William Saurin Lyster

William Saurin Lyster (born March 21, 1828 in Dublin , † November 27, 1880 in Melbourne ) was an Australian opera impresario of Irish origin.

The son of Captain Chaworth Lyster and nephew of the Attorney General of Ireland, William Saurin (after whom he was named), was sent to sea with a whaler in his youth because of his poor health and met Sydney and Melbourne on this voyage in 1842 . Immediately after his return to Dublin, he left for India at the age of 18 to try his hand at growing indigo . From there he went to South Africa in 1847 as a volunteer in the "Kaffir War" under Harry Smith .

In 1848 he traveled to America with his brothers Frederick and Mark. Mark fell overboard during the voyage while his brother Frederick made his debut as a singer in the opera Fra Diavolo in New York . William Lyster himself went to Nicaragua as a mercenary . In 1854 he appeared as an actor in the play The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret for the opening of the new Boston theater.

In 1857 he and his brother founded an opera company with Frederick as conductor, his wife Rosalie Durand as soprano and his future wife Georgia Hodson , the sister of actress Fanny Hodson as mezzo-soprano. The troupe performed in New Orleans , Chicago and San Francisco between 1857 and 1859 , before they went to Australia in full line-up, with soloists, choir and orchestra and now also soprano Lucy Escott and tenor Henry Squires , and in March 1861 with Lucia di Lammermoor made her debut at the Theater Royal in Melbourne.

In the next few years Lyster and his troupe, which in the meantime also included the singer Armes Beaumont , successfully performed operas in Australia and New Zealand such as Les Huguenots , Lurline , Don Giovanni , I Puritani , The Lily of Killarney by Julius Benedict , Faust , Le prophète , Oberon , Semiramide , L'Africaine , William Tell and A Masked Ball . He bought land near Melbourne and opened the Narree Worron Grange farm .

His return to America in 1868 was a financial disaster. Lyster had to dissolve his theater company, his brother Frederick took over the management of the California Theater in San Francisco with his second wife, actress Minnie Walton , and he himself returned to Melbourne.

Here he and John W. Smith founded the Lyster Smith Opera Company , which consisted of two ensembles, one Italian-speaking for Italian and one English-speaking for French, German and English opera. The company made its debut in 1870 with Verdi's Ernani , followed by the Australian premiere of I Vespri Siciliani . After the Italian singers returned home after an eventful season, Lyster reorganized the company and opened it very successfully in 1871 at the Prince of Wales Opera House in Melbourne with Jacques Offenbach's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein with the singers Fanny Simonsen , Armes Beaumont and Edward Farley . The next year Orpheus in the underworld and Knight Bluebeard followed .

In 1873 he went with his troops to Sydney, while the house in Melbourne was taken over by an Italian troop under Augusto Cagli , whose manager Lyster was. 1877 brought Lyster as the first opera of Richard Wagner 's Lohengrin , an Australian stage. The first performances of La forza del destino (1878) and Carmen (1879) followed. On a recreational trip in 1879, he was offered the Australian rights to Gilbert and Sullivan's hit opera HMS Pinafore .

Due to his poor health and after a jealous drama during a performance of the "Huguenots" in his Melbourne theater, in which the husband injured his wife and her lover and killed himself, Lyster decided to retire to his farm, but he died before that in Melbourne.

Web links

• Australian Dictionary of Biography - Lyster, William Saurin (1828-1880)
• Live Performance Australia Hall of Fame - William Saurin Lyster 1828–1880