(Excerpt from Valerie, or the Treasured Tokens: Romantic O...)
Excerpt from Valerie, or the Treasured Tokens: Romantic Opera in Four Acts Ah! Simple maiden. So free from guiling, Thy gen tie spirit hath won my heart; Ah yes i I love thee! Nor fear thy chiding, But grieve. To think that we must part. One way is thine and still another mine. Together Heaven hath cast them not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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James Remington Fairlamb was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Collonel Jonas Preston Fairlamb and his wife, Hannah Kennedy. He was playing in church at the age of fourteen, and before he was twenty had held the position of organist and choirmaster in several Philadelphia churches.
In 1858 he went to Europe, where, at the Paris Conservatory, he studied piano with Prudent and Marmontel, and voice with Masset.
From Paris he passed to Florence and thence to Zürich with President Lincoln’s appointment as United States consul to Switzerland. While in Stuttgart, King Karl of Wiirtemberg awarded him the “Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences” in recognition of his Te Deum for double chorus and orchestra, dedicated to that monarch. In 1865 Fairlamb returned to the United States, and established himself in Washington, D. C. , where he was active until 1872, as teacher and composer, and with an amateur opera company he himself had organized, produced his grand opera Valérie. From 1872 to 1898, he held positions as organist in Philadelphia, Elizabeth, New Jersey, Jersey City, and New York; and in 1898 became instructor of music in DeWitt Clinton High School in the last-named city. He died at his home in Ingleside. Fairlamb published in all some two hundred compositions, including more than fifty choral works, sacred and secular, and over a hundred songs. Rupert Hughes has conveniently classified him among “The Colonists, ” i. e. , the musical writers belonging to the specific city ganglia or colonies which he regards as a vital phase of American musical development. Associated w ith the great advance in every phase of musical activity which the United States experienced in the period after the Civil War, Fairlamb cannot be reckoned with those composers who, like Gottschalk and Stephen Foster (the first consciously, the second following the line of least resistence), undertook to develop “nationalist, ” i. e. , folk-music elements in his original work. He was, however, an excellent example of the talented, foreign-trained American musician whose effort aided in establishing higher standards of taste and appreciation in his native land. There can be no question that his work as a composer was qualitative, and that many of his songs, in particular, have spontaneity and charm. Like so many composers, Fairlamb was not particularly successful in the field wherein he was most ambitious to gather laurels. Neither his lighter scores, Love’s Stratagem, Treasured Tokens, and The Interrupted Marriage, nor his posthumous five-act grand opera Leonello, achieved public production.
In 1865 Fairlamb returned to the United States, and established himself in Washington, D. C. , where he was active until 1872, as teacher and composer, and with an amateur opera company he himself had organized, produced his grand opera Valérie. He was one of the founders of the American Guild of Organists, and was identified with the first American productions of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Pinafore and The Sorcerer.
(Excerpt from Valerie, or the Treasured Tokens: Romantic O...)
He was twice married: first, in 1866 to Marian Kerr Higgins, daughter of Judge David Higgins of Ohio, and second, to Melusina Therese, daughter of George F. Muller of Pittsburgh.
