Remember the big celebrations last year for the bicentennial of the birth of William Henry Fry? Neither do I.
Fry was born in Philadelphia in 1813. A pioneering figure in American music, he was the first native-born composer to write on a large scale. He composed orchestral works and the first opera by an American to be performed publicly in his lifetime (“Leonora,” in 1845). He was an outspoken advocate of American music – that is, music composed by Americans – at a time when German imports ruled the roost. It would be decades before American music would gain a toehold in the concert halls, which makes Fry an even more remarkable figure.
He studied music with a former bandleader in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, who went on to become the head of Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Society. Fry himself would become the society’s secretary.
Fry was also a journalist, a writer on music, and the first music critic to write for a major American newspaper. He was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and acted as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune.
Fry composed seven symphonies, all of them of a descriptive nature. His “Santa Claus Symphony,” after Clement Moore, is more of a Straussian tone poem. My personal favorite is the “Niagara Symphony,” written for P.T. Barnum, conceived for enormous forces augmented by a mindblowing eleven timpani.
Fry died of tuberculosis, “accelerated by exhaustion,” in Santa Cruz (Saint Croix) in the Virgin Islands in 1864, at the age of 51.
There is some discrepancy regarding the date of his birth, with some sources giving August 10, and others August 19.
Happy birthday, perhaps belatedly, William Henry Fry.
The “Niagara Symphony” (it begins quietly):