Catherine Hayes(1818–1861)

Catherine Hayes was born at 4 Patrick Street, Limerick, on 25 October 1818, the second daughter of Arthur Williamson Hayes, a Limerick band-musician of Protestant Anglo-Irish stock, and Mary Carroll, a Catholic seamstress and laundress. Her father abandoned the family when she was about ten; her mother raised the two girls in the Catholic poor parish of St Michael's, taking in laundry from the Georgian houses on the Crescent. The girl sang. She sang on the balcony of her mother's house above Patrick Street at the back of the rented rooms, looking out over the rooftops of the medieval town. She was nineteen years old in the summer of 1837 when the Anglican Bishop of Limerick, Edmund Knox, on his way home from a parish visitation, heard her singing through an open window of the Crescent and stopped his carriage to ask whose voice it was. The story is in the standard biographies and in her own posthumous memoir. The bishop sponsored her to the Dublin singing teacher Antonio Sapio.

She gave her first concert at the Rotunda in Dublin on 3 May 1839. The proceeds funded her passage to Paris in 1842 to study with Manuel García, the most famous singing teacher in Europe (and the father of Pauline Viardot and Maria Malibran). García took her in for fifteen months on the principle, set out in the inscription on the lithographed portrait she had made of him on departure, that *she had a voice that could be trained to anything and a discipline that would not let it be untrained*. He sent her to the Italian operatic stage. She made her début at the Teatro Marsigli in Bologna in May 1845 in *I Puritani* of Bellini in the role of Elvira and the next morning's reviews carried the foundation of her European career: the *Gazzetta di Bologna* called her the *uccello celeste*, the heavenly bird. The two seasons through 1845 and 1846 took her through Vienna, Florence and Rome, and to a contract at La Scala in Milan for the 1845-46 season in which she sang Linda di Chamounix and Lucia di Lammermoor in front of audiences that included Verdi.

She came home to Ireland in 1849 for the *Catherine Hayes Concert* tour, a ten-city Irish concert series organised by the Dublin promoter James Quin during the third year of the Great Famine. The Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Waterford, Galway, Belfast and Derry concerts of the autumn 1849 tour ran to packed houses through a country in which something approaching one in seven of the pre-Famine population had died of starvation, eviction or famine-related disease in the previous three years. The Limerick concert at the Theatre Royal on 10 November 1849 ran to a thousand-seat audience and to the city's first standing ovation since the building had been built. She gave the proceeds, by her own arrangement, to the Limerick relief committee. The Famine reception turned her into a figure of Irish national-popular musical culture in a way the Italian seasons had not done, and she stayed in the Irish memory under the byname her press of the period had given her: the Swan of Erin.

The next decade was the global concert career. She sang at Covent Garden through the 1849-50 season as the first Irish-Catholic prima donna at the Royal Italian Opera. She toured the United States in 1851-52 under the management of P. T. Barnum's office (Barnum had managed Jenny Lind's American tour the previous year; he engineered Catherine Hayes's tour on the same model), gave a hundred and ten concerts across thirty American cities, sang for President Fillmore at the White House, and made enough money to buy her mother a house in Dublin. She went on from the United States to California in 1852 (where the San Francisco *Daily Alta California* called her concert at the Adelphi Theatre the foundation of San Francisco's musical season), then to Hawaii, Australia, India and the Far East across the next three years, returning to London in 1856. The tour was the first true world-circuit concert tour by a major operatic singer; she sang on every continent except Antarctica before any other prima donna and is the first major European singer to have done so.

She married William Avery Bushnell, an American agent of the Barnum office she had toured with, in October 1857 at the church of St Patrick at Sydney during a return visit to Australia. The marriage was the only conventional domestic period of her life, and was short. Bushnell died of tuberculosis the following July 1858, eight months after the wedding, at the small estate she had bought outside Limerick. She came back to England a widow at forty, gave a final benefit concert at the St James's Theatre, London, on the evening of 8 August 1860 in front of an audience that included the Earl of Dunraven and the Anglo-Irish musical establishment, and retired to a small house at Roccles Park, Sydenham. She died there of cerebral haemorrhage on 11 August 1861, forty-two years old, almost exactly a year after the farewell concert. She is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in west London under a marble monument paid for by public subscription. The Hayes name in the English-side catalogue is the triple-stream surname of Hainault Flemish weaver, the English hay-enclosure, and the dialect form of John's son; she carried the Limerick variant of it into the foundational generation of operatic-international touring as the Swan of Erin.