Isaac Nathan (1790 - 1864)

Born 1790 in Canterbury, Kent, England

Husband of Rosetta (Worthington) Nathan — married 1812 in England

Husband of Henrietta (Buckley) Nathan — married 1826 in Kensington, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom

Descendants

Died 15 Jan 1864 at about age 74 in Sydney, New South Wales (Australia)

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Biography

Isaac Nathan is Notable.

Isaac Nathan has Jewish Roots.

Isaac Nathan was an English-Australian composer, musicologist, journalist and self-publicist, who has been called the 'father of Australian music'. His influence on Australian musical history is great, if not popularly recognised. Whilst his own music may have made negligible affect he contributed to the prevailing pseudo-Byronic and Romantic tone of Sydney's artistic life. He was certainly the first musician with a European reputation to settle in the Australian Colonies, and the first to attempt a serious study of Aboriginal music.

Isaac Nathan was born in 1790 in Canterbury, Kent, England, the eldest of five children of the Cantor, Menehem Monash Nathan, a Polish refugee language master, who believed himself to be the illegitimate son of Stanislaus II, last King of Poland. His mother has not been substantively identified, but is most likely to be English-born Mary Lewis (later Goldsmid) (1779–1842). Isaac was initially sent to Solomon Lyon's boarding school in Cambridge to become a Rabbi, however, he convinced his father to instead apprentice him to the famous London maestro Domenico Corri to learn singing and composition. ^[1]

In 1812 Isaac eloped with a pupil, Rosetta Worthington, a minor novelist and the only child of an Irish army officer. Her mother tried to prevent the elopement. The young couple married twice, firstly in St Mary Abbot's, Kensington, and three months later in a London synagogue after Rosetta converted to Judaism. In 1824 Rosetta died, leaving two sons and four daughters for whom Isaac now had to care alone: ^[1]

• Charles Brahm (1816-72); married Harriet Fisher and became a medical doctor
• Alfred (c1820-1900); married Hannah Barker
• Jane Selina (c1820-71); married Doctor John Foulis
• Louisa Caroline (c1822-); married William Lawe Gane
• Marion (c1822-); married Thomas Venour
• Jessie Rosetta

In 1814 Isaac persuaded Lord Byron to write a series of poems on Hebrew subjects, which he set to his own adaptations of ancient Jewish chants. Hebrew Melodies was highly successful, but Byron's flight from England in 1816 and the death a year later of Isaac's (unsubstantiated) pupil, Princess Charlotte, to whom he had dedicated Hebrew Melodies, deprived him of aristocratic patronage. He composed operettas such as Sweethearts and Wives; in 1823 he published in London An Essay on the History and Theory of Music and on the Qualities, Capabilities and Management of the Human Voice, subsequently called Musurgia Vocalis, which achieved for Isaac a strong European reputation. ^[1]

He attempted a publishing business in partnership with his brother Barnett and published a history of music in 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.

In 1826, Isaac married a second time, to Henrietta Buckley. ^[1] Their children included:

• Temple F S (1836-1909)
• Zillah (1837-1921); unmarried
• Henry Lynd (1844-1904); married Anne MacFarlane
• Walter Byron (1845-)
• Una Blanche (1850-1922); married Walter Fell

He became musical librarian to both George IV and King William IV. By the time Isaac submitted his accounts for a mission the kings had (apparently) sent him on, William IV had passed away and the new Queen, Victoria, knowing nothing about the matter, was advised by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne (Isaac is said to have earlier fought a duel over the honor of Lady Caroline Lamb, Melbourne's wife, and written a poem for her) to refuse payment of the £2,000 requested. ^[1] As a singing teacher, one of Isaac's young pupils was the (later) great English poet and playwright, Robert Browning (1812-89).

Isaac Nathan migrated from England to New South Wales.

Facing financial ruin and aged about fifty, Isaac took his family to the Colony of New South Wales (now a State of the Commonwealth of Australia); arriving in the York on 7th April 1841. Upon settling he firstly opened an academy of singing and was soon after appointed both choirmaster of St Mary's Cathedral and music adviser to the Sydney Synagogue. He organised the largest concert of sacred music yet heard in the colony. ^[1]

Isaac composed a solemn ode, Australia the Wide and Free, for the inaugural dinner of Sydney's first Municipal Council (1842) and two choral odes, Long Live Victoria and Hail, Star of the South, for subsequent festivities. He composed a setting of the Lord's Prayer for Bishop William Grant Broughton (1788-1853). In May 1847, Nathan's romantic Don John of Austria, the first opera to be wholly composed and produced in Australia, was performed at the Victoria Theatre; it is one of only a few of Isaac's manuscripts to survive. ^[1]

Isaac built Byron Lodge, a large house in Randwick, on Sydney's eastern seaboard six kilometres from the city. ^[1]

What turned out to be his last composition, in 1863, A Song to Freedom he sent as a gift to the Queen. ^[1]

On 15th January 1864 he was killed while alighting from a city horse-drawn tram. ^[2] He was aged 73 years and had been resident in New South Wales for twenty-two years. Isaac's second wife, three of whose six children were born in Australia, died in 1898. ^[3] Isaac's eldest son, Charles, an honorary FRCS, was senior surgeon to the Sydney Infirmary and a pioneer in anaesthetics. ^[1]

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9} Mackerras, Catherine. Nathan, Isaac (1790–1864). Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1967; accessed online 9 Jun 2018
2. ↑ New South Wales Death Index #153/1864
3. ↑ New South Wales Death Index #4337/1898

See also

• Mackerras, Catherine. Nathan, Isaac (1790–1864). Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1967; accessed online 9 Jun 2018.
• Wikipedia: Isaac Nathan; accessed 27 Dec 2022.