Henry Brougham Farnie

In 1863 Farnie moved to London, as editor of a new musical journal, The Orchestra. In the first edition of the magazine, he printed one of his own verses, "The Last Stirrup Cup", which impressed the composer Luigi Arditi so much that he set it to music. The song was taken up by Charles Santley and became immensely popular. The Morning Post stated that it was familiar to "millions of people".^[3] The Era later wrote, "the success of this casual attempt at song writing determined Farnie's future career."^[6] The proprietors of The Orchestra, the musical publishers Cramer and Co, engaged Farnie as their literary adviser, with a brief to adapt and translate foreign operas.^[6] Simultaneously, Farnie found himself in demand as the lyricist for popular songs. Among the songs for which he wrote lyrics were, "The Guards' Song" (music by Dan Godfrey),^[7] "Land Ho" (music by Henry Leslie),^[8] "The Message from the Battlefield" (music by John Hullah),^[9] "The Dove and the Maiden" (to the tune of "La colombe et l'autour" from Le pont des soupirs by Jacques Offenbach),^[10] "The Fall of the Leaf" (music by George Macfarren),^[11] and "Summer is Nigh" (music by Julius Benedict).^[12]

Librettist and adapter of French operettas

In 1867, Farnie's two-act drama Reverses was staged at the Strand Theatre. The Observer, in a favourable review, said of Farnie, "if he has not before this tried his hand at dramatic writing, he has at all events now made a very successful essay in the art."^[13] His principal work for the stage, however, was as a librettist. He wrote or adapted libretti for dozens of operettas in the 1870s and 1880s. Although many of Farnie's adaptations were extremely popular and enjoyed long and profitable runs in West End theatres, most of them did not survive beyond his lifetime. One obituary said of them, "few were of very high literary merit. They were furnished chiefly to suit ephemeral public taste, and for the most part ceased to exist with the excitement they created."^[14] According to a 1914 article in The Times, the translations were heavy-handed, and "The spoken dialogue was a kind of Sahara between the oases of song ... the attempts to fit English words to French music usually resulted in absolute nonsense."^[15] Even harsher was the judgment of The Pall Mall Gazette: "He had little or no original talent or literary faculty, but an immense knack of vamping up French opera bouffes, glozing over licentiousness sufficiently to get it smuggled past the censor, spicing the dialogue with 'topical allusions,' and converting the lyrics into some sort of patter that would go with the music. The dogerel [sic] he used to produce was something appalling."^[16] Nevertheless, some of Farnie's lyrics have endured, including the "Gendarmes' Duet" (adapted from the comic duet for men-at-arms in Act 2 of Offenbach's Geneviève de Brabant), and "Sweet Dreamer" (with Arthur Sullivan).^[17]

Among Farnie's earliest adaptations were operas and plays with music by

Farnie married Elizabeth Bebb Davies, of Wales, in 1861, but the couple lived in Scotland. She divorced him for adultery after a few years, and he then married Alethea Emma Harvey, an Englishwoman, in 1865. In 1879, his second wife, also complaining of adultery and cruelty, petitioned the English courts for a declaration that their marriage was null and void. The case made legal history: Harvey's argument was that since the first marriage was solemnised in England, the courts in Scotland did not have the power to end that marriage by divorce, and therefore, Farnie had not been free to marry Harvey. The Lords found that the divorce decree of the Scottish courts should be respected by the English courts.[36]

Farnie died suddenly at the age of 53 in Paris.^[2] He left his entire estate of £23,072 to his sister, Isabella.^[37]

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