Hugh Talbot

Hugh Talbot (15 October 1844 – 31 October 1899), born Hugo Talbot Brennan, was an Irish tenor best known for creating, to universally bad reviews, the role of Frederic in the Gilbert and Sullivan hit The Pirates of Penzance in the original New York production.

After beginning his career in Italy in 1872, Talbot performed Italian opera in England in 1877–1878 with Mapleson's Italian Opera company. He was then engaged by Richard D'Oyly Carte in 1879 to originate the role of Frederic. After his critical disaster in the role, Talbot toured unsuccessfully with several American opera companies, settling in California in 1881, where he became a successful voice teacher.

Life and career

Early life and career Born at Portobello Barracks near Dublin to Edward Brennan and his wife Margaret, Talbot was the fifth of six siblings. He and his family moved to London by 1851, where he was reportedly a choirboy as a youth and later clerked for a lawyer. An amateur tenor by 1868, Talbot sang with such groups as the Moray Minstrels. By 1872, Talbot travelled to Italy to study music, where he began to perform under the name Signor Ugo Talbo in 1872, appearing in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, as the title character in Faust and as Alvaro in La Forza del destino, among other roles, and in concerts until at about 1876.

On 31 December 1879, he created the role of Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance. Talbot's Frederic was perhaps the most roundly criticized performance of any Gilbert and Sullivan opera's opening night. Nearly every critic eviscerated him in reviews. The New York Times reviewer wrote: The essential part of the young pirate apprentice received inadequate attention from the tenor. His make-up resulted in his appearing, in the first act, to be of advanced age; he was not, apparently, acquainted with his lines, and his singing was weak and tame. But the others were so spirited and generally enthusiastic that the effect of the opera was not materially injured by this weak spot in the cast.

The World was not much kinder: "Mr. Talbot sang some of the airs allotted to the tenor admirably, but he was utterly innocent of any appreciation whatever of the humor of the situations and shamefully ignorant of his lines." In the interim, he had briefly travelled to Philadelphia to play Frederic for the opening of Carte's Second American Company.

After D'Oyly Carte After leaving D'Oyly Carte, Talbot appeared on tour with Tagliapietra's Opera Company in the US in such operas as Il Trovatore, Faust and Martha. He next joined the Blanche Roosevelt English Opera Company as Epitmethius in an unsuccessful production of B. C. Stephenson and Alfred Cellier's The Masque of Pandora in Boston in 1881. Again performing as Signor Ugo Talbo, he then joined an opera company, organized by Max Strakosch Clarence Hess, for a few weeks, in Faust and Mefistofele. After this, in August 1881, he moved to San Francisco, California, where he joined Inez Fabbri's opera company in Carmen and La Dame blanche, but the season was a failure. Nevertheless, Talbot lived for the rest of his life in California, singing in concerts and becoming a successful singing teacher.

Talbot died in Stockton, California, in 1899.