Sylvie Braitman, soprano
John Khouri, piano (early cast-iron frame piano, about 1860)
Laurette Goldberg, host and piano
Mary Kay Duggan, project research

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Introduction, Laurette Goldberg

• Home Sweet Home, op. 329, no. 1, arranged by prolific Theodor Oesten (1813-1870). The most famous piece in the United States on both sides of the Civil War, "Home Sweet Home", written in the 1820s by Sir Henry Bishop for his musical "Clari, or The Maid of Milan", must have evoked memories of former modes of living to the new Californians of the 1850s. Co-published by Matthias Gray, San Francisco, with G. Andre & Co., Philadelphia, with an idealized European country home on the sheet music cover (click on Search 2 to follow the score).
• The California Pioneers. M. A. Richter. The first piece of music published in California.
• The Last Rose of Summer, op. 45, Variations. By English piano virtuoso,Brinley Richards (1819-1885). Published by Matthias Gray between 1875 and 1878 (click on Search 2 to view demanding music score).
• Champagne Charlie by Alfred Lee (San Francisco: Matthias Gray, 1872).
• La Force et le courage. The "Edition Californienne" of the 1870s was sponsored by Les dames francaises de San Francisco for the "Oeuvre de la deliverance." To see details of the lithograph (by San Francisco artists Britton and Rey) of a patriot before the firing squad and follow the stirring text, use Search 1.
• : Ching Chow Chung, from the multicultural music review "Aladdin" written by German immigrant Charles (formerly Carl) Schultz in 1873. Schultz arrived in San Francisco in 1853, an 18-yr.-old who had studied the violin as a private pupil of Spohr. While "Ching Chow Chung" appears to be in Chinese, with such phrases as "lapsong suchong", it is actually a nonsense text imitative of the sounds of the Chinese language with music in a "Chinese" idiom with which Schultz must have become acquainted in his adopted city. It was originally sung by Irish immigrant Maggie Moore whose photograph appears on the sheet music cover (Search 1).
• Los lindos ojos (Those Pretty Eyes), "danza compuesta para canto y piano" by Manuel Ygnacio Ferrer, words by J. M. Paredes (M. Gray, 1875). Ferrer was born in Baja California in 1832 and died in San Francisco in 1904. From 1854 for four decades he concertized on guitar and piano. With his ten children he toured the East in 1891, playing at the White House and at the Vanderbilt mansion (Search 2).
• Galop brillante, op. 49, for 4 hands.