Musicians - Isaac Nathan

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	Musicians - Isaac Nathan

Isaac Nathan is an Anglo-Jewish musician and self-publicist (c. 1792 - January 15th 1864) who ended an eventful career of triumph and failure by becoming the 'father of Australian music'.

Early Success

Born about 1792 to a hazzan of Polish origin in the English town of Canterbury, Isaac Nathan was initially destined for his father’s career and went to the school of Solomon Lyon in Cambridge. Showing an enthusiasm for music, he was apprenticed to the London music publisher Domenico Corri. In 1813 he 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, although they display the sad truth that, as throughout his life, Nathan's enthusiasm exceeded his actual talents.

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 (). However they were the first attempt to set out the traditional music of the synagogue, with which Nathan was well acquainted though his upbringing, before the general public. To assist sales, Nathan recruited the famous sunger 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 later to claim that he had been appointed as singing teacher to the Princess Royal, Princess Charlotte, and Music Librarian to the Prince Regent, later George IV. There is no evidence for this, although his edition of the Hebrew Melodies was dedicated to the Princess by royal permission.

Decline

However In 1816 Byron left England never to return (or to communicate further with Nathan). In 1817 Nathan’s royal pupil died in childbirth. Nathan's glory days seemed over almost as soon as they had begun.

Nathan’s two great enemies were debt and his own impetuosity. The latter led him to undertake a runaway marriage with a pupil, and another after his first wife’s early death. Both spouses were Christian; however for both, interestingly, Nathan also undertook and arranged synagogue marriages after the church ceremony. His hot temper and tendency to self-delusion undoubtedly also account for a duel he fought over the honour of Lady Caroline Lamb, and his assault of an Irish nobleman who he thought had impugned one of his female pupils. The latter saw Nathan hauled before the courts, although he was acquitted. For Lady Caroline Nathan felt a special attachment; 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’. Perhaps it was his early, heady success which led to him being profligate with money, although it has been suggested that an addiction to gambling on prize-fights was a root cause of his financial problems. The question of how he earned his living in England between 1820 and his emigration in 1841 is tangled, although it seems that at least some months may have been spent at different times in debtors’ prisons. He wrote frequently for the popular press in London, especially about boxing. Music was clearly always involved. He wrote comic operas for the London stage, and four of these were produced between 1823 and 1833. His copyright for ‘Hebrew Melodies’ ought to have brought him income, - at one point he sold it to his married sister, presumably to avid 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. (This gentleman, incidentally, eventually founded a successful pleasure garden at Rosherville outside Rochester, where under the name of Baron Nathan - presumably in jocular reference to Nathan Rothschild - he regularly performed a blind-fold hornpipe in between eggs laid out on the stage). Nathan published an interesting 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, and the Byron Reminiscences already mentioned. Nathan also attracted some renown as a singing teacher. By a striking coincidence one of his pupils was another great English poet, the very young Robert Browning, who sixty 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 .

Australian Resurgence

For the Royal Family Nathan claimed to have undertaken some mysterious services, but the Whig government under Lord Melbourne refused payment to him, leading to his financial embarrassment. He emigrated to Australia in 1841 where 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, and wrote the first Australian operas. He was also the first to research and transcribe the music of the Australian Aboriginals.

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