Hall, with the Handel Society under J. S. Liddle in late April 1903, and immediately afterwards he appeared at the Westmorland Festival. In June 1903 he was auditioned at the Royal College of Music in London by Charles Villiers Stanford, who left the room and brought Hubert Parry in to hear him as well. The violinist Professor Kruse, who was then attempting to revive the Saturday 'Pops' at the St James's Hall jumped out of his chair and promptly engaged him, and it was Kruse who arranged for his first appearance in Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius early in 1904 as an addition to his Beethoven Festival. Harry Plunket Greene, who had encouraged Elwes through this audition, also remained his lifelong friend.

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