page_title: Henry Chorley
section_title: Fiction and playwriting
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Chorley / Life and career / Fiction and playwriting
caption_attribution_description: English: Henry Fothergill Chorley funerary monument, Brompton Cemetery, London
context_page_description: Henry Fothergill Chorley was an English literary, art and music critic, writer and editor. He was also an author of novels, drama, poetry and lyrics.
  Chorley was a prolific and important music and literary critic and music gossip columnist of the mid-nineteenth century and wrote extensively about music in London and in Europe. His opera libretti and works of fiction were far less successful. He is perhaps best remembered today for his lyrics to "The Long Day Closes", a part song set by Arthur Sullivan in 1868.
context_section_description: Chorley also wrote, with far less success, novels, stories, drama and verse, and various librettos.  His works of fiction included Sketches of a Seaport Town (1834), a collection of stories, essays, and novellas related to Liverpool.  The next year, he wrote Conti the Discarded.  Neither of these achieved success.  His plays, Old Love and New Fortune (1850) and Duchess Eleanour (1854), did not gain a following.  He wrote two novels, Roccabella (1859) and A Prodigy: a Tale of Music (1866).  His libretti included The Amber Witch for composer William Vincent Wallace, The May Queen – A Pastoral (1858) for William Sterndale Bennett, and two for his friend Arthur Sullivan: The Sapphire Necklace and The Masque at Kenilworth. He published an English version of Meyerbeer's Dinorah, and wrote the words for several well-known songs, including Gounod's "Nazareth", Edward Loder's "The Brave Old Oak" and "The Three Ages", the English form of the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria", Sullivan's "The Long Day Closes", and the hymn "God, the Omnipotent!".
  Chorley wrote the English libretto for Gounod's Faust, for its first presentation in London in 1863 (at Her Majesty's Theatre).  During rehearsals, it was found that the lines were unsingable.  Both Sims Reeves and Charles Santley made strenuous and persistent complaints to Messrs. Chappell's, and new translations were made secretly, since no-one dared to tell Chorley.  The first he knew of it was at the first performance.  Chorley, as reviewer, waited to make his comment until the final announced performance, of which he wrote that it was "seriously imperilled by a singular translation". Unfortunately for him, the final performance in question had not taken place, so the Musical World was able to compliment him on his poetic imagination. Nevertheless, Chorley's translations of several songs from Faust were published and widely performed, such as "The Flower Song", "When All Was Young" and "Glory and Love". A similar Chorley effort, albeit of an obscure work, fared better: his translation of Mendelssohn's Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde, which Chorley rendered as "Son and Stranger," for the work's London premiere in 1851 is still heard today in that work's rare revivals.
caption: Funerary monument, Brompton Cemetery, London
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