Joseph Emidy The Lost Composer
Joseph Emidy is one of the many overlooked composers of the music world. Kidnapped from the Guinea coast of Africa as a young boy, Emidy was enslaved by the Portuguese, and is believed to have spent time on the coffee plantations of Brazil. Where he acquired the knowledge of classical music and opportunity to play the violin is unclear, but it is known that by his early twenties he had worked his way up to second chair violin at Lisbon’s opera house and had begun to compose his own works.Subsequently, he was kidnapped and forced into service as ship’s musician of an English frigate, and would not set foot on land again for five long years.
Finally liberated in Falmouth, England, he married and made a name for himself as a composer, teacher and concert leader, accomplished in the piano, violin, violincello, cello, flute and clarinet. Because he was widely accepted as a musical leader in the west of England, his friends debated introducing him into London’s musical society, but finally decided that, “...his color would be so much against him, that there would be great risk of failure, and that it would be a pity to take him from a sphere in which he was making a handsome livelihood on the risk of so uncertain a speculation.” Thus Joseph Emidy died in 1885, an extremely talented but relatively unknown musical phenomenon, and no known copies of his compositions are extant.