Ernest A. Claire Ford was an English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

 composer of opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

s and ballet

Ballet

Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...

 music and a conductor.

Life and career

Ford was born in Warminster

Warminster

Warminster is a town in western Wiltshire, England, by-passed by the A36, and near Frome and Westbury. It has a population of about 17,000. The River Were runs through the town and can be seen running through the middle of the town park. The Minster Church of St Denys sits on the River Were...

, Wiltshire

Wiltshire

Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...

, England, the son of the vestry clerk and organist there. From 1868-73, he sang in the chorus at Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury Cathedral, formally known as the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is an Anglican cathedral in Salisbury, England, considered one of the leading examples of Early English architecture....

. He studied under Arthur Sullivan

Arthur Sullivan

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer of Irish and Italian ancestry. He is best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado...

 at the Royal Academy of Music

Royal Academy of Music

The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...

 in London, where, in 1875, he received the first Goss Scholarship. Beginning in 1916, Ford taught composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Guildhall School of Music and Drama is an independent music and dramatic arts school which was founded in 1880 in London, England. Students can pursue courses in Music, Opera, Drama and Technical Theatre Arts.-History:...

.

Ford studied in Paris under Édouard Lalo

Édouard Lalo

Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer.-Biography:Lalo was born in Lille , in northernmost France. He attended that city's music conservatory in his youth. Then, beginning at age 16, Lalo studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Berlioz's old enemy François Antoine Habeneck...

 and also toured America. There, his motet, a setting of the Psalm Domine Deus, was performed at a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. During the 1880s, Ford was the official accompanist at the Saturday Popular Concerts at St James's Hall

St James's Hall

St. James's Hall was a concert hall in London that opened on 25 March 1858, designed by architect and artist Owen Jones, who had decorated the interior of the Crystal Palace. It was situated between the Quadrant in Regent Street and Piccadilly, and Vine Street and George Court. There was a...

, London. He also wrote a number of operas and operettas in the 1880s and early 1890s, including Daniel O' Rourke (1884); Nydia (a duologue by Justin H. M. Carthy, 1889); Joan (Robert Martin, 1890); and Weatherwise (1893).

Ford became the assistant musical director for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company

D'Oyly Carte Opera Company

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was a professional light opera company that staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas. The company performed nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere, from the 1870s until it closed in 1982. It was revived in 1988 and...

 at the Savoy Theatre

Savoy Theatre

The Savoy Theatre is a West End theatre located in the Strand in the City of Westminster, London, England. The theatre opened on 10 October 1881 and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte on the site of the old Savoy Palace as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan,...

 in 1888, serving in this position for five years. In 1891, Ford and François Cellier

François Cellier

François Arsène Cellier , often called Frank, was an English conductor and composer. He is best known for his tenure as music director and conductor of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company during the original runs and early revivals of the Savoy operas.-Life and career:Cellier was born in South Hackney,...

 conducted Sullivan's grand opera

Grand Opera

Grand opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events...

, Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe (opera)

Ivanhoe is a romantic opera in three acts based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott, with music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and a libretto by Julian Sturgis. It premiered at the Royal English Opera House on 31 January 1891 for a consecutive run of 155 performances, unheard of for a grand opera...

, which opened Richard D'Oyly Carte

Richard D'Oyly Carte

Richard D'Oyly Carte was an English talent agent, theatrical impresario, composer and hotelier during the latter half of the Victorian era...

's Royal English Opera House. Ford also arranged the piano score for Ivanhoe. While serving as music director at the Savoy, Ford wrote the music for a one-act curtain raiser, Mr. Jericho

Mr. Jericho

Mr. Jericho is a comic opera in one act with words by Harry Greenbank and music by Ernest Ford.The work was first performed at the Savoy Theatre, London, on 18 March 1893 as a curtain raiser to Arthur Sullivan's Haddon Hall in March and April 1893, and to Ford's Jane Annie in June and July 1893,...

, that premiered there in March 1893. The piece has a libretto by Harry Greenbank

Harry Greenbank

Harry Greenbank was an English author and dramatist best known for contributing lyrics to the successful series musicals produced at Daly's Theatre by George Edwardes in the 1890s.-Life and career:...

. In May of the same year, Ford supplied the music for the full-length J. M. Barrie

J. M. Barrie

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The child of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright...

 and Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

 comic opera

Comic opera

Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...

, Jane Annie

Jane Annie

Jane Annie, or The Good Conduct Prize is an opera written in 1893 by J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle, with music by Ernest Ford, a conductor and occasional composer....

, a flop that nevertheless toured until September of that year.

Later, Ford became musical director of the Trafalgar Theatre

Duke of York's Theatre

The Duke of York's Theatre is a West End Theatre in St Martin's Lane, in the City of Westminster. It was built for Frank Wyatt and his wife, Violet Melnotte, who retained ownership of the theatre, until her death in 1935. It opened on 10 September 1892 as the Trafalgar Square Theatre, with Wedding...

 in London. There, he revised and rewrote the music for the comic opera The Wedding Eve. He also composed much of the music for ballets produced at the Empire Theatre between 1894 and 1897, including La Frolique, Brighton Pier, Faust and La Danse. He became conductor of the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society in 1897. Ford also composed a volume of settings of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

, many other songs and chamber music, an Elegy for violin and orchestra and a cantata, The Eve of the Festa.

As a writer, he published A Short History of Music in England (1912). In 1903 he contributed a chapter to H. Saxe Wyndham's biography of Sullivan, entitled "Sullivan as Composer."

Ford died in London at the age of 61.