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In 1855 Loder went to Australia with the soprano Anna Bishop, and settled in Adelaide as conductor
of Lyster's opera troupe. In 1859 he was again active in London—as organist, singer, conductor, and
composer; on 11 June he conducted the revival of the opera Raymond and Agnes by his cousin
Edward Loder. In 1861 he published Pets of the Parterre, a comic operetta, which had been produced
at the Lyceum and Adelphi theatres, and in 1862 The Old House at Home, a musical entertainment
staged also at the Adelphi.
Loder's music was perhaps more popular in America than in Britain. The New York Glee Book
(1843), written for the New York Vocal Institute and reissued as The Philadelphia and New York
Glee Book in 1864, contains many of his original partsongs. He also published The Middle Voice,
Twelve Solfeggi (1860), and various individual songs and instrumental pieces both in England and
America. Loder paid a second visit to Australia, and died, after a long illness, at Adelaide on 15 July
1868.
His sister Kate Fanny Loder (1825–1904), a successful pianist and composer, was born in Bath on
21 August 1825. In 1844 she became a professor of piano at the Royal Academy of Music, where
she had previously studied. Among her compositions were works for the piano, notably the Twelve
Studies of 1852, an orchestral overture (1844), a string quartet (1848), and songs. On 16 December
1851 she married the surgeon Henry Thompson (1820–1904), with whom she had a son and two
daughters. Her husband was knighted in 1867 and created a baronet in 1899. She became paralysed
after 1871, in which year the first performance in England of Brahms's German Requiem was given
at her house. She died at Headley, Surrey, on 30 August 1904.
L. M. Middleton, rev. David J. Golby
Sources N. Temperley, ‘Loder’, New Grove · The Era (20 Sept 1868) · private information (1893) ·
N. Burton and N. Temperley, ‘Loder, Kate (Fanny)’, The new Grove dictionary of women
composers, ed. J. A. Sadie and R. Samuel (1994) · Burke, Peerage
Wealth at death £2781 3s. 4d.—Kate Loder: probate, 13 Aug 1904, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved: see legal notice
L. M. Middleton, ‘Loder, George (1816–1868)’, rev. David J. Golby, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16917, accessed
11 Jan 2008]
George Loder (1816–1868): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16917
Kate Fanny Loder (1825–1904): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/60936
Loder, Edward James (1813–1865), composer and conductor, one of the seven children
of the violinist John David Loder (1788–1846) and his wife, née Mills, was born at Bath.
About 1826 he was sent to Frankfurt am Main to study with his father's old friend,
Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries, who after several years' residence in London had just
returned to the continent. A couple of years later Loder returned to England, and in 1830 he
arranged the music for a production of Black-Eyed Susan at the Theatre Royal, Bath.
Shortly thereafter he travelled again to Germany with the intention of studying medicine,
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but, quickly changing his mind, he resumed his study with Ries. About 1834 he returned to
London and immediately received a commission to compose music for J. S. Arnold's play
Nourjahad, recast as an opera, for the opening of the New Theatre Royal Lyceum and
English Opera House after the fire of 1830. The production took place in July 1834, and
Loder's music was considered its principal attraction. Unlike the usual English operas,
which were primarily a succession of songs and ballads, Loder had attempted to make
Nourjahad a genuine musical drama, and, as such, it was well received by those
contemporary critics who wished to see English composers emulating their serious German
contemporaries. In little more than a year Loder produced three more works at the Lyceum,
which did not, however, aspire to the same high aims; none the less The Dice of Death, with
a libretto by John Oxenford, was moderately successful in 1835.
Meanwhile, Loder had entered into an agreement with the music publishers Dalmain & Co.
to supply a weekly series of compositions, and for the same firm he wrote his First
Principles of Singing in 1838 and A Modern Pianoforte Tutor in 1839. Some of the songs
composed to fulfil his contract with Dalmain were strung together to make the opera
Francis I, which was produced at Drury Lane in 1838 with limited success; one song,
however, ‘The Old House at Home’, achieved considerable popularity. Another opera, Little
Red Riding Hood, intended for the inauguration of the regime of the impresario Hammond
at Drury Lane, was not put into production, and two other stage works, The Foresters and
The Deer Stalkers, produced in 1838 and 1841, were unambitious. During this period,
however, Loder was also working at more consequential compositions: a string quartet in
E[flat] (apparently his fourth, though no trace survives of earlier ones) was performed
several times at the Society of British Musicians, three sets of songs were published in
1837–8, and around 1840 he issued a number of collections of sacred music, outstanding
among which was a set of nine Sacred Songs and Ballads (1840) with texts by Desmond
Ryan and dedicated to Sterndale Bennett.
In 1846 Loder became music director at the Princess's Theatre, and in the same year he
staged his ‘romantic opera’ The Night Dancers, composed to a libretto by George Soane that
was based on the same German folk-tale that had provided the plot of Adolphe Adam's
ballet Giselle. More significant musically and dramatically than the other stage works he
had written since Nourjahad, it was an immediate success with press and public, and
within twelve months was produced in New York and Sydney. In London it was revived at
the Princess's Theatre in 1850 and at Covent Garden in 1860. As well as its abundance of
good melodic material, apparent in such numbers as the ballad ‘Wake, my love’, which was
essential for a success in the English theatre, The Night Dancers displays the masterly
orchestration and genuine dramatic instinct that enabled Loder to create something worth
while when he chose to exert himself. Fuller Maitland loftily described it in 1902 as having
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‘merits far beyond the trivial tunes with which Balfe caught the ear of his vulgar audiences’
(Fuller Maitland, 42). Many of Loder's works at this time were connected with his duties at
the Princess's Theatre; he contributed music to various productions, and in 1848 composed
the operetta The Andalusian and the ballad opera Robin Goodfellow, though neither of
these displays the same level of commitment as The Night Dancers or enjoyed comparable
success. He put more effort into his ‘operatic masque’ The Island of Calypso, intended for
the National Concerts in 1850 but not performed until 14 April 1852, when Berlioz
conducted it at Exeter Hall.
In 1851 Loder was appointed music director of the Theatre Royal, Manchester, where he
spent his energies in composing, arranging, and conducting the music for the theatre's daily
fare. By 1855 he had completed his opera Raymond and Agnes, originally announced for
the Princess's Theatre for the 1849–50 season, and it was given its première in Manchester
on 14 August. Despite its considerable musical and dramatic qualities, it was coolly received
and sustained a run of only seven performances. A later production at St James's Theatre,
London, in 1859 lasted no more than a week, despite enthusiastic reviews. The opera
enjoyed an isolated revival at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, in an edition by Nicholas
Temperley and Max Miradin, in 1966.
Shortly after the Manchester production of Raymond and Agnes, Loder fell ill with a brain
disorder that made it necessary for him to relinquish his Manchester post and return to
London. A subscription to assist him was advertised in the Musical World in 1856 and
1857, and performances of his works were facilitated by family and friends. These included
the London staging of Raymond and Agnes; a production of his last theatrical composition,
the one-act operetta Never Judge by Appearances, given at the Adelphi on 7 July 1859; and
the 1860 revival of The Night Dancers. Shortly before his death, a set of Twelve Songs
Sacred and Secular was published by subscription for his benefit. The last four years of his
life were largely spent in a deep coma, and Loder, a bachelor living alone, was registered by
a neighbour as having died at his lodgings, 101 Bolsover Street, London, on 5 April 1865.
Clive Brown
Sources
D. Baptie, Sketches of the English glee composers: historical, biographical and critical (from about 1735–
1866) [1896], 148–9 · N. Temperley, ‘Raymond and Agnes’, MT, 107 (1966), 307–10 · N. Temperley, ‘The
English Romantic opera’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1965–6), 293–302, esp. 293 · H. C. Banister, George
Alexander Macfarren (1891), 246 · B. S. Penley, The Bath stage: a history of dramatic representations in
Bath (1892), 130 · J. A. Fuller Maitland, Music in the XIXth century: English music (1902), 41f., 105f. · E.
Walker, A history of music in England, 3rd edn (1952), 308–10 · P. M. Young, A history of British music
(1967), 473–4
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