Vincent Wallace

William Vincent Wallace (11 March 1812 – 12 October 1865) was an Irish composer and pianist. In his day, he was famous on three continents as a double virtuoso on violin and piano. Nowadays, he is mainly remembered as an opera composer of note, with key works such as Maritana (1845) and Lurline, The Amber Witch (1861), Love's Triumph (1862) and The Desert Flower (1863) (based on the libretto of Halévy's Jaguarita l'Indienne). He also published numerous compositions for the piano. Vincent Wallace was a cultivated man and an accomplished musician, whose work as an operatic composer, at a period by no means encouraging to music in England, has a distinct historical value. Like Michael William Balfe, he was born an Irishman, and his reputation as one of the few composers known beyond the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at that time is naturally coupled with Balfe's. Later life In 1854, Wallace became an American citizen after a (most likely common-law) marriage in New York with the German-born pianist Hélène Stoepel, sister of composer Robert Stoepel. In New York, in 1843–44, he had been associated with the early concert seasons of the New York Philharmonic Society, and in 1853 was elected an Honorary (Life) Member of the Society. In later years, having returned to Europe for the premieres of his later operas, he developed a heart condition, for which he received treatment in Paris in 1864. He died in poor circumstances at the Château de Bagen, Sauveterre de Comminges, in the Haute Garonne (the home of Hélène's sister, Marie-Therese, Baroness de Saintegeme), on 12 October 1865, leaving two widows, a son, Willy, from his first marriage who died in 1909, and two sons by Hélène, Clarence Sutherland and Vincent St. John, the latter of whom, faced with a terminal condition in the French hospital in San Francisco in 1897, committed suicide.