# Isaac Nathan

Isaac Nathan (1790–1792 – 15 January 1864) was an English composer, musicologist, journalist and self-publicist, who has been called the "father of Australian music", having assisted the careers of numerous colonial musicians during his twenty year residence in Australia. He is best known for the success of his Hebrew Melodies (1815–1840) in London. However, he made significant contributions as a singing teacher and music historian during his time at St James's Palace and as a composer of opera in the Royal Theatres (1823–1833). After emigrating to Australia in 1840, Nathan wrote Australia's first operas and Australia's first contemporary song cycle which entangled fragments of Aboriginal songlines with European musical traditions. Nathan tailored compositions to the unique individual singing needs of his students and community choirs while using the Neapolitan bel canto pedagogical tradition that he inherited in London. Nathan's best student was Dame Marie Carandini.

## Early success

Isaac Nathan was born 1790 in the English city of Canterbury to a chazzan (Jewish cantor) born in Poland, Menahem Monash "Polack" (the Pole), and his English Jewish wife, Mary (Lewis) Goldsmid (1779–1842). He was initially destined for his father's career and went to the Jewish night school of Solomon Lyon in Cambridge. As a young child, Nathan played violin, piano and organ. Showing an enthusiasm for music, he was apprenticed to the London Italian master singing teacher Domenico Corri. Corri transmitted the Neapolitan bel canto tradition of Nicola Porpora to a younger generation of musicians including Nathan. In 1813 Nathan conceived the idea of publishing settings of tunes from synagogue usage and persuaded Lord Byron to provide the words for these. The result was the poet's famous Hebrew Melodies. Nathan's setting of these remained in print for most of the century and new editions were published throughout his life, the last of which were printed in 1861.
The Hebrew Melodies used, for the most part, melodies from the synagogue service, though few if any of these were in fact handed down from the ancient service of the Temple in Jerusalem, as Nathan claimed. Many were European folk-tunes that had become absorbed into the synagogue service over the centuries with new texts (contrafacta). However they were the first attempt to set out the traditional music of the synagogue, with which Nathan was well acquainted through his upbringing, before the general public. To assist sales, Nathan recruited the famous Jewish singer John Braham to place his name on the title page, in return for a share of profits, although Braham in fact took no part in the creation of the Melodies.
The success of the Melodies gave Nathan some fame and notoriety. Nathan was a singing teacher at the St James's Palace for a time, and claimed that one of his students was the Princess Royal, Princess Charlotte, and music librarian to the Prince Regent, later George IV. In support of this claim, examples of Nathan's sheet music has been found in the Royal Archives in the Music folder of Princess Sophia Augusta. It is likely that the singing teacher for the princess chose the music she would sing, and unlikely that any other singing teacher in the country would have chosen Nathan's music (largely because Nathan maintained strict watch over the copyright for his works). His edition of the Hebrew Melodies was dedicated to the Princess by royal permission.

## Decline

In 1816, Byron left England, never to return (nor to communicate further with Nathan). In 1817 Nathan's royal pupil Princess Charlotte died in childbirth. He thus lost his two major patrons.
Nathan undertook a runaway marriage with a music pupil, and another after his first wife's early death. Both spouses were Christian; however for both, Nathan also undertook and arranged synagogue marriages after the church ceremony. His hot temper probably accounts for a duel he fought over the honour of Lady Caroline Lamb, and his assault on an Irish nobleman who he thought had impugned one of his female pupils. The latter saw Nathan prosecuted, although he was acquitted. Nathan felt a special attachment for Lady Caroline; she was godmother to one of his children and he wrote her an appreciative poem in Hebrew, which he reprints in his Recollections of Lord Byron. Gambling on prize-fights was one cause of his financial problems. He may have spent at least some months in debtors' prisons. His copyright for Hebrew Melodies ought to have brought him income – at one point he sold it to his married sister, presumably to avoid it being lost in bankruptcy – but it became involved in complex legal disputes. He attempted a publishing business in partnership with his brother Barnett Nathan, who later became proprietor of Rosherville Gardens. Nathan fled to the west of England to hide from debt collectors.

## London return

In 1823, Nathan's father died, and he returned to London possibly with the aid of an inheritance. Nathan published a history of music (1823), dedicated by permission to King George IV, which shows in its treatment of Jewish music a great deal of understanding of the Bible and of Jewish traditions. The Essay on the History and Theory of Music contains within it 90 pages of exercises in the Neapolitan bel canto tradition which Nathan documented. This work was intended as a prospectus curriculum for the new Royal Academy of Music and probably formed part of an application for the role of professor of singing at the newly formed institution which aspired to teach the old Italian tradition of opera singing in London. Nathan's treatise was later copied extensively by others including Domenic Crivelli (who was appointed professor of singing in 1824, and given access to Nathan's treatise), and Manuel García II, who was sent a copy in 1836. Nathan was not successful in his aspiration to be the professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music, but he was given a consolation of sorts, being appointed to write opera for the Royal Theatres. Nathan wrote no less than five operas between 1823 and 1833, and many of his songs became extremely popular. He also wrote frequently for the popular press in London on boxing and music.
Nathan was one of the best singing teachers in the world in the 1830s and by 1836 his Musurgia vocalis, the second edition of his "Essay on the History and Theory of Music" established him as a world leading authority on the bel canto tradition. One of his pupils was another great English poet, the very young Robert Browning, who 60 years later recalled: "As for singing, the best master of four I have, more or less, practised with was Nathan, Author of the Hebrew Melodies; he retained certain traditional Jewish methods of developing the voice".

## Political demise

From 1837–1839, Nathan was entrusted by King William IV with an espionage mission and given a letter with Royal Seal guaranteeing his protection and indemnity. He was required to use his charisma and charm to persuade Sarah Woodward (an authoress) to hand over copies of a book called The Secret History which proposed to reveal the true identity of a second child of King George IV. The child had never exercised her claim, by blood, to be the rightful heir to the throne (ahead of Queen Victoria). The matter was considered to be a scheme but the threat of revelation of the story was likely to stir up the Chartists who were preparing with revolutionary sentiment. Nathan safely retrieved the documents (including a birth certificate and copies of the books). However, King William IV died a month before Nathan could return the documents to the palace. Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, wanted Nathan to give him the documents. However, Nathan did not trust the man, and instead secretly gave the documents to the king's brother, and they remain in the Royal Archives of Windsor Castle today. When Nathan went to the treasury to claim his expenses for the mission, Lord Melbourne intervened, took the letter with the seal of King William IV and refused to pay the balance requested. The letter with King William's seal can be found in the Melbourne Papers of the Royal Archives. Nathan was left in financial ruin. He sold everything he had and gathered his family and moved to Australia.

## Australian resurgence

Nathan emigrated to Australia with his children, arriving in April 1841. There he became a leader of local musical life, acting as music adviser both to the synagogue and to the Roman Catholic cathedral in Sydney. He gave first or early performances in Australia of many of the works of Mozart and Beethoven. On 3 May 1847, his Don John of Austria, the first opera to be written, composed and produced in Australia, was performed at the Royal Victoria Theatre, Sydney. He was the first to research and transcribe Australian Aboriginal music; he also set lyrics by the poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop.
Nathan wrote Australia's first operas, Merry Freaks in Troublous Times (1843) and Don John of Austria (1847), and Australia's first song cycle, The Australian Melodies. He made significant contributions as a singing teacher, and as one of the country's earliest music journalists. Nathan published prolifically with announcements, advertisements, analysis, context, lyrics and reviews.
Peter Sculthorpe wrote an orchestral piece in 1988 called At the Grave of Isaac Nathan.
The portrait of Nathan shown in this article is held by the National Library of Australia.

## Death and descendants

On 15 January 1864 Nathan was crushed by a tram car in Sydney at the intersection of Pitt Street, where he lived at No. 442, and Goulburn Street after alighting from the tram. The horse-drawn tram was the first in Sydney: Nathan was Australia's (indeed the southern hemisphere's) first tram fatality. He was buried in Sydney; his tomb is at Camperdown Cemetery.
Many of Nathan's descendants became leading Australian citizens. Later descendants include four brothers – the conductor Charles Mackerras; the psephologist Malcolm Mackerras; the headmaster of Sydney Grammar School Alastair Mackerras; the sinologist Colin Mackerras, and their nephew, the conductor Alexander Briger.

## Summary

Nathan's Hebrew Melodies were in print in England at least until the 1850s and were known widely across Europe. They were particularly prominent among Jewish circles, probably because they resonate with Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) sentiments. Nathan continued recomposing these songs and others with the last formal publications occurring in Sydney in 1861.
Much scholarly debate has occurred with regard to Nathan's role as the creative instigator for Byron's poems. However, detailed diary accounts show that Nathan and Byron had a very intimate and enduring professional and personal collaboration over a sustained period of time. For some songs, Nathan played music at the piano, and Byron was struck with a flash of inspiration to write the prose. Most likely, Nathan gave Byron the theological context derived from Talmudic oral traditions, then sang melodies for Byron. Much of the work was done while the pair were together, although some poems were sent by letter. The songs diffused a spirit of philosemitism in cultured circles (indeed they became perhaps Byron's most genuinely popular work); but they were used as the basis for settings by many other composers in the nineteenth century, both Jewish (Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Joachim) and gentile (Schumann, Loewe, Bruch, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, and others). The Hebrew Melodies were at the forefront of a fashionable movement in the early nineteenth century in which Haskalah ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment were considered exotic. The Haskalah promoted aspirational values of religious emancipation, education, and equality.
Nathan's wrote four significant theoretical works. His "Essay on the History and Theory of Music" (1823) documented the Neapolitan bel canto tradition of Nicola Porpora, and he proposed it as a curriculum for the newly established Royal Academy of Music (London). This curriculum was later copied extensively by Manual García (1805–1906), whose subsequent books on singing are still relied upon as an authority on historical approaches to singing teaching. In his first treatise, Nathan argued for a publicly funded school of music and addressed it to King George IV. The king granted a royal charter a few years later in 1830. In 1836, Nathan published his most famous treatise, Musurgia vocalis. This work drew on ancient theorists and tried to explain the legendary power of music to create an emotional response in listeners. Again, Nathan advocated for public music education, and four years later the British government granted a sum of 30,000 pounds for a new public school of music.
In Australia, Nathan wrote a series of lectures on the history and theory of music, and delivered these at Sydney College in 1844, and published them in 1846 appealing to Charles Augustus FitzRoy, the governor of New South Wales to fund music education. Nathan was the singing teacher at the time for Lady Fitzroy (the Governor's wife). In 1849, Nathan published The Southern Euphrosyne featuring fragments of Aboriginal songs, excerpts of Australian melodies, national anthems, and Australia's first opera. He sent it to Queen Victoria to give to Prince Albert as a gift, and petitioned her to consider his loyalty, and bring him back to London to drink tea with her. In 1850, Governor Fitzroy announced "An Act to Incorporate and Endow the University of Sydney", and in 1858, Queen Victoria granted a Royal Charter to fund the institution.
Nathan's indomitable refusal to admit defeat and to overcome challenges means that readers often connect with him. His life follows the traditional "hero's narrative" through which he was constantly knocked down, and found ways to eventually succeed. His legacy is perhaps his greatest success. He made contributions to institutions, his student lineage and his descendants have often made significant contributions to Australian music and Australian society more broadly, and his compositions and theoretical works can often be characterised as historically important. Some scholars suggested that Nathan should be remembered by as "the father of Australian music".
Between, 2016 and 2024, many discoveries have been made about the contributions made by Isaac Nathan to Australian music, and there is much more work to be done.