Archive item of the month – August 2020

Alfred Mellon

(London 7 April, 1820 – London 27 March 1867, RSM Member A469): violinist, conductor and composer.

Plaster bust (1862) of Alfred Mellon by George James Somerton Miller (d.1876).

Mellon studied violin with Bernhard Molique (1802-1869) in Stuttgart before returning to London, where he performed in the opera and other orchestras and later became leader of the Covent Garden orchestra. His teacher, Bernhard Molique, performed at Philharmonic Society concerts on occasions in 1840, 1842 and 1848 and moved to London, becoming a professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in 1861.

Mellon’s application form to join the RSM (passed on 5 May 1850) stated that he “is engaged at the Philharmonic Society’s Concerts, is Conductor of the Ballet at the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, and is also Composer and Director of the Music at the Adelphi Theatre and has various other engagements as a performer on the Violin &c.”. Mellon’s life was firmly rooted in the theatrical environment; he was also married to the actress, Sarah Janes Woolgar (1824-1909), in July 1855.

As music director of the Pyne-Harrison Opera Company (afterwards the Royal English Opera Company), Mellon conducted many new works of the period including operas by Michael William Balfe (1808-1870), Julius Benedict (1804-1885), George Alexander Macfarren (1813-1887), Vincent Wallace (1812-1865), and his own opera, Victorine in 1859. In addition to his two operas The Irish Dragoon and Victorine and some string quartets, Mellon’s published compositions number about forty. They were popular in their style and many were intended for performance in a lighter theatrical vein.

The Musical Society of London (1858-1867), formed by Mellon, gave new works by prominent musicians and composers and engaged distinguished performers including Clara Schumann (1819-1896) who also performed at an RSM annual concert. Between 1860-1866, he conducted a series of promenade concerts in the Floral Hall at Covent Garden and had been appointed conductor for the Liverpool Philharmonic Society two years before his death. His obituary, reported in The Times of 29 March, reads: “By the death of Mr. Mellon the musical profession has lost the most generally and justly esteemed of our English orchestral conductors. From his first arrival in London, some three or four and twenty years ago, his aptitude for this department of the musical calling was manifested; and much of his experience was gained by directing the small orchestra of the Adelphi Theatre. His first independent undertaking was the Orchestral Union, under which name a society was established whose concerts, with a small but well-balanced orchestra, conducted by himself, speedily obtained a wide and legitimate reputation, – a reputation more than confirmed when, the numerical strength of the orchestra being materially increased, he was enabled to give some of the finest performances of classical music that had ever been heard in England. Although Mr. Mellon held a high position at the Royal Italian Opera from the first, it was to the Orchestral Union that he chiefly owed his well-earned fame as a conductor. This led to his being engaged as musical director of the Royal English Opera, originally set on foot by Miss Louisa Pyne and Mr. W Harrison, at the Lyceum Theatre in 1856, and afterwards removed to Covent Garden – a speculation which, though it did not terminate prosperously, proved of real service to English operatic music, and, with more liberal support from the public, might have laid the solid foundation of a national lyric theatre. As a conductor of opera, Mr. Mellon was no less eminently gifted than as a conductor of orchestral music; this was shown at a later period when, as the head of the musical department of the English Opera Company, it was his duty to prepare for representation not only several English works of importance, but also the English version of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. Mr. Mellon’s great ability was, perhaps, never more emphatically proclaimed than at the concerts of the Musical Society of London, which be directed from the beginning, and at which he had, perhaps, the grandest orchestra under command that up to that time had ever been assembled in & London concert-room. Even now the magnificent performance, under his direction, of Spohr’s great symphony, the Consecration of Sound, is remembered; and many are the triumphs in a similar direction which he subsequently achieved. His ability as a caterer for the public amusement was favourably exemplified by his Promenade Concerts at Covent-garden Theatre, where the judicious intermixture of “classical” with “popular” music, as well as the admirable performances of his orchestra, met with unanimous recognition. In addition, moreover, to other various duties, Mr. Mellon had recently accepted the conductorship of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, celebrated among the first musical institutions in the country. Here his talent, zeal, and indefatigable attention to business produced the same good results as elsewhere, and his loss will be severely felt. As a musician Mr. Alfred Mellon held a distinguished and well-earned position. Under Herr Molique, at Stuttgardt, he made himself master of all the technical resources of his art, and many compositions from his pen, in the shape of quartets, &c., showed his ability to use them to excellent purpose. As a man he was universally esteemed, and as a friend his loss will be long and earnestly regretted. He died at the age of 46. It is hardly necessary to add that Mr. Mellon was the husband of one of the most popular and admirable actresses of our time.”

Mellon was buried in the Brompton Cemetery where there is a splendid funerary monument erected in his memory. His friend and colleague George Macfarren dedicated his opera Helvellyn of 1870 to the memory of Alfred Mellon.