Charles King Hall

Charles King Hall was born 17 August 1845, St Pancras, London.[3] His father, Charles Frederick Hall (1815–1874), was a violinist[4] who was the musical director of the Adelphi Theatre in London.[5] King Hall's mother, Eleanor Eliza Jane Vining, came from a family of well-known dramatic and comedic actors. King Hall's cousins included the English actor and stage manager George Vining (1824–1875) as well as the American actors Fanny Vining Davenport and her son, Harry Davenport.[6]

In 1876, King Hall married Isabel Maud Penton (1852–1932) at All Saints Church, Gordon Square.[7]

King Hall's widow, Isabel, and youngest daughter, Grace, circa 1900

They had five children. The eldest, Edith Jane Gertrude King-Hall (1877–1963),[8] is sometimes confused with the Edith King Hall (1864-1933) who wrote children's books. (That author was the daughter of naval officer Sir William King Hall.) The composer's younger son, Ernest Vincent King-Hall (1885–1941) was a Royal Navy officer who married Hylda May Shallard, a chorister in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1907 to 1909; he died during the Second World War.[9][10] King Hall's remaining three children were Lucy Harriet Greenfield King-Hall (1879–1900), Frederick Charles William King-Hall (1880–1963) and Grace Isabel King-Hall (1881–1960).[11]

King Hall composed both sacred and secular music, especially sentimental ballads and organ voluntaries. He contributed regularly to the popular German Reed Entertainments at St. George's Hall, Langham Place. His obituary in The Musical Times called his German Reed music "his most popular works".[12] Kurt Gänzl wrote that King Hall's music was "pretty [and] forgettable." Yet, it gave steady, reliable satisfaction over the course of nearly twenty years with the Reeds.[13] King Hall collaborated with such librettists as Arthur Law, F. C. Burnand, Gilbert Arthur à Beckett, Walter Frith and J. Comyns Carr, composing the scores for Foster Brothers (1877), A Happy Bungalow (1877), Doubleday's Will (1878), A Tremendous Mystery (1878), The Artful Automaton (1878), Grimstone Grange (1879), A Christmas Stocking (1879–1880), A Merry Christmas (1880–1881), A Strange Host (1882–1883), The Naturalist (1887), The Verger (1889–1890) and Missing (1894).[14] Most of these entertainments were accompanied by piano and harmonium only.[15]

King Hall began to compose musical theatre early on. His father was also a composer, and it is unclear which of them supplied the incidental music for Dion Boucicault's The Streets of London, a play performed first at the Princess's Theatre in 1864 when King Hall was 19. A contemporary review of the first production said that the composer won "the goodwill of the audience" by incorporating "the street tunes of the times".[16] From 1867 ("Golden Moments Gallop for the Pianoforte") to the year of his death ("An Emblem of Life; A Duet for Female Voices"), his work appeared regularly in both England and America. Examples of King Hall's original compositions include his score for Edward Oxenford's humorous cantata Beauty and the Beast (1890), published by the London firm of Hutchings & Romer, and his series of six "society dances" published by Joseph Williams in the 1890s.[17]

"Barn Dance," the first of King Hall's society dances, circa 1890

Ivy-choked tombstone of the King Hall family in Highgate Cemetery, 2017

King Hall also supported his family as an organist, teacher, composer, and consultant to Chappell & Co., who published much of King Hall's sheet music. In the 1890s Chappell's Vocal Library numbered quite a few of King Hall's vocal arrangements and organ transcriptions, including "On Angels' Wings" (from Viviani's Silver Trumpets), "Mighty Lord" (from Gounod's Marche Religieuse), and "Soft and Low" (from Gounod's Mock Doctor).[18] He specialized in arranging for piano and voice the theatre scores of other British composers, such as Arthur Sullivan's Haddon Hall and Ernest Ford's Jane Annie.[19][20] Examples of his adaptations were Alfred Cellier's "Andante Pastorale", which King Hall arranged for the organ in 1892[21] and Arthur Sullivan's Imperial March, which King Hall transcribed for the organ in 1893.[22]

King Hall also wrote two primers for Estey Organ, the American maker of reed organs and harmoniums. Both were published in 1880.[23] He included in the organ primer his own testimonial for the instrument, saying "The tone of the Stops individually is mellow and sweet, and entirely free from the harshness which so frequently characterizes Reed Instruments; while the ensemble stresses solidity and fulness, and resembles very closely that of a thoroughly good Pipe Organ."[24] That same year, King Hall wrote a short piece for a popular girls' magazine about the challenge of playing the harmonium, urging frustrated novices to persevere and "not let your disappointment keep you from trying again."[25] King Hall was one of the few English composers writing specifically for the harmonium at the time.[26]

As church organist, King Hall served the Anglican parishes of St. Paul's, Camden Square, badly damaged in the Second World War; St. Luke's, Kentish Town, declared redundant in 1991 but reopened in 2011; and Christ Church, Brondesbury, now Christ Church with Saint Laurence Brondesbury.[27] A newspaper review of one of King Hall's organ concerts in December 1884, in which the organist "gave evident delight to his audience," refers to him as the organist and choir director of St Clement Danes on the Strand in the city of Westminster, London, as well as "of the Royal Albert Hall."[28]

On 1 September 1895, King Hall died of throat cancer at the age of 50 at his home in Islington.[29] He was buried in Highgate Cemetery.[30] A notice of his death in a Scottish newspaper recalled King Hall's "connection with the old German Reeds’ entertainment, to which he contributed a large number of operettas and musical sketches."[31]