Frank E. Tours: A Life in Music

Frank E. Tours was a musician whose career embraced the distinct, but related worlds of classical and popular music in the early twentieth century. As a music director in London, he brought his training at the Royal College of Music to George Edwardes’ musical comedies with scores by Lionel Monckton, Paul Rubens, and Ivan Caryll. And when he migrated permanently to the United States in 1910, he brought his skill and experience to musicals by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter on Broadway, shows that helped to define an emerging American musical identity in popular music. As a composer, though, he took a different path, one where he remained faithful to his upbringing in a multi-generational musical family and to his education as the student of the finest composition teacher of his generation in England. Though he occasionally wrote the scores for musical comedies early in his career and later for films, Tours was a dedicated and accomplished composer of songs for voice and piano. Throughout his career as a music director, he constantly returned to the genre as an outlet for his creative energies, setting more than seventy poems over a thirty-year period, while most of his evenings were spent in the orchestral pits of London’s West End and Broadway.

In retrospect, it might seem inevitable that at least one of the children of Berthold Tours would have made a career in music. As the chief editor at Novello, Ewer & Company, one of London’s finest music publishing houses, Frank’s father became a well-known and respected figure in British musical circles of the Victorian Era.1 In fact, the Tours family saw professional musicians rise to prominence among them for several generations before Frank developed his own distinguished career in the theatre. The family name was acquired when Antoine, whom family lore maintains was probably a farmer from Tours, France, resettled first in Geneva and took the surname La Tour.2 He later moved to Rotterdam in the mid-eighteenth century where he simply went by the name Antoine Tours, thus distinguishing himself from many other Latours in the region. His son, Jacob, who was Dutch by birth, became the first in the Tours lineage to become a distinguished musician, when he became both the principal organist of Rotterdam’s Groot Kerk (“Great Church”) and a composer of liturgical music, as was the custom of the day. Before assuming this esteemed position, he was an organist in Maassluis, a city in the southwest province of the Netherlands, and later at the church of the Remonstrants in Rotterdam. Jacob’s son, Bartholomeus, who was born in 1797 in Rotterdam, was a violinist of high regard within his region, as demonstrated by the fact that he received a gift of jewels from the Queen of Württemberg in the 1840s when he played for her at Bad Kissingen. In addition to being a fine organist, who followed his father into his post at the Groot Kerk, a position he kept with distinction until his death 34 years later, Bartholomeus helped to establish the musical society Eruditis Musica in Rotterdam. During this time, he also oversaw the building of a new organ, which was Holland’s largest instrument of its kind until it was destroyed in a German air attack in 1940. The Tours name subsequently became associated through marriage to one of Germany’s leading musical families when Bartholomeus’ daughter, Jeanne Hermine, wedded the composer Woldemar Bargiel, who was the half-brother of Clara Wieck-Schumann. Indeed, Frank Tours recalled family members during his youth in the 1880s speaking of Robert Schumann as “Uncle Bobby.”3

Bartholomeus’ son Berthold (also named Bartholomeus, who then took a new name when he immigrated to England) was similarly surrounded by music at a young age and received his first training from his father. After continuing his studies in organ, violin, and musical composition in Leipzig, and then taking a brief position with Prince Yuri Golitsyn in Russia, Berthold settled in London, where he would establish his career and spend the rest of his life. His quiet industriousness made him a prolific composer, whose catalogue includes 125 art songs, 50 sacred vocal works, and over 90 instrumental works for piano solo, piano four-hands, and various chamber ensembles. An appreciation in The Etude referred to Berthold Tours’ compositions as being “characterized by refinement of melody, originality of harmonization, and admirable workmanship generally.”4 His instrumental tutor The Violin, published by Novello, was widely in use, having sold more than seventy-five thousand copies during his lifetime. During the 1870s and 1880s, he welcomed visits by many esteemed musicians and was highly regarded for his editorial acumen by England’s leading composers, whom he encountered through his work.5 His leading position at Novello enabled him to purchase a house of eleven rooms in the Hammersmith district of London and to employ two servants that gave Frank’s mother time to attend to his and his four brothers’ education and upbringing (their only sister had died in her youth). Some of the brothers studied organ with their father, but it was Frank who showed early signs of having a prodigious musical talent, as he became the organist at St. John’s Church in Hammersmith when he was fourteen.

Frank’s dedication to music along with his natural ability at the piano and organ led him to pursue professional training at the Royal College of Music. The RCM was a relatively new institution when Frank applied in 1893, having been established by Sir George Grove a little more than ten years earlier, when the Royal Academy of Music was already sixty years old.6 The school was founded with the mission to offer educational opportunities of the highest order, with support from the Royal family, to qualified music students irrespective of their social circumstances. Since he did not need a scholarship, Frank’s reasons for choosing the Royal College lay in its outstanding faculty and location in nearby South Kensington. When he began his studies, the RCM employed several of the best musicians in England, including Charles Villiers Stanford (composition), Hubert Parry (composition), Franklin Taylor (piano), Walter Parratt (organ), Jenny Lind (voice), and J. Frederick Bridge (organ). This distinguished roster of teachers attracted the likes of Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Ireland, Frank Bridge and many other talented and ambitious young musicians who would surpass their professors in acclaim and compel the musical world to recognize a distinguished English school of composition in the twentieth century. Frank declared the piano as his principal area of study during his first term, but then changed it to organ two years later.7 This was most likely a practical decision, given the high demand for church musicians in England and the fact that his technical ability at the piano was not that of a virtuoso. He declared at this time that his secondary area would include composition, perhaps encouraged by Charles Stanford with whom he was studying.8 Since both Stanford and his organ teacher Frederick Bridge were also accomplished conductors, they must have both played a central role in Frank’s eventual decision to become a music director, although his records do not indicate that he studied conducting formally at school.

Having entered the RCM at an early age, Frank took his examinations, which occurred in the spring of 1896, when he was still eighteen. Although he could have settled into a comfortable profession as a church musician at that time, he hoped to pursue further training in composition at the Leipzig Conservatory, as both Stanford and his father had done. His fortunes would change over the course of the next year, though, in a way that determined his future career. During the first Christmas holiday after leaving music school, he accepted a brief stint as the music director for the pantomime Robinson Crusoe in Ireland. A few months later, Stanford asked him to conduct his comic opera Shamus O’Brien on its second national tour.9 At first, he hoped it would merely be a summer position to keep him occupied before heading to Germany. However, his father’s death on March 11, 1897, occurred within days of his taking the job, forcing him to accept Stanford’s offer to lead the production through October.10 As a result, Frank turned to conducting in the theatre as a reliable occupation in which he was regularly employed over the next fifty years.

Just as vaudeville and burlesque circuits were a training ground for aspiring performers in America during the early twentieth century, pantomime offered British performers similar opportunities to hone their theatrical craft. After getting his first taste of professional life as a music director during the year after his graduation, Tours continued to accept jobs with itinerant and seasonal companies. At Christmas time during the next several years, he conducted Robinson Crusoe and Cinderella in Aberdeen, Dundee, Brighton, Manchester, and Liverpool. He was also increasingly hired at this time to conduct the tours of British musical theatre productions that had already made a hit in London. In 1898, he was the music director for the The A.B.C.; or, Flossie the Frivolous, featuring Music Hall star Marie Lloyd playing the role of a waitress in her only musical play. The music for the show was by “Graban” as was the music for Sweet Brier, a musical play in three acts by Herbert Shelley that Tours took up the baton for later that year.11 Eventually Frank came to the attention of musical-comedy impresario George Edwardes through one of his scouts. Ever since the concurrent successes of A Gaiety Girl and The Shop Girl in 1894, Edwardes had dominated British musical theatre with his up-to-date shows that combined attractive singing actors, charming light music, and scenarios with a keen eye for modern style and sensibility.12 When Edwardes met the nineteen-year-old Tours in London, he was prepared to give him an assignment as a music director based upon his stellar reputation, but was concerned that his youthful features would not inspire confidence in his orchestral musicians, especially on a long and exhausting tour. Instead he told the young conductor to return when he had grown a large walrus mustache that would hide his boyish appearance behind an imposing display of facial hair.13

Once he had acquired the necessary lip accessory, Frank was sent on the English tours of a succession of Edwardes’ Gaiety Theatre hits—A Greek Slave (1900), San Toy (1901), A Country Girl (1902), and Three Little Maids (1903). In 1901, having established himself as a music director for touring shows in the United Kingdom, he turned once again to composition; but instead of working with the classical forms he had learned at home and in school, Tours began to compose for the theatre, a natural development that demonstrated his growing commitment to the field. The property he selected for his first effort was The Lady of Lyons, a venerable, but, according to The Sketch, “old and somewhat time-worn Love-versus-Pride drama” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.14 Presented to the public as Melnotte: or The Gardiner’s Bride, the musical version of the play was designed as a comic opera with choruses amidst the individual solo and duet numbers. Frank had known librettist Herbert Shelley from his recent tour of Sweet Brier, which had originally opened at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith near the Tours family home. The production never made it out of the Coronet Theatre in nearby Notting Hill, where it was given a tryout. Local critics seemed to think that Tours’ music was not primarily at fault for the opera’s lack of success, writing that the music was “tuneful and pleasing, and gives evidence of artistic earnestness of purpose.”15 Despite the lack of enthusiasm for the project displayed by The Musical Times, the journal made a point of singling Tours out as a promising young composer. He could thus take both the experience and encouragement with him into later theatrical ventures while continuing to earn his bread and butter from conducting.

Tours’ clout within the Edwardes organization had risen by 1903 to the extent that he was asked to conduct Paul Rubens’ Three Little Maids at Daly’s Theatre in London, in addition to his usual work touring the provinces. And when the impresario forged a plan to expand his empire abroad and send a company around the world, he entrusted Tours with the job of musical director for the ambitious enterprise, which traveled to North America and Australia and lasted sixty-five weeks.16 Following two weeks of rehearsal in New York, the show opened at Daly’s Theatre on Broadway near 30th Street on September 1 to excellent reviews. The New York Times critic effused later that night in his appraisal: “It is just possible that there have been better musical comedies...but, if there have, nobody in the audience could think of them at the end of the evening.”17 The show played on Broadway through Christmas at Daly’s, later moving to the Garden Theatre. When the production left for Washington D. C., Tours would not perform again in New York for another seven years.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the first flowering of musical comedy in England, precipitated by George Edwardes’ smart productions in the West End, took place alongside a concurrent ripening of British art song that would be a key development in a broader renaissance of English classical music. The revival of a distinguished school of English composition, which for centuries had been lurking in the shadows of a European musical culture dominated by artistic forces from the continent, had, according to Stephen Banfield, “reached maturity by 1900,” forged largely through the choral and orchestral music of Edward Elgar.18 The groundswell of sophisticated new music by young British composers was also animated by a heightened attention among them to the capacity for English poetry to provide a vehicle for innovative musical settings for voice and piano. As they sought to elevate an aesthetic discourse that had for so long been unresponsive to progressive musical ideas throughout the nineteenth century, English composers turned less often to sentimental verse employed in the typical British ballads of the Victorian Era, and instead sought the more disciplined and ironic language of Heinrich Heine, William Butler Yeats, and A. E. Houseman for musical interpretation.

While there are no surviving scores from his studies at the RCM to support the assumption, it is difficult to imagine that Tours didn’t compose any art songs while studying with Stanford.19 His teacher’s dedication to the genre was not only evident in his own work (comprising more than sixty songs by the time Tours entered the RCM), but more significantly in the outpouring of songs from his students, which included every English composer that made noteworthy contributions to the genre during the first two decades of the twentieth century.20 Stanford’s notorious short temper with students who lacked sufficient discipline and respect for tradition would leave an indelible imprint on a generation of composers, whether they flourished or suffered under his tutelage. Though Tours’ sentimental aesthetic interests, which revealed an obedience to convention and tradition, compelled him to resist the modern sensibility that was forming in the choices of text and musical settings of Vaughan Williams, Bridge, Hurlstone, Ireland, and Gurney (to name but a few), the striving for idiomatic vocal lines, solid modern harmonic architecture, and elegant rhythmic clarity that he consistently displayed (and probably acquired from his exposure to Stanford), enabled him to bring a dignified pathos to the romantic and spiritual verses he regularly chose to set.

The first two songs by Tours that were accepted for publication were settings of verse by Arthur Anderson, who would go on to write the books and lyrics for many musicals in New York over the next twenty years.21 Many of Tours’ collaborators over the next two decades would likewise be theatrical colleagues who enjoyed creating for and speculating in the field of the commercial ballad, both in England and the United States. Anderson’s words for “Lover Mine” and “’Tis Passing Strange” reflect the social and romantic anxieties particular to courtship among the Edwardian middle class: in the first case, a woman questioning whether her fiancé has represented his financial wherewithal honestly, or, in the second, a man questioning whether a woman will remain in love with him through the years. The musical settings for these bourgeois sentiments together are an impressive first effort that bear the hallmarks of Tours’ craftsmanship and lyricism. In his choice of text and in their elegant and sophisticated gentility, they also reveal his commitment to elevating the artistic expression of the Victorian ballad (as his father had done before him), rather than to composing art songs in the way so many other Royal College of Music students of his generation would over the next thirty years.

Tours found his next lyric in Rudyard Kipling’s early novel The Light That Failed. Presented as a prologue to the book, the poem that became “Mother o’ Mine” is the paean of a son who imagines enduring an improbable series of tribulations—hanging, drowning, damnation—only to find that his mother’s love and devotion remains unshaken through it all.22 Having been buried for more than ten years in Kipling’s book, which was considered a failure among literary critics, the verse became widely known through Tours’ musical setting and remained popular over the next two decades. “Mother o’ Mine” continued to occupy the public imagination well into 1920s, and the music remained in print nearly three decades after it was first published.23 With the rise of the recording industry, the song was issued by at least five labels between 1907 and 1933: twice by Columbia, OKeh, and Brunswick, and no less than seven times by The Victor Talking Machine Co.24 The pathos and fervent poignancy of the song that was endearing to people on both sides of the Atlantic for so many years was all but lost on audiences by mid-century however, rejected by a post-Freudian society that had become cynical toward such overt and sincere Oedipal impulses.25 But what may seem like an embarrassing outpouring of maternal affection by a young man to someone with a modern social sensibility was in its time considered to be a natural emotional expression of a commonplace familial bond.

Though he would never match the success of “Mother o’ Mine” with any of the more than five dozen songs that he published over the next twenty years, Tours likewise never composed another song setting that did not rise to the same level of craftsmanship. His lack of creative ambition and iconoclasm, which made him content to be a composer of middlebrow salon songs rather than to join the ranks of the artistic elite that emerged out of Stanford’s studio at the RCM, would all too often lead him to expend his considerable talent for musical interpretation on inferior lyrics. If his discrimination in the choice of texts was, generally speaking, uneven, his artistic integrity was, nonetheless, reliable and sure, enabling him regularly to transform a mediocre lyric into a work of genuine value and interest. Sometimes, when the words he set were irredeemably sentimental and earnest, the eloquence and appeal of his musical voice remains fresh and devoid of nostalgia. However, when he did find a sophisticated or meaningful poem to set, the results are uniformly satisfying and worthy of the company of songs by his better-known British contemporaries. Tours established himself with several publishing houses over the course of a few years: G. Ricordi & Co published the Anderson songs as well as “My Darling” with words by J. Edward Fraser; Novello & Co., his father’s old firm, published the enchanting lullaby “Hush-a-By, Sweetie”; Boosey and Co. took two early Tours songs “Oh! Cupid” and “Love’s Quiet”; after the success of “Mother o’ Mine,” Chappell & Co. published several more art songs, including “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” a setting of the familiar text by symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, along with the scores from his British musical comedies; and M. Witmark & Sons published nine songs between 1903 and 1909, a prescient decision by an American firm before Tours had relocated to New York and developed a name for himself as a composer of ballads.

Throughout his career, songwriting coincided with Tours’ regular work as a conductor for musical comedies. The twelve songs that he published in 1903 and 1904 were largely composed while he was the music director for Three Little Maids, which was touring England in late 1902 and continued through the fourteen-month world tour that began in the fall of 1903. Given that he had been composing with increasing regularity, and since he had been immersed in performing the scores of Paul Rubens, Ivan Caryll, Percy Greenbank, Lionel Monckton, Howard Talbot, and Adrian Ross all year round, it did not take long for him to begin to collaborate on new musical comedies himself. After working as musical director for Rubens’ Lady Madcap and Caryll’s The Little Cherub during 1905 and the spring of 1906 at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Tours was asked to contribute songs to Sidney Jones’ See-See, which appeared at the same venue as the others in the fall.26 His clout as a composer had risen to the point where he shared the composing responsibilities as well as the lead billing for The Dairymaids, which opened at the Apollo Theatre in April 1906.27 He was next asked to contribute additional numbers to The New Aladdin and The Gay Gordons, the latter being a “Play with Music” by Seymour Hicks, who also played the lead. By the time he was asked by Hicks in 1909 to be the lead composer for The Dashing Little Duke, Tours had been contributing numbers to music comedies for nearly three years and conducting them in London and on the road for over ten, so he was well prepared for this substantial assignment when it came. Hicks had played the role of the young Duc du Richelieu in an 1899 version of the original French play (Les Premières Armes de Richelieu, Palais Royal, 1839), but he handed it over to his wife Ellaline Terriss to turn it into a pants role for the musical version that he wrote and produced.28 For his part, Tours was acknowledged to have composed a light opera instead of another “Play with Music” as advertised. But this was apparently not an unwelcome preponderance of music, even for a play that, according to one critic, “might be very successfully given without musical numbers at all.”29 The composer was the show’s music director for the duration of the run from February 8 through May 28, first at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and later at the Hicks Theatre in London.

Not surprisingly, Hicks was already planning his next musical while the The Dashing Little Duke was still on the boards. The production he mounted, based upon a successful farce by the American playwright Richard Harding, was called Captain Kidd after the show’s aristocratic, globetrotting protagonist.30 Despite the auspicious array of talent Hicks had assembled, which included himself and Terriss in the lead roles and Leslie Stuart (composer of the outstanding hit Florodora) to write the score, the show would not only fail at the box office, it would bring to an end Hick’s dominance on the London stage. Tours was asked to lead the orchestra and the swift demise of Captain Kidd left him unexpectedly without work for the duration of the season, although he seems to have taken over the baton at some point during the run of The Balkan Princess, which opened at the same time but lasted through the summer and well into the fall of 1910. For, in July, the American producer William Brady and his wife, Grace George, herself a noted actress, came to London, partly as emissaries of Sam and J. J. Shubert, to scout properties and talent for the forthcoming Broadway season, and he offered to hire Tours to lead the orchestra in the Broadway production of The Balkan Princess, the American rights of which he had just acquired (in addition to two original cast members).31 Though Tours had already finished the score for a new show with Hicks and Terriss based on story of Joan of Arc, he took the assignment and sailed for New York in October only to find that the local musicians union would not allow him to work as a conductor for six months.32 The Shuberts, knowing Tours’ value and experience as a composer of light music, hired him instead to collaborate with Jerome Kern on the score for La Belle Paree, the brothers’ first production at the Winter Garden Theatre. Only the year before both composers had contributed songs to Leo Fall’s operetta The Dollar Princess, which was being adapted for London audiences. Having landed on his feet, Tours submitted an application for naturalization within a month of his arrival, and thus commenced his stay in the United States with the conviction that he intended to immigrate permanently and seek his fortunes in New York without looking back.33

Tours continued to work for the Shuberts throughout 1911, taking over the conducting duties for La Belle Paree and The Balkan Princess at different times once he was free to work in the city. The first Broadway show that he was in the pit opening night for was the American adaptation of Liebeswalzer (“The Kiss Waltz”).34 The Shuberts once again asked Tours and Jerome Kern to work together, this time providing interpolations for an imported score by Carl Michael Ziehrer in an attempt to facilitate the assimilation of a Viennese operetta that the producers had bought to satisfy New York audiences’ appetite for middle-European theatrical fare in the wake of The Merry Widow. As he was quickly establishing himself among the elite music directors on Broadway, Tours was also busy composing ballads. Being a staff musician at the Shubert organization with limited conducting and composing duties at first must have felt like a paid vacation for Tours, who prided himself on never being without work since he started conducting professionally fifteen years earlier. As a result, he had his most prolific year to date, publishing twelve art songs along with one of his numbers from La Belle Paree. M. Witmark & Sons, which had been issuing Tours songs since 1903, became his principle publisher over the next decade, along with a couple of other leading American firms.

His immigration to the United States was marked by the setting of one of the most idiomatically American lyrics to be found among his songs. Frank Lebby Stanton was a journalist and poet from Charleston who was working in Atlanta when he wrote “Wearyin’ for You” for an 1894 collection of verse called Songs of the Soil.35 Tours must have learned about the text from the well-known song setting by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, the success of which continues to overshadow his version. But despite never getting any traction with the public, the Tours setting may justifiably be said to have outdone its more famous counterpart in many respects, not least of which being its uncannily natural musical rendering of Stanton’s vernacular, which Jacobs-Bond had sought to suppress (the most obvious examples being her changing the words “jest” to “just” and “fer” to “for”). Among his finest achievements, “Jest a-Wearyin’ fer You” revealed Tours’ uncommon sensitivity to American linguistic and musical dialect and laid the groundwork for his songs over the next decade in collaboration with American lyric writers. None of his later work would be nearly as entrenched in dialect as “Jest a Wearyin’ fer You,” but still Tours was often able to cultivate in his personal style an American musical sensibility in the process. Elsie Janis’ lyric “From the Valley,” for example, bears no hint of the romantic angst that was so common in Tours’ English songs, but rather describes a spiritual journey from darkness into light and back to darkness that was unrelated to love and loss. The candor and maturity of Janis’ poetic voice was matched by a restrained elegance in Tours’ music, which itself had matured from the ambitious and sometimes overwrought sentimentalism of songs like “The Alternative” from his British period. Janis would be the first of many performers among his Broadway milieu who would collaborate with him on ballads.

Tours became one of the leading composers of the “Black and White Series” at M. Witmark & Sons during the 1910s, which was an economy division of their catalogue that focused on music with classical leanings (the series name referring to their no-frills, monochromatic sheet music covers).36 Julius Witmark began expanding the company’s catalogue beyond popular music, which had been their mainstay since the 1880s, for about ten years before the time when the company first began to publish Tours’ songs during the New York run of Three Little Maids in 1903. Isidore Witmark described how his brother, who was a fine singer in addition to being one of the company’s founding managers, travelled to England and acquired the publishing rights to “a catalogue of better-grade songs,” which later grew into the Black and White Series comprised of “semi-classical” ballads and sacred music. The Witmarks would first publish music by Tours more than a decade later, around the same time as they began to issue many successful songs by American ballad composers Ernest R. Ball, Caro Roma, and many others.37 Among his numerous love ballads and songs of spiritual yearning, Tours also contributed several songs with religious texts to the Witmark catalogue. Given his early training on organ and the fact that his father was a prolific composer of sacred music, it was natural that Frank should want to write music for use in the Christian liturgy. Novello, Ewer & Co. had published a Short Service of the Office of Holy Communion by Frank around the turn of the century (dedicated “To the Memory of My Dear Father, Berthold Tours”). Although contemporary accounts and unpublished scores from the earliest years of his career indicate that he was equally preoccupied with composing sacred music as he was with opera (the latter, again, likely the result of Stanford’s influence and his immersion in the score of Shamus O’Brien), he only began to compose liturgical songs for solo voice once he arrived in America. Over the next two years he gave the Witmarks several songs for their sacred music catalogue, including settings for Christmas (“Thou Blessed Man of God”) and Easter service (“Breaks the Morning”). While Tours had dedicated himself for more than a decade to conducting musical comedies and had already logged thousands of performances in British and American theatres, his ability to create inspirational religious music of great dignity and solemnity was undiminished by his constant immersion in light music.

Tours was next assigned by the Shuberts to conduct The Wedding Trip, which opened on Christmas Day of 1911 with music and lyrics by Reginald deKoven and Harry B. Smith.38 The show was another disappointment for the team that created Robin Hood (which opened in 1890) and was still searching for its successor nearly twenty years later. After the show closed in February, deKoven returned to the tried-and-true by reviving Robin Hood once again and he hired Tours to be his musical director for a brief run at the New Amsterdam Theatre followed by a lengthy tour and then a production of Rob Roy at the Liberty Theatre the following year.39 Tours then returned to London in 1914 to replace Cuthbert Clarke at the Empire Theatre, but was lured back to New York again by the Shuberts to be the musical director for Tonight’s the Night with a score by Paul Rubens and interpolations by Kern.40 He worked temporarily on The Lady in Red before it closed out of town in Chicago, but fortunately Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step, which had a successful run on Broadway in the spring, was scheduled to play for two months at the Illinois Theatre before continuing on the road, and Tours was hired by producer Charles Dillingham to lead the orchestra.41 And when composer and conductor Robert Hood Bowers left the production of Berlin’s Stop! Look! Listen! at the Globe Theatre the following year, Dillingham hired Tours again, a decision that cemented a musical relationship that would continue for two decades with Frank becoming the music director for nearly a dozen of Berlin’s shows.

Jerome Kern’s career in the theatre began in London’s West End, where he contributed songs to over ten productions and occasionally worked with Frank Tours before both men moved to New York within a year of each other. And though the trajectory of their careers was ultimately quite different, the parallel paths that these men took in their early professional lives gave them a bond of artistic and personal familiarity that would continue for thirty years. Tours was leading the orchestra when Kern’s Love o’ Mike opened at the Shubert Theatre in 1917, and the composer had three hit shows on Broadway at the same time. Dubbed his “Annus mirabilis” by biographer Gerald Bordman, 1917 was the year when Kern finally unseated Victor Herbert as the dean of American theatre composers, an occasion which similarly marked the conductor’s rise in prominence as a musical director on Broadway to the top of his field, a position he would not relinquish for twenty years.42 Just as he established himself professionally, Frank began to court one of the production’s attractive and talented female cast members, Helen Clarke.43 Born and raised in Manhattan by parents with connections to New York’s elite cultural and intellectual life, Helen worked as a stage performer from her early youth and was discovered by Elisabeth Marbury, who cast her at the age of twenty-one as a dancer named Dolly Dip in Nobody Home, the first Kern show in the famed Princess Theatre series that transformed the American musical theatre. She then appeared in several other musical comedies, including Very Good Eddie, Oh, My Dear, and La-La-Lucille!44 Her career was pre-empted by her blossoming love affair with Tours and ended permanently when the two married on July 3, 1920.45 By the end of the decade, Frank and Helen had five children and were living comfortably in Great Neck on Long Island.46

As he worked to establish himself as a first-call musical director on Broadway, Tours’ composition for voice and piano slowed down from its heightened pace during the year after his arrival in the United States. The relatively few songs he set between 1913, when he returned to England briefly to conduct at the Empire Theatre, and 1917, when the United States joined the Allied Powers in World War I, were, nonetheless, indicative of a continued maturation of his compositional sensibility. Perhaps through a rekindling of his British associations during his year back home, Tours began working with the lyricist Edward Teschemacher, whose poems had been favored by British ballad composers since he rose to prominence with “Because” in 1902 (music by Guy d’Hardelot). Although the content of Teschemacher’s lyrics in a song such as “Apple Time” represented a retreat to the sentimental Edwardian romanticism of his earlier work, Tours found a charming textural economy in his accompaniment to match the naive sentiment imploring young maidens to go apple picking in the orchards. In “Son of My Heart” Tours found an inspired melodic strain reminiscent of the music of Ernest Ball, while at the same exploring new avenues of expressivity for its sentimental lyric through an elegant modern harmonic language that would have been inconceivable for the composer of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Mother Machree.” The romantic pathos behind the lyrics for “No Voice But Yours,” “Hidden in Your Heart,” and “Give Me Your Hands” strikes a more universal tone of desire and longing rather than the concerns of young men and women looking to negotiate their future happiness, which was the subject of many early texts he chose to set. Tours met this plaintive tone of yearning with unsettling progressions and sonorities that defy expectation on key turns in the lover’s narrative that can disarm even the listener that is ordinarily inclined to resist the emotional language of romantic poetry. Knowing the composer’s own personal story only helps us to understand how the intensification of his musical language for these particular texts at this time was attributable to some extent to his own courtship of Helen, and that the passionate musical language of these songs was born more of personal authenticity than of mere craft and creative aspiration.

During America’s involvement in the war, Tours worked consistently at the conductor’s desk in the theatres of Broadway, beginning with four shows for the Shuberts: The Highwayman (5-2-17, 44th St.) with music by Reginald deKoven; Maytime (8-16-17, Sam S. Shubert) with music by Sigmund Romberg; Over the Top (11-28-17, 44th St.) also with music by Romberg; and Girl o’ Mine with a score that he composed. In 1918, he was the music director for Jerome Kern’s Rock-a-Bye, Baby, Irving Berlin’s military musical Yip Yip Yaphank, and Sinbad starring Al Jolson, musicals that centered around three of the biggest names on Broadway. During the war, Tours was also moved to compose some of his most serious and sophisticated art songs, even as he was immersed in the theatrical levity that characterized the shows for which he was working. The verse he set at this time was occasionally of a higher order of poetic expression, which in turn was the catalyst for powerful musical interpretations that exceeded even his own usual standards of excellence. John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields epitomized the desolation of the European battlefield and the war’s cruel futility, and in so doing it inspired no less than fifty-five composers to set its melancholy imagery of death and destruction.47 In his interpretation, Tours paints the grim scene in suitably macabre chords and swiftly shifting modalities that evoke the unstable ground that these soldiers fought and died upon. The voice that emerges from beyond the world that the listener inhabits expresses musically the entire range of emotion contained in McCrae’s message: he begins in solemn, unhurried phrases to describe the masses of graves; reaches up to describe the flight of birds; arcs down at the memory of the roar of gunfire; meanders in halting phrases above spectral harmonies to remember life on earth; forcefully calls to arms the brothers who would take up their cause in their absence; and chants repeatedly the name of their final resting place where they will not sleep if they are betrayed. By interpreting the text closely and illustrating carefully its series of moods, Tours finds a satisfying middle ground between the disturbing nightmare evoked in Charles Ives’ setting and by the trivializing combination of religious anthem and military tribute in the one by John Philip Sousa. There is a Tours family anecdote that Sousa said he would give all of his marches to be able to write a single ballad like Frank Tours. Hearing their respective settings of “In Flanders Fields” side-by-side one can imagine his saying such a thing.

The hardships of the Great War inspired the creation of a set of lyrics from Irene Castle, who revolutionized modern dancing with her husband, Vernon, and then endured months of separation when he trained and fought for the British Royal Flying Corps.48 When he returned from the European conflict, he trained other young pilots in Canada and later in Texas, where he died in a tragic airplane accident. As her books amply demonstrate, Irene was a woman of great intelligence, style, determination, and grit. Frank Tours and Irene had become close on the road with Watch Your Step when Vernon was overseas, and their song set Four Little Love Songs was the product of their intimate friendship at a difficult time in her life.49 Musical America delivered an uncompromising verdict upon her work, stating that “her texts are of that intensely subjective variety that leave nothing to persons possessing imagination” and then concluding rather callously that “one cannot write a great poem immediately upon the death of one’s loved ones.”50 By contrast, their appraisal of Tours’ music was generous, concluding that “we can say of him that he resembles our highly esteemed Victor Herbert, in that he writes just as good music to poor texts as to real poetry.” Her lyrics, obviously, were the work of someone who was not an experienced poet, but rather a public figure who was using the medium of verse to contain her profound sadness and devotion, which she continued to do with her two books about her husband and their relationship. As a tribute to Vernon Castle, a genuine war hero and one of the most charismatic and influential cultural figures of the early twentieth century, the songs are not merely fascinating documents; they have the power to conjure a deep emotional response, especially if one is familiar with Irene Castle, her marriage to Vernon, and his extraordinary talent, bravery, integrity, humanity, and joie de vivre.

After the war, Tours continued to be in high demand as a music director on Broadway. Following a three-month stint at the helm of Morris Gest’s Midnight Whirl, staged on the roof of the Century Theatre with George Gershwin receiving the lead billing as composer, he returned to London with Edith Day when she took the city by storm as the star in Irene. The London Times referred to her introduction to British audiences in historical terms, stating that she achieved “one of the most striking successes of any American actress on her first appearance on the London stage since the evening Miss Edna May burst upon the horizon” twenty years earlier in The Belle of New York.51 The original London cast recorded nearly the entire score of Irene for the British Columbia label with Tours conducting. Despite being the result of a commercial enterprise, the recordings also serve as a document of the musical performances and interpretive style, a form of historical preservation of the music that was rare and would not become standard until the 1940s with the regular appearance of original cast albums.52 He returned to New York to conduct Morris Gest’s extravaganza Mecca with sets and staging by Ballets Russes veterans Leon Bakst and Michel Fokine, which Alexander Woollcott said was “as rich and sumptuous in pageantry as the American theatre has known.”53 From one lavish spectacle to another, Tours joined the production of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921 the following summer, dominated by the talents of Fannie Brice, Van and Schenck, Raymond Hitchcock, and W. C. Fields and featuring new music by operetta composers Victor Herbert and Rudolf Friml, along with Follies regular Dave Stamper. By far the smartest, most sophisticated revue to play on Broadway, at a time when the genre was flourishing like no other, was the Music Box Revue.54 Designed to feature the unique talents of Irving Berlin, it was a star vehicle unlike any in the history of the American musical, not only because it cast the spotlight on a songwriter instead of a performer, but because it demonstrated that a Broadway show could be built around words and music as its primary attraction. Tours was the natural choice for music director, both because he had conducted most of Berlin’s musicals since 1914 and because the two were great friends, Berlin having served as best man at Tours’ wedding during the previous year.

After a two-to-three-year hiatus following World War I, Tours composed a handful of songs that represent the culmination of his work in the genre. After more than twenty years of composing for voice and piano, he was in full command of his craft and thus able to demonstrate the continued currency and viability of the ballad in the 1920s through his settings of several romantic lyrics. Throughout his career, Tours dedicated his music to some of the finest singers in the theatre, such as Maurice Farkoa, Orville Harrold, John Charles Thomas, and John McCormack. Although there was no remunerative benefit for the performer and the gesture was primarily made out of collegial friendship, these dedications may also be seen as a twentieth-century manifestation of the royalty ballad, since they served a reciprocal function of honoring the singer with the distinction of association with the published song while at the same time giving them a reason to program it in their concerts.55 In the case of John Steel, concert tenor for the 1919, 1920, and 1921 editions of the Ziegfeld Follies as well as the 1922 and 1923 editions of the Music Box Revue, he collaborated as a lyricist with Tours on ballads while the two of them were working together on the Berlin shows. In his lyric for “Hope Dreams,” Steel indulged in arcane language and imagery to craft a portrait of a man yearning for the fulfillment of his dreams by wishing on a “Star of Hope.” Despite the challenge presented by this less-than-promising idea, it inspired Tours to create one of his finest melodies, a long, arcing line in octaves amidst throbbing sonorities that evokes a celestial communion with greater sincerity than anyone may reasonably have expected. The esoteric narrative of Steel’s lyric was grounded by Tours’ setting, which balances harmonic richness and melodic elegance with natural vocal scansion. In this late period of creativity, Tours also revealed his capacity, in at least one instance, to make a credible contribution to the classical tradition of art song that his training with Charles Stanford had once suggested he might participate in more fully. “Fury of the Sea,” a setting of a poem by Edmund Goulding, offers a glimpse of the artistic heights that Frank Tours might have ascended to had he regularly chose superior texts and sought to convey their meaning in forceful, uncompromising musical language. The unrelenting torrent of arpeggios that course beneath its stentorian vocal line are drawn freely from German and French art song traditions of the nineteenth century in their ability to clearly illustrate the text. While Tours would continue to compose for projects upon which he was working as a conductor, he essentially stopped composing ballads for publication (with one notable exception) in the middle of the 1920s at the height of his creative and technical powers.

Advances in the motion picture industry after World War I precipitated the construction of massive theatres in every major city that would put films in direct competition with live theatre for the entertainment dollars of local audiences. These movie palaces needed large orchestras to supply music for a variety of needs, since even the most extravagant film productions at the time could not stand alone as an evening of entertainment, especially when vaudeville and Broadway were offering spectacular productions and talent all over the city. Paramount Pictures, which was making great strides to monopolize the distribution of its films, took over the Rialto Theatre in Times Square in 1919 after S. L. “Roxy” Rothapfel had made it the “Temple of the Motion Picture” a few years earlier.56 As music was central to Roxy’s vision of elevating moviegoing into the realm of high-class entertainment at the Rialto, he installed Hugo Riesenfeld as music director. A violinist, conductor, and composer who had worked with Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna during the early years of his career, Riesenfeld would revolutionize the cinema orchestra and create over a hundred scores for silent films. In 1925, Tours was hired to take over as the music director of the Rialto Orchestra as theatre managers sought to maintain the high quality of their musical programming, which included several light instrumental numbers in addition to the underscoring for shorts and a feature film. He also worked in the same capacity at the Criterion Theatre, another Times Square movie palace leased by Paramount to screen their films. After quickly establishing himself as an elite music director for high-end movie theatres in New York, he was asked to open the Plaza Theatre in London, which was located in Piccadilly Circus and built to be Paramount’s flagship theatre in England. According to the opening night program: “The Plaza has been designed in the confident hope that it will prove a real home of entertainment in the heart of London for all who seek relaxation and amusement.”57 The opening was attended by dozens of members of British Royalty and other distinguished guests, a list of whom was given in the program to add to the evening’s pomp and glamour. In addition to conducting the Plaza Orchestra in three selections and background music for the feature film Nell Gwyn with Dorothy Gish, Tours composed a waltz song for the occasion as an introductory number. “Sweet Nell” is both nostalgic and modern, evoking in words and music the historical figure of Nell Gwyn—the orange seller and actress who became the mistress of Charles II—as presented in the 1926 novel by Marjorie Bowen and in the film. The Plaza Orchestra was one of the finest ensembles in the city and their sound and repertoire were captured in several recordings for British Columbia. The venue gave Tours the opportunity to exercise his gift for composing and performing light music for orchestra, which recordings such as “Minuet,” “A La Gavotte,” “The Busy Bee,” and “Lover’s Lane” have preserved for posterity.58

Tours’ association with Paramount Pictures would grow over the next few years, when he began working at their film studio in Astoria, Queens, scoring and conducting films over the next eight years. Joining the film industry in 1925, as Tours did, held several substantial challenges for a music director. The role of music in the cinematic arts was in flux at the time, and with the technological advancement of the soundtrack still on the horizon, movie theatre managers in the big cities needing large orchestras to provide underscoring for increasingly complex and lengthy dramas. The solution that many music directors arrived at was to use pre-existing musical scores and parts from libraries created by publishers (Carl Fisher being one of the biggest in New York) or from in-house collections. But techniques for using new music created specifically to support the action was slow to evolve. When Tours arrived in London to begin his tenure at the Plaza, he wrote an essay for the British trade magazine Kinematograph Weekly, in which he describes the current situation in which some musical directors (“M. D.’s”) prefer to play indiscriminately chosen classical and popular works complete while others cut and edit pieces to suit the action. At the end, he makes “A Plea for Special Music,” apparently a novel idea in January 1926 that involved “synchronising [sic] the picture with appropriate music and as nearly as musically possible with music of the period of the story.”59 One may assume that he implemented these ideas in Nell Gwyn, a prescient view in light of Warner Bros. release later that year of Don Juan, which was the first feature-length motion picture with a recorded soundtrack. One of his early contributions to a film score was the song “Desert Stars,” the theme of which he composed and arranged in his score for the 1926 film Beau Geste starring Ronald Colman. By the time he began to work full time on the Paramount Astoria lot in 1928, the studio had fully transitioned to sound pictures and synchronized soundtracks had already become standard practice. Over the next seven years he worked on many films for Paramount (along with a few for Samuel Goldwyn and United Artists) as musical director and composer. His credits include The Cocoanuts (1929) featuring the Marx Brothers, Glorifying the American Girl (1929) featuring performers in the Ziegfeld Follies, Laughter (1930) starring Nancy Carroll, One Heavenly Night (1930) with John Boles and Evelyn Laye, The Emperor Jones (1933) starring Paul Robeson, Crime Without Passion (1934) starring Claude Rains, Gambling (1934) written by George M. Cohan, who also played the lead, and The Scoundrel (1935) starring Noel Coward.60

Tours remained in high demand as a music director on Broadway throughout the time he worked for Paramount. On a typical day, he would leave Great Neck in the morning, travel to Astoria by train, put in a day of work at the studio, and then take another train to Times Square to conduct a show in the evening. After he returned from a second run at the Plaza Theatre in London, Tours conducted Noel Coward’s This Year of Grace at the Selwyn Theatre starring the author and Beatrice Lillie, followed the next season by Coward’s colossal operetta Bitter Sweet, which opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre in November 1929. Tours sailed to London in September to “go over the score” and to oversee the making of a silent film of the production to aid in mounting the show. He returned to New York three weeks later with the film, 123 singers and dancers, producer Charles B. Cochran, and Coward.61 Having worked on the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927, the famed producer asked him in the fall of 1930 to be the music director for the ill-fated musical Smiles, starring Marilyn Miller and Fred and Adele Astaire and with a score by Vincent Youmans. After several years in a creative doldrums, Irving Berlin emerged in 1932 with an outstanding contemporary score for Face the Music. Tours once again conducted, and he returned two seasons later with the same team of Moss Hart (sketches) and Hassard Short (staging) to mount As Thousands Cheer, which surpassed their earlier success with a revue that some consider to be the pinnacle of the genre. During the run, Tours was honored in the press for having conducted his 2,000th performance of an Irving Berlin musical, an unprecedented collaboration in musical theatre history.62 He concluded his Broadway career with two operettas—Kern’s Music in the Air and The Great Waltz with music by the Strausses (Johann Sr. and Johann Jr.)—and two hit musical comedies by Cole Porter in the prime of his career—Jubilee and Red, Hot and Blue!. Over the course of twenty-five years, Frank Tours was at the conductor’s podium as the Broadway musical evolved from a medium dominated by European light opera to one that fully integrated vernacular American musical styles and in the process became one of the world’s most distinctive theatrical art forms.

As commercial radio became a ubiquitous part of American life, Tours was hired to be a music director on several high-profile programs. Will Rogers was asked to ply his theatrical trade on radio in 1930 and was convinced only reluctantly at first.63 By the time he appeared on the Gulf Headliners in 1933, he was the country’s most beloved radio personality. Tours joined the program in January of 1935, and when Rogers died tragically in a plane accident in August, Frank continued to lead the orchestra even as the country mourned and the show limped along for another month. The Vince Program was created for the Blue Network in 1933 to showcase the singing of John McCormack, and when John Charles Thomas took over for the 1935-1936 season, Tours conducted the in-house orchestra.64 Later, he led the orchestra for the Gulf Screen Guild Show, featuring a panoply of Hollywood stars, who donated their time and talent for the Motion Picture Relief Fund and other entertainment charities. RKO Studios contracted Tours in 1937 to work in their music department as a conductor, composer, and arranger, which prompted him to relocate to Los Angeles. The decision to accept a long-term contract at that time (he worked on RKO films exclusively until 1945) was likely precipitated not only by the anticipation that the studio would continue to work on musicals with top composers such as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin, but also by the attraction of not having to renegotiate a new contract every season, as he had done for the past thirty-five years. But in 1937, Irving Berlin moved over to Twentieth Century-Fox, George Gershwin unexpectedly died, and Fred Astaire had become increasingly uncomfortable working at the studio, prompting him to leave within a couple of years.65 In addition, new studio boss Sam Briskin began to implement a plan to increase revenue by reducing the number of A-pictures produced on the lot in favor of low-budget films. Being contractually obligated to a music department at a studio that valued cost-effectiveness over production quality, Tours was now forced to do yeoman’s work for at least twenty-three films in various capacities over the next eight years, mostly B-pictures for which the studio needed a competent music director and stock underscoring by a stable of uncredited composers. After spending his entire career at the apex of every facet of musical theatre in London and New York, he was only involved in two musicals during these years: Joy of Living, with a score by Jerome Kern, starring Irene Dunne and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; and a loosely adapted version of Rodgers and Hart’s Too Many Girls featuring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. With his long experience in musical comedy and operetta, Tours would have been better suited to work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Twentieth Century-Fox, which were committed to producing musicals with glamorous stars, often based on nostalgic themes where he could have had more opportunities to make a valuable contribution to the field.

His years in Los Angeles, however, were not entirely spent in the service of mediocrity. His long association with John Charles Thomas brought him to the attention of Edwin Lester, who was in the process of establishing a first-class musical theatre production company in Los Angeles. Tours brought his unparalleled experience and skill to the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera for five years, conducting revivals of Blossom Time, Roberta, A Waltz Dream, The Gypsy Baron, Tonight at 8:30, Charlot’s Revue, Music in the Air, and Bitter Sweet, with Thomas frequently in the lead. And then, when Gene Mann, an ex-vaudeville performer turned theatrical producer, envisioned operetta seasons at the outdoor 4,000-seat Greek Theatre, he knew Frank Tours was just the person to entrust with being the music director for his enormous (and risky) undertaking.66 The productions attracted some of the finest singers on the West Coast, many of whom had appeared on Broadway, and it succeeded in prospering for three seasons, during which time the company produced two-week runs of Rose-Marie, Blossom Time, The Firefly, The New Moon, Rosalie, Bitter Sweet, The Merry Widow, The Vagabond King, and Music in the Air. Three years after being mercifully released from his obligations to RKO, Tours was back in his element, once again leading glamourous productions of live musical theatre for appreciative audiences, a fitting end to an illustrious career as a conductor of light music.

Tours published one final song during this period after nearly two decades of inactivity as a composer. A memory painting of a western traveler in the South Pacific, “West of the Sun” conjures an image of a tryst remembered and longed for again through the sensory experience of a warm and fragrant land. Unlike many Tin Pan Alley songs that essentialized Polynesian culture and women in the wake of the United States’ establishment of the territory of Hawaii as a National Park in 1916, the lyric of “West of the Sun” by Dorothy K. Thomas carefully avoids colonialist allusions while indulging in romantic imagery of westerners falling in love in a tropical paradise. Tours’ music uses the habañera rhythm to evoke the gentle swaying of palm trees in perfumed trade winds, and his colorful harmonic language—fluctuating easily between major and minor—depicts the rich sensory experience of the poet’s dreamscape. The eloquence and sophistication of this swan song shows that he had not lost any of his creative powers during his years of musical menial labor in the music department of RKO.

By the early 1950s, musical culture in the United States, which was dominated by big band jazz and rock-and-roll, had evolved to a point where it had become largely independent from its European heritage. Even Broadway musicals, with the rare exception of a show like My Fair Lady, were thoroughly infused with American musical idioms that bore little resemblance to the grand musical romanticism of light opera. As a result, Tours found that his services were no longer being requested by producers in any medium and so he settled into a somewhat uneasy retirement. He returned to New York one more time in 1954 to look for work, and though he was not hired as a conductor, he was employed as a musical secretary by Irving Berlin, who saw that his old friend needed a job when retirement had left him without the dignity of a pension after a lifetime of work. Berlin ultimately rewarded Tours’ decades of service to his stage career with a generous monthly stipend that kept him free of financial insecurity for the rest of his life. During these years of professional inactivity, Tours found himself surrounded by a large family that both revered him and was endeared to him as a constant source of fun, warmth, and affability. His love of puns and telling amusing stories was as much a part of their cherished memory of him as their knowledge of his distinguished musical heritage. Several of his fifteen grandchildren recall him happily performing familial duties when he came to live with them intermittently or they with him. Just as he had been an avid maker of photographic scrapbooks during the 1900s and 1910s and of silent home movies in the 1920s and 1930s that documented his life and work, he also loved making personal sound recordings with his children and extended family where he would talk and play the piano for them. Once he was no longer working for the music industry in any capacity, he dedicated more and more of his time to playing the piano, where he would improvise for hours at a time in long, sustained streams of invention. No longer composing songs or music of any kind, he crystalized his musical ideas into impromptu instrumental rhapsodies that those who witnessed them remember with a mixture of awe and delight. Tours also spent time preserving his legacy, creating bound copies of his personal sheet music collection and compiling detailed lists of the musical productions he directed and of his published musical works. Frank and Helen had spent their years in Los Angeles living in several different parts of the city, from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills to Hollywood. They resided in a modest house in Westwood when he died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five on February 1, 1963.67 At the end of his life, Frank Tours’ music was out of print, no longer performed, and largely forgotten by a public for whom “Mother o’ Mine” would have been thought of as the old fashioned music of one’s parents’ or grandparents’ generation, if it was remembered at all. But the legacy that his family has kindled for five decades is not just the memory of an ancestor’s former glory; it is a living legacy in music that contains a wealth of artistic beauty in addition to being a window to a different age. If given due consideration, the songs of Frank Tours, will once again be valued as an elegant and meaningful reflection of their time and place.

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NOTES

1 The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 38, No. 650, April 1, 1897, 238-39; The Etude, Vol. XV, No. 12, December, 1897, 318.

2 J. T. Anema and O. Schutte, Nederlandse Genealogieën, Deel 10 (Koninklijk Nederlandsch Genootschap Voor Geslacht- en Wapenkunde ‘S-Gravenhage, 1993), 331-63; December, 1897, 318; The International Magazine, No. 1, March, 1885, 66; The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, edited by George Newnes, Vol. IV, July to December, 1892, 87-89.

3 Many details of the Tours family lore were conveyed to me by John Francis Emerson, one of Frank Tours’ grandchildren.

4 The Etude, December 1897, 318.

5 Novello, Ewer & Co. published music by many of the finest living musicians in England, including John Stainer, Arthur Sullivan, Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry, and many others. For more information, see The Complete Catalogue of Novello, Ewer & Co. (London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1890). Elgar submitted his cantata The Black Knight to Novello in 1892 and was encouraged by their response, even though Berthold Tours had told him that the piano part was too difficult for the average choral accompanist. His response was to make the necessary changes: “Since my interview with Mr. Tours on Wednesday last I have most carefully gone through the P. F. accompaniment of the above-named Cantata & have removed all the difficulties which he was so kind as to point out.” Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 166.

6 Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 133.

7 Frank’s matriculation sheet is housed at the Royal Conservatory of Music archive: RCM Student Register, Vol. 3, 1889-1894, 1035.

8 Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, revised and enlarged by Alfred Remy (New York: G. Schirmer, 1919), 959.

9 Frank Tours compiled a list of his jobs as a musical director that he called “Fifty Years with my Back to the Audience” from which much of the basic information about his career for this essay was drawn.

10 “Berthold Tours,” Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. V (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 366.

11 Kurt Gänzl, British Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 682. The Era Almanack, 1899, 85.

12 Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890-1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 30-33.

13 Unidentified newspaper clipping, Frank Tours personal scrapbooks.

14 The Sketch, September 25, 1901, 245. The present standard hyphenated version of the playwright’s name is different from how is was given originally. For more information, see Bulwer’s Plays: Being the Complete Dramatic Works of Lord Lytton, (Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, Bart.), edited by John M. Kingdom (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1875) (accessed January 12, 2020).

15 The Musical Times, November 1, 1901, 731.

16 The company set forth out of Southampton on August 8, 1903 and did not return home until October 25, 1904. The tour took the company through New York, Washington D. C., Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Perth, and Paris. Frank Tours personal scrapbooks.

17 “‘Three Little Maids’: A Masterpiece of Musical Comedy at Daly’s,” The New York Times, September 2, 1903.

18 Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1-3.

19 The only composition that exists from Frank’s youth is “The Skelsmerghian Song” from 1887. The Skelsmergh School for Young Gentlemen in Kent was attended by all the Tours boys from the ages of 7 to 12. The song was composed in 1889 by Frank as a precocious student and was good enough for them to keep. He had it printed many years later for an “Old Boys Dinner” that the brothers attended and where it was surely performed.

20 Banfield, Sensibility and English Song, 26-41, 513-14.

21 Arthur Anderson contributed to the productions of The Girl Behind the Counter, Two Little Brides, The Merry Countess, The Marriage Market, Chu Chin Chow during his career. Richard C. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, Vols. I-III (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), I: 870 990; II: 6, 37, 128, 184.

22 While the poem’s message is clear, its origin and purpose remain murky. Forced to speculate, Kipling biographer Phillip Mallett suggests that the author wrote the verse to ameliorate his concerns that the autobiographical elements of the book’s tortured protagonist might implicate his mother unfairly. But an alternative scenario—one in which he wrote it to ease his mother’s disappointment over him issuing the book with a tragic ending—seems more probable. Since the poem did not appear when The Light That Failed originally appeared in Lippincott’s journal, it is perhaps more likely that Kipling wrote the poem when he published it as a book the following year with a tragic ending that he had written first and that had met with his mother’s disapproval. Phillip Mallett, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 58. Geoffrey Annis, “The Light That Failed: An Introduction,” The Kipling Society, http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_light_intro.htm (accessed February 26, 2020).

23 Chappell & Co. even promoted a version for tenor and baritone duet on their cover in the 1920s

24 For more information, see Discography page of this website.

25 As a reflection of the shift away from social acceptability of such unabashed expressions of maternal affection as “Mother o’ Mine” by mid-century, see Preston Sturges’ parody of the “mother song” (“Home to the Arms of Mother”) in his 1944 film Hail, the Conquering Hero.

26 Gänzl, British Musical Theatre, 888, 949, 955.

27 Ibid., 952, 956, 989, 1040.

28 Producing the play was more akin to directing in the age where the theatre manager had the primary creative responsibility for the production. Charles Frohman, in fact, had controlling interest in the property, which, in today’s parlance, would have made him the producer and Hicks the writer-director. Tours, Frank E., The Dashing Little Duke, lyrics by Adrian Ross, vocal score (London: Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew, 1909).

29 For good measure, the critic noted that “[t]he book by Seymour Hicks is good; so, too, are the lyrics by Mr. Adrian Ross, while the music by Mr. Frank Tours is a shade better than merely that.” Unidentified newspaper clipping, Frank Tours personal scrapbooks.

30 Andrew Lamb, Leslie Stuart: The Man Who Composed Florodora (New York: Routledge, 2002), 206.

31 “Brady Back with Many New Plays,” The New York Times, August 1, 1910, 7.

32 Unidentified newspaper clipping, Frank Tours personal scrapbooks; “Theatrical Notes,” The New York Times, April 4, 1911, 11.

33 Tours would become a citizen six years later. Petition for Naturalization, U. S. District Court, S. District of New York by Frank E. Tours, July 2, 1917.

34 Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, I: 971.

35 Frank Lebby Stanton worked for the Atlanta Constitution and wrote and published several volumes of poetry, including Songs of a Day (1893), Songs of the Soil (1894), Comes One with a Song (1899), Songs from Dixie Land (1900), and Little Folks Down South (1904). John W. Leonard, ed., Who’s Who in America: A Biographical Dictionary of Living Men and Women of the United States: 1899-1900 (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co.), 687.

36 Isidore Witmark described the catalogue in this way: “The series contained not only ballads for all voices but sacred songs, arranged for solos, duets, and quartettes, and each song was offered in at least three keys, so that is could come within the range of any voice.” He also wrote of Tours that as a composer of ballads “he has no peer.” Isidore Witmark and Isaac Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime (New York: Lee Furman, 1939), 271, 413.

37 For more information about the composers of The Witmark Black-and-White Series, see their original catalogue Songland.

38 Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, I: 980.

39 Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, I: 991; II: 36-37.

40 John Franceschina, Incidental and Dance Music in the American Theatre from 1786 to 1923, Vol. 3 (Albany, GA: Bear Manor, 2018), 486.

41 Information on out-of-town and touring Broadway productions was drawn from Herbert Goldman’s musical theatre research for Packard Humanities Institute.

42 Love o’ Mike (1-15-17, Shubert) opened four day after Have a Heart (1-11-17, Liberty) and one month before Oh, Boy! (2-20-17, Princess), at which point he had an unprecedented three simultaneous hits on Broadway open nearly within a month of each other. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, II: 110-14.

43 Helen Clarke was the spelling that Helen Veronica Gaylord Clark used on the stage.

44 Selma Jeanne Cohen and Dance Perspectives Foundation, International Encyclopedia of Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

45 U. S. Census Bureau, 1900 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office). Viewed at https://www.ancestry.com (accessed on June 28, 2020). Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, II: 70. Anema and Schutte, Nederlandse Genealogieën, 349.

46 U. S. Census Bureau, 1930 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office). Viewed at https://www.ancestry.com (accessed on June 28, 2020).

47 Jennifer A. Ward, “American Musical Settings of ‘In Flanders Fields’ and the Great War, Journal of Musicological Research 33 (2014), 96-129.

48 Irene Castle, Castles in the Air (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958), 138-74.

49 It should not be inferred that her poetry was about anyone other than her husband, despite the fact that Castle wrote that “Frankie Tours and I were inseparable” while on the road together and even suggested they had a brief affair. Ibid., 136-37.

50 Musical America, August 3, 1918, 28.

51 “Irene” at the Empire: A Welcome American Invasion, The London Times, April 8, 1920, 8.

52 “Irene” with Edith Day, Monmouth Evergreen, MES 7057, LP. The first American production to be documented on record with this degree of completeness was Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock in 1938.

53 The New York Times, October 10, 1920, 81. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, II: 228-29.

54 Jeffrey Magee, Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202-86.

55 An example of this relationship at work can be found in the press notice of a concert by John McCormack where he was reported to have sung Tours’ “The Littlest of All,” “which pleased greatly in the McCormack reading.” The Music News, Chicago, IL, January 25, 1918, 3.

56 Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Golden Age of the Movie Palace (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1961), 42-51.

57 The program explains that “The Plaza will be the London home for Paramount productions and others of equal merit, where it is hoped to present all that is best and most worthy in motion picture art.” A reproduction can be found at the website “ArthurLloyd.co.uk—The Music Hall and Theatre History site Dedicated to Arthur Lloyd, 1839-1904” (accessed on July 14, 2020).

58 Of these listed works, only “Lovers’ Lane” is an original Tours composition.

59 “The Plaza’s Music: Piccadilly House and New Orchestral Ideas,” Kinematograph Weekly, January 28, 1926.

60 For more information, see the Internet Movie Database.

61 “Frank Tours Sails,” The New York Times, September 21, 1929, 24.

62 “Mr. Tours Chalks Up a Conductor’s Record: Directs an Irving Berlin Score for the 2,000th Time Today,” unidentified newspaper article, Frank Tours personal scrapbooks.

63 John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 722-24.

64 The Vince Program was named after its sponsor Vince Toothpaste. Ibid., 180.

65 Richard Jewell, RKO Pictures: A Titan Is Born (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 141-46.

66 Gladwin Hill, “Hollywood’s Musical Missionary,” The New York Times, August 8, 1948, X1.

67 “Frank Tours, Orchestra Conductor, Dies at 85,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1963, H9.

Essay by Eric Davis, Los Angeles, CA