page_title: Edward Lloyd (tenor)
section_title: The early 1890s in London
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Lloyd (tenor) / The early 1890s in London
caption_attribution_description: English: Mr Edward Lloyd, The English Tenor, pencil and watercolor heightened with white, 12 x 6.5 in. / 30.5 x 16.5 cm.
context_page_description: Edward Lloyd was a British tenor singer who excelled in concert and oratorio performance, and was recognised as a legitimate successor of John Sims Reeves as the foremost tenor exponent of that genre during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
context_section_description: Oratorio
  
  Lloyd was very active during the heyday of George Bernard Shaw's reviewing days. Shaw thought Lloyd in his best vein in Mendelssohn's St. Paul at the Crystal Palace in November 1889; in June 1890 he found the massed performance (3000 executants) an ordeal, but thought Edward Lloyd sang 'without a fault', when Watkin Mills and Mme Patey were in excellent form and Mme Albani her usual self. Shaw despised the massed festivals, but usually much admired Lloyd. In June 1891 at Crystal Palace, if Santley was the hero of the hour, Lloyd was delightful in Love in her eyes sits playing and in one of the Chandos Anthems. But he was out of sorts for The enemy said on the following night, though he had to repeat it, and sustained his reputation.
  Lloyd was good again at Birmingham in October, and in a Mozart concert aria in the December centenary celebration. In June 1892 a proposed Crystal Palace performance of Handel's Samson was substituted by the familiar Judas Maccabaeus to spare Lloyd the difficulty of the new role. However the Judas came off well, with the usual line-up of Santley, Lloyd, Albani and Patey. He appeared on 2 December 1893 at the official opening of the Queen's Hall, in Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, with Mme Albani and Margaret Hoare, under the direction of Frederick Cowen. In 1894 it was again Love in her eyes which Lloyd sang to perfection, though again he, Mme Albani, Ben Davies and Nellie Melba all had to accord first place in popular esteem to Charles Santley, who received stupendous applause. On Jubilee Sunday 1897 he performed the Mendelssohn Hymn of Praise with Mme Albani and Agnes Nicholls.
  Concert opera
  
  Lloyd had an ovation at St James's Hall for his Siegfried's forging scene in July 1888 under Hans Richter. The Philharmonic orchestra gave him a 'mundane' accompaniment in Lohengrin's grail narration in January 1889, and in Siegfried's forge his laugh was too well-bred, 'hardly the exultant shout of a young giant over his anvil'; and William Nicholl was out of tune as Mime. In July 1889 even Richter's wonderful conducting of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust could not (for Shaw) redeem Lloyd's 'wanton tampering' and 'annoyingly vulgar alteration' of important passages, and even in performances a few years later did not quite forget it, though he admitted Lloyd had set a standard in the work.
  In March 1890 his 'Preislied' from Meistersinger was the key attraction at Crystal Palace. In July 1890, Lloyd 'sang well', but tended to 'jingoism', 'genteel piety' and 'sentimentality' in the Lohengrin Act 3 under Richter, but 'he was not Lohengrin.' In March 1891 his Tannhäuser in a concert performance of the last act was 'beyond cavil'. At the Richter concert of June 1891 he sang Tannhäuser's Rome Narrative and the Siegfried forging music 'very tunefully and smoothly, without, however, for a moment relinquishing his original character as Mr Edward Lloyd.' In the Lohengrin and Tannhäuser third acts repeated at Queen's Hall in May 1894, Lloyd was 'playing a little to the gallery by a style of declamation not exactly classic, though sufficiently sincere and effective.'
caption: Lloyd as caricatured by Lib for Vanity Fair, 1892
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