Emile Coulon.

Emile Georges Coulon is my Great Great Baby Daddy.  He toured with my Great Great Grandmother Octavia Hamilton and she came home from a Sydney tour pregnant to him and gave birth to a brown eyed baby named Alice Moon to two blue eyed parents. Octavia Hamilton was Mrs Eliza Moon in her real life and she was married to Augustus Moon who refused to pay maintenance on the bastard children when Octavia moved in with the Wine Merchant 8 years later....this was played out in a Melbourne Court Room and left Alice an Orphan at 8 years of age.  This is why I was sent a French Art Dealing Entrepreneur in Tokyo. I met him in the Green Room of a Noh Theatre after I'd got off stage Playing The Wife in a Kyogen Version of Moliere's Tartuffe.  Kyogen is traditional Japanese comedy that provides light relief in the middle of the long Noh plays.  Again Opera is part of my programming and scripting. My Director/Sensei  Don Kenny was an Opera Singer who arrived in Tokyo with the US NAVY. My French Husband Patrick Foret was a French Navy Brat.  He chased me back to Sydney and lured me to Paris for a Satanic ritual wedding where I agreed to things I didn't understand because I didn't speak French.  My Brother was there for this wedding. He witnessed my trauma and deep grief after the ceremony. My sister also was traumatised by her ceremony as she rang me in New York after it had happened.  



COULON, Emile GeorgesBass-baritone singer, arranger
Born ? France, c.1821/2
Arrived Australia, Sydney, 10 September 1854
Departed Melbourne, 26 December 1860
Died USA, late 1874
Summary: According to his obituary, Coulon was a pupil of the younger Manuel Garcia (1805-1906). The same document reports that he was 53 at the time of his death (therefore born in 1821 or 1822), and that he made his debut in 1851. However, he was probably the M. Coulon in Mequet's new opera troupe at Brest in 1850, and the M. Coulon who was Bertram in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable in Paris early in 1853 (see also M. Coulon and M. Coulon, première basse-taille de grand opéra). By mid-1853 he must have been in the United States, for he appeared several times in the San Francisco opera season beginning in September 1853. There his regular co-artist was the tenor Laglaise (probably Jean-Baptiste Laglaise, or Laglaize), who from 1856 also sang with him regularly in Australia. In July 1854, Coulon assisted Catherine Hayes at her farewell recital, prior to sailing with her for Australia. For more on Coulon in San Francisco, see The Pioneer (1854), 114, 115, 245, and Martin, Verdi at the Golden Gate (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993). The Hayes company's arrival in Sydney on 10 September 1854 was announced in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald the following morning that mentioned Coulon favourably. After working with Hayes and Lewis Lavenu in 1854-55, he and Laglaise (recently arrived from the USA) toured with Anna Bishop and George Loder in 1856 as a member of their English Opera Company. A contemporary appreciation of Coulon in Australia appears in Frank Fowler's Southern lights and shadows. In Melbourne on 13 April 1859, as reviewed in The Argus, he gave the first performance of Sidney Nelson's new national song, Advance Australia (published the following month). From July 1859, Coulon spent 8 months in Mauritius, returning to Melbourne in March 1860. He was in Sydney appearing in opera in June and July, and in Melbourne in October-November floated a scheme to form a European opera company for the colonies. Coulon finally sailed from Melbourne for England on 26 December 1860. In May, as reported in the press, local supporters of his touring opera company scheme received a letter from him stating that he had: "succeeded in organizing a company provisionally, which would be ready to proceed to the colonies upon approval … The company embraces three ladies, three gentlemen, 10 members of orchestra, and the nucleus of a competent chorus." However, at a meeting on 30 August, subscribers were told: "M. Coulon's opera scheme may be considered defunct." He never returned to Australia. Coulon reportedly sang Marcel in Huguenots in Brussels in 1864 (the correspondent for The Reader judged him "a careful and finished vocalist, but incapable of giving adequate expression to the fierce Calvinistic exaltation of the character"). He was at Covent Garden for the 1868 season. According to The Saturday Review, one Signor Collini in a revival of Robert le diable there was "no other than M. Coulon, who had for some years vainly striven to make a reputation for himself at the Grand Opera in Paris". The name Signor Collini had perhaps been coined the previous year, when Coulon appeared thus at Milan as count Capuleto in Gounod's Romeo e Giulietta. In 1873, at San Carlo in Naples, however, The Athenaeum's correspondent judged that Signor Collini as the "new Germont … must be regarded as a failure; he is the heaviest of heavy fathers, and his voice had a continuous tremolo, as if the old man had been attacked with the palsy: his make-up was quite hideous."

This obituary appeared in Melbourne's The Argus (23 January 1875):

The announcement of the death of Emile Coulon (which appeared as an extract in yesterday's Argus) will recal[l] to the reader's mind many a scene in the stirring times which followed the discovery of gold in Victoria. At the time when the "Salle Valentino" was the chief place for musical entertainment, the old Theatre Royal was being built, and long before the theatre itself was finished, the Vestibule was used, and very largely patronised as a concert room. It was here that Coulon sang twenty years ago and delighted the audience of that day (at it was a thoroughly appreciative and critical audience). The people who had come fresh from London, Paris or Vienna recognised the good quality of the singer who could do justice to the buffo music of Rossini and Donizetti. Here in those days Coulon's name was associated with many another yet remembered. Mrs. Hancock, Madame Carandini, Octavia Hamilton, Louisa Swannell, the Australian Nightingale, Charles Lyall, Charles Biall, "Johnston of the 40th" and "Callen of the 12th." From this time up to 1859, in which year M. Coulon left the country [recte 1860], he was associated in opera with the Bianchis, Laglaise, Greig and many others of note in those days, who have long since passed from the scene. It was expected when Coulon left Melbourne that he was to return with a complete opere company, but he did not return, to the great disappointment of many citizens well disposed towards the patronage of musical art. The little obituary notice from which we quote says that Coulon was 53 years old when he died, that he made his debut in 1851, and that he was one of the best of Garcia's pupils. We who remember him know that was a good singer, and had a good voice; while he remained in Melbourne he was in his very prime. The Garcia who was his master was the brother of Malibran and of Viardot. There is no such singer now in Melbourne as Emile CouIon was in those lively days we speak of.

Musical works: At Hayes's "Last grand concert" at the Royal Victoria Theatre on 30 September, under the musical direction of Lewis Lavenu, Coulon sang the French National Hymn La Marseillaise. He performed it widely. Following later Sydney performances in April 1855, on 10 May Woolcott & Clarke advertised their illustrated edition of the Marseillaise Hymn, arranged by M. Coulon, his only published work.

Disambiguation: Émile Coulon (mid 19th-century Belgian architect); Eugène Coulon (fl. London 1844-60): French dancing-master was in the ballet at London's Her Majesty's Theatre at the time, reputedly "introduced the Polka to England in 1844" (Coulon's Hand-book; containing all the last new and fashionable dances (1860/1873), see also Coulon in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors). A pianist, Miss or Mlle. Coulon, was active in London in the early 1850s, appearing for instance in 1851 at (her father?) Mr. E. Coulon's rooms, Great Marlborough Street. Eugene is the Coulon celebrated in the titles of several dance prints with music by Jullien. In Sydney in September 1853, Henry Marsh published an Australian edition (lost) of Pop goes the weasel "With description of the Figures by COULON, and the Original Music" (cf. extant 1853 US edition). On 16 March 1867, the Argus reported: "At the Hamilton Police Court on Tuesday, Emille Calon, professor of music, was charged with attempting to poison himself  with strychnine." The report evidently confused the memory of Emile Coulon with Edward Calon, the first known mention of a musician soon after active in Adelaide (where he was also accused of embezzlement) and later as organist of St. Paul's Church in Sale, Victoria.

Add 2013 (information from Allister Hardiman): Emile Georges Coulon (his contract with Catherine Hayes was signed "Georges Coulon") died in the USA in 1874. He probably belonged to the family of the dancers Jean-François Coulon (1764-1836) and his son, London-based from 1844, Antoine Coulon (1796-1849).
Works online: Marseillaise Hymn (arranged by M. Coulon) (Sydney: Woolcott & Clarke, [1855])


http://sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/register-C.php