CARMICHAEL, Mary Grant

Mary Grant Carmichael was an English composer, pianist, and accompanist born in Birkenhead. She studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where her teachers included Oscar Beringer and Ebenezer Prout, and continued her studies with Heinrich Porges in Munich. From the 1880s, she appeared regularly as a pianist and accompanist in London, performing with prominent musicians including Joseph Joachim and Alfredo Piatti.
Carmichael wrote songs, song cycles, piano and choral music, as well as larger compositions. Her best-known stage work is the operetta The Frozen Heart, or The Snow Queen, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story. She also composed a Mass in E-flat and numerous settings of poetry by William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other writers. Her songs include Cradle Song, Infant Joy, My Faint Spirit, Sweetheart, Sigh No More, The King of Denmark’s Ride, and The Singer and the Flowers.