GOUNOD AND ALFRED WILLIAM PHILLIPS

Abstract

A LFRED WILLIAM PHILLIPS (1844-1936), a self-taught, selfmade musician, established the music-publishing firm of Phillips & Page in London in 1883.1 The following year he decided to see whether he could get Charles Gounod to write sacred songs for his firm. When he sailed for France he traveled as a plain staid citizen named Alfred William Phillips but he was, no doubt, well fortified by a consciousness of persuasive powers accruing to him by reason of the multiple noms de plume which he applied in the publication of his own musical compositions: lyrics under the name of Rosa Carlyle, pianoforte solos as Sarakowski and Czynski (Alexandra, queen-to-be, was especially fond of Czynski's Polish Dances), dance music as Juan Gomez, scholastic music and arrangements of the Great Masters as Andr6 Baptiste, and songs as Leigh Kingsmill, Allen Dene, and Jules Taubert. Unconsciously, he did Her Majesty's Government a great service-that of restoring Charles Gounod's shattered confidence in an England to which he had retreated with his family in 1871 for intermittent refuge from the Franco-Prussian threat, and from which he had conclusively fled in 1874 with stinging resentment against pirating publishers supplemented by painful embarrassment resulting from the widely publicized machinations of a certain Mrs. Georgina Weldon whose promotional ardor had taken