William Furst

William Wallace Furst (March 25, 1852 – July 11, 1917) was an American composer of musical theatre pieces and a music director, best remembered for supplying incidental music to theatrical productions on Broadway.

Furst was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied music in Baltimore, and was a church organist at the age of 14.

Furst's comic opera Electric Light was produced and conducted by him in 1878, and for the five seasons following he received engagements as conductor of opera. By the 1880s, he was composing theatrical music for productions starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, William Faversham, Viola Allen and Mrs. Leslie Carter. He composed the music for five Shakespeare productions by Margaret Anglin at the Berkeley Stadium in California, as well as her production of Electra. One of his earliest operettas was My Geraldine (1880).

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Furst was the orchestra director at the Tivoli Theatre in San Francisco, California. He composed his only opera, Theodora, for the Tivoli. In 1892, he composed the successful operetta The Isle of Champagne. In 1893, he published "The Girl I Left Behind Me" and moved to New York City, becoming the music director at the now-demolished Empire Theater. The same year, he composed the music (along with Charles Alfred Byrne and Louis Harrison) for the musical Miss Nicotine with Lillian Russell and Marie Dressler Another such Empire piece was The Little Trooper, starring Della Fox (1894) followed by The Little Minister (1897). In 1898, he composed another such piece for the Empire, A Normandy Wedding (an adaptation of the French Papa Gougon), which received an enthusiastic reception in New York at the Herald Square Theatre.

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