DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15271, 22 June 1923, Page 4

DAY BY DAY.

The fact that in an age in which people show a lively

Centenary of a Great Song.

willingness to celebrate all sorts of centenaries, the hun-

dredth anniversary of a world-famous song passed almost unnoticed, must be attributed to ignorance rattier than to indifference. In music and in words, if not in sentiment, “Home, Sweet Home” may be as poor as critical people have declared it to be, but it enjoys, nevertheless, a more widespread fame than any other song that one can call to mind, and more than one of the great singers whom we have heard in New Zealand, from Melba downwards, have moved crowded houses with the simple appeal of the song which, with all its defects, has reached the heart and filled the eyes of many a wanderer. “Home, Sweet Home” was first sung in the musical play “Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” which was produced at Covent Garden on May 8, 1823. The author, John Howard Payne, was a young American actor who had gone to London with a great reputation as the darling of New York audiences. He appears to have been a success in London, but for some reason he relinquished acting plays in favour of writing them, and as the author of a tragedy and a theatrical manager, lie soon found himself in the Fleet Prison for debt. Subsequently he re-wrote for Sir Henry Bishop, the composer of “Clari,” the libretto of the piece, using another play as his raw material, and as Bishop wanted another song for “Clari,” Payne, drawing on his memory of some youthful verses of his own, wrote “Home, Sweet Home.” It was a tremendous and instantaneous success, more than 300,000 copies being sold, a great number in those days. Payne himself received £250 for his share in the song and the play, It is curious ‘and not a little pathetic, that the man who so idealised . the home, should himself have never known one from his boyhood. He never married, and his earliest life was of the homeless character of the nomadic actor, while later on he entered the American Consular service and eventually died in it at Tunis. "Clari” has long been forgotten, people to this day do not greatly care whether the air of “Home, Sweet Home” was suggested to Payne by an Italian girl’s song, or whether it was based on an earlier melody by Bishop. But Lite song itself is one of the immortals.