Charles Santley - Later Years

Later Years

Santley gave recitals at the Monday Popular Concerts, and appeared with the Joachim String Quartet and Mme Clara Schumann. He settled down to concert and oratorio work in England. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1880, and in 1887 Pope Leo XIII created him a Knight Commander of St Gregory the Great. He married twice, first (in 1858) to Gertrude Kemble (granddaughter of Charles Kemble), who before her marriage had a professional career as a soprano singer. Their daughter Edith also became a concert singer. Gertrude died in 1882. The couple had five children. Santley's second wife was Elizabeth Mary Rose-Innes.

Santley, to whom European travel had been a holiday routine for many years, toured in Australia and New Zealand in 1889-1890, to the United States and Canada in 1891 and South Africa in 1893 and again in 1903. He sang last at the Birmingham festival in 1891 after an unbroken series of thirty years of appearances there. George Bernard Shaw, describing Santley as the hero of the 1894 Handel Festival, remarked especially on his Honour and Arms and Nasce al Bosco. 'Santley's singing of the division of Selection Day was, humanly speaking, perfect. It tested the middle of his voice from C to C exhaustively; and that octave came out of the test hall-marked; there was not a scrape on its fine surface, not a break or a weak link in the chain anywhere; while the vocal touch was impeccably light and steady, and the florid execution accurate as clockwork.' In these two arias his entire compass from low G to top E flat, and in Nasce al Bosco the top E natural and F, were exhibited 'in such a way as made it impossible for him to conceal any blemish, if there had been one.'

In January 1894 he was with Clara Butt, Edward Lloyd, Antoinette Sterling and other singers at the first of the Chappell's Ballad Concerts, when they were transferred from St James's Hall to Queen's Hall. From 1894 Santley devoted his time increasingly to teaching: between 1903 and 1907 he trained the Australian baritone Peter Dawson, taking him meticulously through Messiah, The Creation and Elijah. Indeed, in 1904 he brought Dawson in on a tour of the West Country, beginning at Plymouth, led by Emma Albani, with William Green (tenor), Giulia Ravogli, Johannes Wolf, Adela Verne and Theodore Flint.

In January 1907 he sang Elijah at Manchester Town Hall, having sung Messiah and Elijah every year there since 1858. He celebrated the jubilee of his singing career in the company of many of his musician friends at a grand benefit concert held at the Royal Albert Hall on 1 May 1907. He was knighted (the first singer to receive this honour) in December of that year, after singing at Bristol, and sang Elijah at Hanley two days later. Over the next months he gave short recitals at Liverpool and sang Elijah at Edinburgh. He made his Covent Garden farewell in 1911 as Tom Tug in Charles Dibdin's The Waterman. In 1915, at the request of London's Lady Mayoress, he sang at the Mansion House concert for Belgian refugees, when the accurate intonation, fine quality and vigour of his voice were still apparent.