I’m not particularly talented at any musical instrument, but I’m an excellent singer…in my own mind, or perhaps my own shower. (To hear my wife tell it, I shouldn’t quit my day job.) It wasn’t so for a few of my distant cousins, who had the talent and passion to make music their life’s work.
I’ve already told the story of my 5x-great-grandfather John Perkins, who served in several capacities in the American Revolution. After the Revolution, he moved his family from Middleboro, Massachusetts to Windsor County, Vermont. John and his wife Hannah had several children at the time of their move, among them Elisha Paddock Perkins, born in Middleboro on May 21, 1782. Elisha was named for his father’s cousin (John Perkins’s mother was born Patience Paddock), who initially served in the same company as John during the Revolution but died at the Battle of Saratoga in September 1777. Several other cousins named children after Elisha Paddock Perkins as well.
Elisha Paddock Perkins married Hannah Taft, eleven years his senior, in 1799. She was the sister of Stephen and Daniel Taft, who had founded the village of Taftsville, just east of Woodstock, in 1791. Stephen was the first husband of Elisha’s sister Patience Perkins, who later married Daniel Drake and moved west with the Mormons. The Tafts had come from Mendon and Uxbridge, Massachusetts, where they were cousins and neighbors of Aaron Taft, great-grandfather of President William Howard Taft. (In 1800 Aaron Taft, following a common migration pattern, would move his family from Massachusetts to Townshend, Vermont, some 20 miles south of Taftsville. President Taft’s father, Alphonso, was born there in 1810, before the family moved to Cincinnati.)
Elisha and Hannah had nine children between 1800 and 1815. Their second son, Orson, who’s the first character in this musical story, was born in Taftsville on December 17, 1802.
Orson Perkins married Hannah Rust (1808-1884) in 1830 and they had eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. After Elisha Paddock Perkins’s death in 1839, Orson’s widowed mother came to live with his family and he had extended family all around him. Orson’s younger sister Hannah lived just up the road with her husband, Earl Vaughn; their first son was named Orson Perkins Vaughn (their fifth child, Darwin, died at Gettysburg and their youngest child, named Earl Vaughn for his father, would know great tragedy in his life).
According to The Story of Taftsville, Orson and Hannah lived on a hill farm in Stockbridge, a few miles northwest of Taftsville, then on Dana Farm in Woodstock before buying the Sugar Hill Farm, which still exists today, in the 1850s. Orson made a living primarily as a farmer and a stone mason, but his true passion was music. The 1893 Naaman-Zwillingsbrüder, a/k/a the Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, referred to him as a “singing master,” and local histories describe him as “very musically talented; He sang and played the fiddle and was an old time singing teacher.” Hannah was known as the finest soprano in the county. Their “children all had fine and exceptional voices.”
Indeed. Three of Orson Perkins’s sons would make their living through music, traveling far and wide. The eldest, William Oscar Perkins, was born in Stockbridge on May 23, 1831. He studied with leading American voice teachers, then studied in England with J.Q. Wetherbee (who had taught many of America’s leading singers in Boston for many years) and at the Milan Conservatory with Giuseppe Perini, considered at the time one of Italy’s very best voice teachers. William O. Perkins returned to America in the 1850s and settled in Boston, where he was a great admirer of the Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, a fervent abolitionist. William was known as a singer and conductor, and even more so as a composer, his 40-plus published books of original songs earning him an entry in the Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians.
William O. Perkins wrote many songbooks that were popular in the late 19th century
William became “Dr. Perkins” in 1879, when Hamilton College conferred a Doctor of Music degree upon him. A public scholar of sorts, he lectured at Harvard and served as an officer of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston. In 1886 William moved to London, where he continued to compose and conduct, research and write, including serving as a correspondent for a Boston paper. He remained in London for a decade before returning to Boston, where he died on January 13, 1902. William never married nor had children.
William's obituary in the Boston papers, 1902
William O. Perkins was not the only musical “Dr. Perkins.” His brother
Henry Southwick Perkins was Orson and Hannah’s second child, born in Stockbridge on April 20, 1833. He studied at the Boston Music School, enrolling in 1857 and graduating in 1861. He then taught music in upstate New York, Ohio, and Indiana before teaching at the Iowa Normal Academy of Music in Iowa City and at the University of Iowa from 1867 to 1871. From Iowa he moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served for four years as President of the Kansas Normal Academy of Music. In 1875 Henry left for two years’ additional music study in Europe. Upon his return he taught in music “normal” schools in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Texas before settling for good in Chicago in 1880.
Henry Southwick Perkins (1833-1914)
In Chicago Henry first rented a room with the family of a piano seller of his acquaintance, then bought a house very near today’s United Center arena where he would live for the rest of his life, and where he himself rented rooms out to young people. Henry composed a number of songs himself (including some in collaboration with his brother William), served as a conductor at festivals across the nation, and was among Chicago’s most prominent music teachers, serving as President of the Illinois Music Teachers’ Association for a term. Like William, he was featured in the Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians. Also like William, Henry never married nor had children. He died in Chicago on January 20, 1914 at the age of 80.
Henry was an accomplished songwriter and conductor as well, but made his greatest mark teaching music
The next son,
Orson Azro (1835-1922), married a girl from the family’s old stomping grounds in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, and moved to Santa Barbara and then, after the death of his wife, to San Francisco. Locals in Vermont recalled that, although not a professional musician, he had a keen ear and tried to improve the quality of singing at church. He was followed by two children,
Lucelia and
Hiram, who died as infants in 1837 and 1839, respectively.
Another son, Edwin Hagan (1840-1916), lived his whole life within a few miles of Taftsville, marrying a local girl and having one daughter. He taught music during the long Vermont winters in addition to farming. Next came Edla Francilia, or “Francie” (1842-1908), whose life also involved music: she married George Cheney, a piano salesman. The couple lived in Amherst and then Cambridge, Massachusetts, until George retired. Their daughter Jessie likewise married a piano salesman who worked for her father.
Orson and Hannah Perkins’s youngest child, Julius Edson “Jule” Perkins, never earned a doctorate in music, but he may have been the family’s brightest musical star. Jule was born in Stockbridge on March 19, 1845. Like his brothers, he learned music at his father’s side before moving on at the age of fourteen to more advanced musical schooling in Boston, where he lived with brothers William and Henry.
Jule remained in Boston, studying and teaching music, for eight years. In 1867, having been named to the University of Iowa faculty, Henry S. Perkins paid for Jule to study for a year in Paris and then for five years in Milan with Perini, his brother William’s teacher. Jule arrived in Milan in the early days of the modern Italian nation-state; the city had been under Austrian rule when his brother William O. Perkins studied there barely a decade earlier. Jule was an accomplished pianist and a composer of several songs of minor notoriety, and from Europe he helped his brother Henry in his teaching work at Iowa.
Hardly the “ugly American” of later days, the handsome Jule became fluent in French and Italian during his time in Europe and was “a profound student in mathematics, philosophy, history and languages.” He also spent time in Florence, where he was a favorite of the literary and artistic set and befriended the American sculptors Hiram Powers and Thomas Ball. Not bad for a farm kid from Taftsville, Vermont.
Jule E. Perkins, the family's brightest musical star
It was as a singer, however, that Jule really made his mark. He was a bass of great talent, considered without question the finest the United States had produced to that time, and “the only native-born American basso in Italian opera who had achieved success.” (Rust book) Also blessed with tremendous stage presence and acting ability, Jule was destined for stardom in the world of opera. In 1869, a year after his arrival in Milan, he made his operatic début at La Scala to rave reviews. He toured the major cities of Italy and sang in Warsaw and Paris as well, spending much time with his brother William, who passed most of 1871 and 1872 in Europe. In the summer of 1873, while still studying with Perini in Milan, Jule signed a contract with London opera promoter Colonel James Henry Mapleson.
Col. James Henry Mapleson, opera impresario
Two decades earlier Mapleson had been a rising operatic star in his own right until voice problems in the mid-1850s prompted him to have an unsuccessful operation. Mapleson’s singing days were over, but his opera days were not. At only 26 he opened London’s first musical agency and went to work as assistant manager at the Haymarket Theatre. In the 1860s he managed the Lyceum Theatre, Her Majesty’s Theatre, and finally the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. By 1873 Mapleson was one of the world’s foremost opera impresarios. He engaged Jule Perkins to sing with Her Majesty’s Italian Opera Company for a period of five years. An impresario based in Constantinople, disappointed at missing out on the talented young American, offered Col. Mapleson $20,000 to release Jule from his contract, an offer the Londoner refused.
The Royal Albert Hall, where Jule made his London debut in 1873
Jule Perkins (aka Signor Giulio Perkin) appears in the Holy Week shows of Bach's Passion in London, 1874
Jule made his London début at the recently-opened Royal Albert Hall in September 1873. On January 10, 1874, the Boston-based
Dwight’s Journal of Music reprinted a piece from the
Worcester Palladian about Jule, citing the positive reviews of Jule’s singing in several British papers. The local press couldn’t help a little teasing: “Is that not a good record for a young American, about whom all the musical people in Boston, seven years ago, declared that he could never be made to sing in tune?” The
Palladian also picked up the teasing of the
Manchester Guardian: “Another first appearance was made in the person of ‘Signor Giulio Perkin’ – is this gentleman an Englishman or an American and, if so, why the Signor Giulio?”
When another Boston music paper, Folio, offered similar commentary, brother William dashed off a letter to defend Jule. His contract with Mapleson was signed in Italy, where he had been living for six years and where he was known as “Signor Giulio Perkins.” The contract, a legal document, was written in Italian, the language of the controlling jurisdiction. It therefore referred to him by that name. Moreover, “the fashion of the titled circles of London insists upon Italian opera.” Mapleson used Jule’s Italian name in his advertisements and programs because it was “his interest, his right, his fashion” to do so. So there.
The Boston music press reports with pride - and a bit of teasing - on the European success of one of their own
Among Mapleson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Italian Opera company was the acclaimed soprano Marie Rôze, born Maria Hippolyte Ponsin in Paris on March 2, 1846. She grew up on the rue de la Chausée d’Antin, in a building that was for a singer of her caliber practically within earshot of the main Paris opera house of the day, la Salle le Peletier, as well as the the Opéra Comique, where she made her hometown début, and the stunning Opéra Garnier, under construction during this period.
On June 27, 1867, at the age of 21, she had performed at Paris’s Hôtel de Ville for the viceroy of Egypt, Ismaïl Pacha, a grandson of Egypt’s revered leader Muhammad Ali (1769-1849). Le Figaro wrote of the sumptuous evening: "Il est vrai que mademoiselle Marie Rôze a beaucoup "donné" dans cette mélodieuse campagne. Marie Rôze, qui chante avec sa beauté !" (“It is true that Miss Marie Rôze “gave” much during this melodious campaign. Marie Rôze, who sings with her beauty!”) Among those impressed was Baron Haussmann, nearly forty years her senior, who became one of her various lovers. Over the next few years Marie traveled back and forth between Victorian England and the Paris of the Franco-Prussian War era, which was in the midst of an exciting transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic marked most notably by the Paris Commune of 1871. She joined Col. Mapleson’s company in 1872.
The Opéra Garnier in Paris in 1864, during its construction. At the time Marie Rôze was a budding young soprano who lived in the neighborhood.
Somehow the Vermont Yankee and the sought-after
Parisienne hit it off immediately, and they were married in London on July 23, 1874. Immediately following the wedding, they appeared at an artists’ reception given by the Lord Mayor of London, then sailed for America. On this side of the pond they performed in New York; traveled west to sing at Henry S. Perkins’s school in Leavenworth, Kansas; then toured Jule’s native Vermont and next-door New Hampshire for two weeks, with Jule’s older brothers conducting. They visited with Jule’s parents in Taftsville, where the normally taciturn country folk treated the hometown basso to a hero’s welcome and considered his bride the most exotic woman anyone had ever seen. Finally, the newlyweds were honored at a reception at William Perkins’s Boston home before leaving again for Europe on August 29.
Marie Rôze, Jule Perkins's wife
The 1874 season began as well for Jule as the 1873 season had. By the end of that year Boston’s music press (which may have been just a little biased) was calling him “the world’s greatest basso profundo.” Unfortunately, Jule’s star was too bright not to burn out quickly. During the winter he was touring in Ireland and the north of England when he began to feel ill. “The show must go on,” and so Jule performed for several weeks in Birmingham and Liverpool and Leeds. By the time the tour reached Manchester he was incapable of getting out of bed, let alone performing. He lingered for several days at the Queen’s Hotel there before dying of rheumatic fever on February 25, 1875, three weeks short of his 30th birthday. Marie being ill as well, and incapable of undertaking a journey to the United States, Jule was buried in London.
After Jule’s death Marie Rôze and her descendants lived quite colorful lives in the world of opera. I write “her descendants,” although it is far from clear if any of them are Jule’s descendants as well. London records suggests that Marie bore Jule’s son, Jule Henry Perkins, in London on May 1, 1875 (more than two months after Jule’s death) but the child himself died that same fall. It cannot be ascertained if this baby is the same as Marie Rôze’s son Raymond Rôze, who throughout his life represented 1875 his year of birth and who is called Raymond Rôze-Perkins in at least one source.
By 1877 Mapleson’s son, Col. Henry Mapleson, was telling the world that Marie Rôze was now his wife. In an autobiography published in 1913 (Memoirs of an American Prima Donna), however, the South Carolina-born opera singer Clara Louise Kellogg said otherwise. Miss Kellogg relates that she toured the United States in 1877 with Marie and Annie Marie Cary: “The press called us ‘The Three Graces,’ and wrote much fulsome nonsense about ‘three pure and irreproachable women appearing together on the operatic stage, etc.’ The classification was one I did not care for.”
The tour was sponsored by Henry Mapleson, fils. Miss Kellogg and the younger Mapleson seem to have had a mutual deprecation society, and she wrote that:
Marie Rôze was never really married to him…but he called her Mrs. Mapleson…At the time of our “Three-Star Tour,” she was playing the rôle of Mapleson’s wife and finding it somewhat perilous. She was a mild and gentle woman, very sweet-natured and docile and singularly stupid, frequently incurring her managerial “husband’s” rage by doing things he thought were impolitic, for he always had to manage every effect. She seldom complained of his treatment but nobody could know them without being sorry for her.
According to Miss Kellogg, at the time Marie had “two sons, one of whom, Raymond Rôze, passed himself off as her nephew for years.” Jule, at least, comes off well in Miss Kellogg’s book: “Prior to this relation with Mapleson, Marie Rôze had married an exceedingly fine man, a young American singer of distinction, who died shortly after the marriage.”
Marie Rôze continued to perform in England, continental Europe, and the United States before retiring from the stage in 1894. It does not appear she and Henry Mapleson lived together as a couple at all after the 1870s. Marie died in Paris in 1926 at the age of 80 and is buried not far from her old lover Baron Haussmann in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.
Raymond Rôze was a minor success as an operatic composer. Most notably, his Jeanne d’Arc was performed by the Royal Opera Company in London in 1913 to a critical review from the Times of London. Raymond was somewhat obsessed with the idea of staging opera in English, a language in which it had never really been performed. He died bankrupt in London on March 30, 1920, six years before Marie.
Vanity Fair ran this caricature of Raymond Rôze when his opera about Joan of Arc ran on the London stage
Perhaps unsurprisingly given how much his birth and parentage was shrouded in mystery, Raymond Rôze’s domestic life was marked by sad and unusual incidents even after his death. The first concerns his daughter. In about 1903 Raymond and his wife, an English soprano named Florence Mills, had a daughter named Maryse Louise Rôze. Maryse was just a baby when they divorced and she grew up with Raymond, having no idea who her mother was until after he died. As later newspaper accounts breathlessly recounted, in the 1920s the beautiful Maryse fell in love with and married a scion of a powerful Persian family; he had been posted in Paris as a diplomat. They traveled to Persia crossing the desert on donkeys in a caravan with rampant disease. In Teheran she gave birth to a son, a development that did not particularly please her new husband.
Horrified by his newfound possessiveness and life in his family’s harem, she escaped with her baby through a window wearing only a nightgown. A Teheran street gang helped her reach a European consulate, and she earned enough money doing film production work over the next few weeks to travel back to London, arriving deathly thin and penniless. There, over the next two years, she attempted to make a living as an opera singer but was a bundle of nerves after her séjour in Persia. She obtained an Islamic divorce from her husband, but when she fell in love with a penniless English sculptor her former husband sent agents to kidnap her son and return him to Iran. I wasn't able to find any information on whether Maryse and the baby ever were reunited.
Maryse’s mother, meanwhile, met an unhappy fate as well. After divorcing Raymond Rôze Florence had two sons, Reginald and Brian Kent, during the World War I years. In 1923 she married an Australian named George Septimus Kingsell, who had served as a Captain in the British Army during the war and remained in London. Kingsell was not of sound mind and was known to argue frequently with his bride. After a particularly bitter argument on August 11, 1931, he shot and killed Florence. As the nurse, Doris Fisher, rushed upstairs to stop him, he jumped over at the bannister and fired at Florence’s son, Brian, wounding but not killing him. Kingsell then shot himself twice in the head with Nurse Fisher struggling with him all the while.
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Jule's grandparents, Elisha Paddock Perkins and his wife Hannah Taft; his parents, Orson Perkins and his wife Hannah Rust; his brothers William O. and Henry S. Perkins, and almost all of their other siblings are buried in the Taftsville Cemetery, about 50 yards from their cousins, my great-great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents.
There are many members of the Perkins family, including my ancestors, buried in the Taftsville Cemetery; Jule's grandfather Elisha P. was among the first when the cemetery opened in 1839
Tree-covered green hills rise all around, the Ottauquechee River flows gently by, and the 1836 covered bridge the Perkins children would have scampered across still stands just across from the 1840 general store in which they would have shopped. It feels a billion miles from Boston’s Back Bay, let alone La Scala opera house in Milan, the bustling boulevards of Paris, a caravan of donkeys heading across the desert to Teheran, or a murder-suicide outside London. But that’s the thing about exploring a family tree: you never know where it’s going to take you.
