29 Facts About Webster Booth

Webster Booth was an English tenor, best remembered as the duettist partner of Anne Ziegler.

Webster Booth was one of the finest tenors of his generation and was a distinguished oratorio soloist.

Webster Booth was a chorister at Lincoln Cathedral and made his professional stage debut with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, where he performed from 1923 to 1927.

Webster Booth made his West End Debut in The Three Musketeers in 1930.

Webster Booth began recording for HMV in 1929 and made over 500 solo recordings and many duet recordings with Anne Ziegler.

Webster Booth was tempted by this offer but eventually decided to pursue his dream of becoming a professional singer rather than a footballer.

Webster Booth joined an accountancy firm and was often torn between auditing duties and singing tenor solos in local oratorio performances.

Webster Booth made his first professional stage appearance with D'Oyly Carte as a chorister in The Yeomen of the Guard on 9 September 1923 at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, under the name Leslie W Booth.

Malcolm Sargent became musical director for the 1926 season, and in later years, Webster Booth was to become one of Sargent's favourite tenors, and made frequent appearances with the Royal Choral Society under Sargent's baton.

Webster Booth returned in 1931, as Webster Booth, to participate in D'Oyly Carte's abridged recording of The Gondoliers as Luiz.

Webster Booth had married Winifred Keey in London in 1924 and their son, Keith Leslie Booth was born the following year on 12 June 1925.

Webster Booth became a member of Tom Howell's Opieros Concert Party for several seasons, sang in cabaret at various Lyons Restaurants, sang at after-dinner entertainments at numerous Masonic and Guild dinners, and appeared for two seasons in pantomime with Tom Howells at the Brixton Theatre in 1927 and 1928.

Webster Booth appeared on TV in the fledgling Baird system TV service broadcasting from Daventry.

Webster Booth's work was largely of a light nature but he did not abandon oratorio.

Webster Booth sang in many oratorio performances for the rest of his career and at the age of 71 said that singing in oratorio had meant more to him than anything else he had done in his long and varied singing career.

Webster Booth met his second wife, Dorothy Annie Alice Prior when she heard him sing in a concert at the Concert Artistes Association.

Webster Booth was a soubrette, mezzo-soprano and comedian who had worked in the theatre since her late teens.

Webster Booth was engaged in Powis Pinder's Sunshine concert party at the Summer Theatre, Shanklin on the Isle of Wight for the 1931 and 1932 seasons.

Webster Booth made several films, including The Robber Symphony in 1935, with music composed and conducted by Friedrich Feher, who directed the film.

Webster Booth sang several Feher songs in the film, including one in Italian.

Webster Booth sang in Der Rosenkavalier and was a guard in The Magic Flute in the International Opera Season at Covent Garden in 1938.

Webster Booth was the Prawn in The Amorous Prawn in 1961, and he and Ziegler played Mr and Mrs Fordyce in Goodnight Mrs Puffin in 1963.

Webster Booth turned the clock back in 1963 when he played Colonel Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard for the Johannesburg Operatic and Dramatic Society at very short notice.

Webster Booth was tenor soloist at the Port Elizabeth Oratorio Festival under the direction of Robert Selley from 1958 to 1962, and under the direction of organist, Keith Jewell he sang in the first performance in South Africa of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius in Cape Town, a work in which he had often sung in the United Kingdom.

Webster Booth had always wanted to sing the bass solos in oratorio and when he and Anne moved to the coastal town of Knysna in 1967 and he became conductor of the Knysna and District Choral Society, he sang the bass arias in excerpts from Mendelssohn's Elijah.

Ziegler and Webster Booth gave their farewell concert in Somerset West in 1975, believing that their singing days were at an end.

In 1978 Ziegler and Webster Booth returned to the United Kingdom.

Webster Booth died on 21 June 1984 at the age of 82.

In June 1994, Booth was the subject of BBC Radio 2 documentary, The Webster Booth Story, presented by Robin Gregory, in which Ziegler appeared.