Bryceson Treharne, a musical genius, founds Adelaide Rep, engaged to Muriel Matters; later scores G&S for world

Musical genius Bryceson Treharne, while teaching at Adelaide's Elder Conservatorium (1901-11), founded what became the Adelaide Repertory Theatre, became engaged to elocutionist and future suffragette Muriel Matters (top left) and would later edit the standard piano/vocal scores for Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular operettas (bottom left).

The extraordinary Bryceson Treharne, a brilliant musician with a passion for amateur theatre, in 1908, founded Adelaide Repertory Theatre, the longest surviving amateur theatre company in the southern hemisphere.

Welsh-born Treharne started studying music seriously at 12 and became an accomplished pianist and organist. At 16, he won the Erard Scholarship for tuition to London’s Royal College fo Music and the loan of an Erard grand piano. At the college, Treharne’s classmates were some of the greatest English musicians: Gustav Holst, John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams.  He studied organ with Walter Parratt, master of the Queen’s Musick for Queen Victoria, and Franklin Tayor, who’d worked with Clara Schumann, and he also worked with Hubert Parry and Charles Villers Stanford.

Treharne also studied in Paris, Milan, and Munich before finally returning to Wales to teach at Aberystwyth University College. He had music published in Aberystwyth but, in 1901 at 22, he took up a teaching position in Adelaide at Elder Conservatorium.

In Adelaide, Treharne played recitals of Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Chopin and Bach, and preached a “sermon” on Brahms. He also met a noted Adelaide elocutionist called Muriel Matters. The two became romantically linked and briefly engaged to marry. But Treharne’s ideas about women were possibly not progressive and Matters later went to the United Kingdom to become the famous South Australian suffragette.

What Matters and Treharne did share was a great interest in the latest poetry and music. Treharne, fascinated by trends in drama, started a discussion group in 1902 for Elder Conservatorium students interested in singing, literature, and drama. Matters read Tennyson’s poem “Enoch Arden” while Treharne accompanied her on piano with a score written for the poem by Richard Strauss.

Years of literary and dramatic exploration in Treharne’s Elder Conservatorium class culminated on September 24, 1908 with a stage performance of Bernard Shaw’s “Man of Destiny” and W.B. Yeats’ “Land of Hart’s Desire”. Adelaide interest was immediate and overwhelming, and soon a new theatrical company – that became the Adelaide Repertory – had more than 500 subscribers paying five shillings a year for two tickets.

Treharne railed against melodrama and music hall productions, insisting that Henrik Ibsen and Shaw would clean the air of ignorance. He produced more than 80 plays, writing music for many of them.  

In 1911, Treharne returned to England and more chapters in his extraordinary life. Treharne went to Berlin in 1912 to work with English modernist director and innovator Gordon Craig in Berlin, before spending time in Milan, Vienna and Paris. In 1914, he married soprano Maud Thackeray and went to Munich to see the Wagner Festspiel, intending to go on to the Salzburg Mozart Festival. Instead, with the start of World War I, he was sent to a German prison camp.

Prison camp didn’t stop Treharne writing almost 200 songs, an act of an opera set in Japan, and orchestral pieces, plus scores of Gilbert and Sullivan operas to be performed in the camp. Able to get early release in 1915, Treharne kept composing including the popular song “Mother, my dear” (1917).

He moved back to teaching from 1924-1928 at McGill University, Montreal, before becoming music director of The Boston Music Company, a branch of G. Schirmer. It was here that Treharne edited the piano/vocal scores for Trial by Jury, HMS Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe and Mikado that became the standard used for rehearsals of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas all over the English-speaking world.

• Information by Peter Hilliard.