Edwin Lemare
British musician (1866-1934)
Edwin Henry Lemare (9 September 1865 – 24 September 1934) was an English organist and composer who lived the latter part of his life in the United States. He was one of the most highly regarded and highly paid organists of his generation, as well as the greatest performer and one of the most important composers of the late Romantic English-American Organ School.
Biography
Edwin H. Lemare was born in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight on 9 September 1865. His birth year is sometimes erroneously stated as 1866, including in Lemare's own autobiography Organs I Have Met. He received his early musical training as a chorister and organist under his father (a music seller, also called Edwin Lemare) at Holy Trinity Church. He then spent three years at the Royal Academy of Music from 1876 on a Goss Scholarship, where he studied under Sir George Alexander Macfarren, Walter Cecil Macfarren, Dr Charles Steggall and Dr Edmund Hart Turpin. He obtained the F.C.O. (Fellow of the College of Organists, later to become the Royal College of Organists) in 1886. He became an organ professor and examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in 1892.
He gained fame by playing two recitals a day, over a hundred in total, on the one-manual Brindley & Foster organ in the Inventions Exhibition in 1884. He gave bi-weekly recitals at the Park Hall, Cardiff, from 1886; this was followed by further appointments around Great Britain.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edwin Lemare” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.