Francis Boott

Francis Boott (June 24, 1813 in Boston, Massachusetts – March 1, 1904 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American classical music composer of art songs and works for chorus.

Boott was born of British parentage. He was educated at Samuel and Sarah Ripley's school in Waltham, where Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the tutors, and at Round Hill School, followed by Harvard College from which he graduated in 1831. In the 1850s, following the death of his wife, Boott took his young daughter Elizabeth (Lizzie) (1846–88) to Florence, Italy, where he studied harmony with Luigi Picchianti.

Boott became an honorary professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was friends with others in the Anglophone community in Florence, including Henry and William James, the Brownings, Isa Blagden and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie Boott lived at the Villa Castellani in the Bellosguardo heights. Lizzie became a painter, and married the painter Frank Duveneck, who went to live with her and her father in the villa. The novelist Henry James visited them there and used the villa as a model for Italian villas in his Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady.

In 1888 Boott returned to America, and continued to compose music.

He died on 1 March 1904 at the age of 91 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Boott bequeathed $10,000 to Harvard University as a prize fund for the best 4-part vocal work written by a Harvard student. In 1960 the amount was increased to $15,246 through capital gains. The prize continues to be awarded by the Harvard University Department of Music.

Boott's first six songs appeared in 1846 under the pen name of Telford; Upton described them as "quite undistinguished". In 1857 eight songs were published, followed by many individual songs in the following years. Boott composed at least 140 songs during his long life, as well as a handful of duets, choral works, part-songs, and instrumental works. He also composed hymns for church services, many of which were included in the hymnal for King's Chapel in Boston.

While his melodies and piano accompaniments are considered "commonplace, with little harmonic interest", his choices of texts were sophisticated, embracing the literary world of his time. In 1857 John Sullivan Dwight wrote that his songs are "not strikingly original, but graceful and facile, much to be preferred to the popular sweetish, sentimental type".

Songs for voice and piano

Vocal duets

Large works

Shorter choral works and part-songs

Instrumental works