Ben Davies (tenor) - Training and Operatic Career, 1881-1891

Training and Operatic Career, 1881-1891

Ben Davies was born in Pontardawe, Wales. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London under Alberto Randegger and Signor Fiori. He made his debut in 1881 in Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl, and in the following ten years devoted himself principally to the operatic stage. In 1883 he created the role of Gringoire in Arthur Goring Thomas's Esmeralda, in the first Carl Rosa season at Drury Lane Theatre: his future wife Clara Perry was in the cast as Fleur-de-lys. In that time he began to assume the mantle of Edward Lloyd, as the leading British operatic tenor.

In 1887 he played Geoffrey Wilder in Alfred Cellier's Dorothy, one of his most successful roles, in the re-casting opposite Marie Tempest ('Mr Davies also has a capital song, A Guinea here, a guinea there, which he sang with his eyes shut, but otherwise admirably.'); in 1889 he took the lead in the sequel, Doris, and later that year he starred as Ralph Rodney in The Red Hussar. He was chosen by Sir Arthur Sullivan to create the title role in the opera Ivanhoe in January 1891, at the opening of the Royal English Opera House (Palace Theatre) - Shaw called him 'a robust and eupeptic Ivanhoe', who 'gets beaten because he is obviously some three stone over his proper fighting weight': and 'his obstreporous self-satisfaction put everybody into good humour.'

In November 1891 he created the tenor lead in the London production of André Messager's La Basoche (also at the Royal English Opera House), in which the basso David Bispham made his stage debut, as Duc de Longueville. Shaw remarked,

Mr Ben Davies conquers, not without evidence of an occasional internal struggle, his propensity to bounce out of the stage picture and deliver his high notes over the footlights in the attitude of irrepressible appeal first discovered by the inventor of Jack-in-the-box. Being still sufficiently hearty, good-humored, and well-filled to totally dispel all the mists of imagination which arise from his medieval surroundings, he is emphatically himself, and not Clement Marot; but except in so far as his opportunities are spoiled in the concerted music by the fact that his part is a baritone part, and not a tenor one, he sings satisfactorily, and succeeds in persuading the audience that the Basoche king very likely was much the same pleasant sort of fellow as Ben Davies.

In 1892 Davies made his Covent Garden debut in Gounod's Faust. (His 'Salve, dimora casta e pura' from that opera was recorded.) In 1893 he appeared in Frederick Cowen's Signa there, sung in Italian, with Mme de Nuovina and the baritone Mario Ancona, under Cowen's baton. 'Mr Ben Davies made almost the only hit of the opera by his singing of a song in the first act, which was the most effective number in the work as it stood; but his success would have been greater if a somewhat smarter physical training had made him less obviously a popular and liberally fed London concert singer.'