James Aquinas Reid Fraser, MD

Aquinas Ried (1810 - 1869) fue un Médico cirujano, compositor y dramaturgo de origen alemán quien se radica finalmente en Chile, donde compone la primera Opera escrita en tierras chilenas, en español y con temática de carácter nacionalista.

Nace en el castillo de Strahlfels, cercano a la ciudad de Ratisbona, en la región de Baviera de la actual Alemania (Entonces Reino de Baviera). Estudia en la ciudad cercana a su hogar y luego viaja a Múnich donde obtiene el título de doctor en filosofía de la Universidad de Múnich en agosto de 1830. En 1832, habiendo emigrado a Inglaterra, se titula en calidad de médico cirujano de la "The Royal College of Surgeons" de Londres.

Se radica en Chile, específicamente en la ciudad de Valparaíso. En el año 1846 entrega el manuscrito, publicado en la ciudad de Valparaíso en noviembre, de la que seria la primera Opera escrita en tierras chilenas, la cual resalta además por ciertas particularidades; La temática de carácter nacionalista, haciendo alusión a un episodio de las luchas por la Independencia, y el hecho de que se encontrara escrita en castellano,cosa que era realmente inusual en su época dada la influencia avasalladora de la Opera italiana en Chile y Latinoamérica en general.

La obra se tituló Telésfora, ópera heroica en tres actos. Dados diversos inconvenientes no se pudo representar este primer drama lírico chileno y tan solo uno de sus coros, titulado Ea, campesinos, venid fue representado, en diversas ocasiones, tras ser arreglado por Guillermo Frick en 1855. El propio libreto de la obra tuvo un gran éxito entre la crítica y el público, cosa que podemos constatar al revisar los periódicos de la época.

Aquinas Ried va a seguir cultivando el género de la Opera a lo largo de su vida y compone las obras Il Grenatiere en 1860, Walhala en 1863 y Diana en 1868. Para el año de su muerte, en 1869, se encontraron diversos manuscritos donde aparecen fragmentos de otras tres obras en producción, tituladas Ismenilda, Idoma y Ondega, además de un esbozo de su tercera ópera en español, la cual habría sido titulada Atacama. Con el terremoto de Valparaíso de 1906 se van a perder varios de estos fragmento

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En la casa del Dr. Aquinas Ried, casado con Catalina Canciani, se realizaban
importantes veladas musicales. Allí tocaban Catalina y su hermana María Teresa, acompañadas de un coro formado por los 12 hijos de ambas. El Dr. Ried
tocaba el violín

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Diario del viaje efectuado por el Dr. Aquinas Ried: desde Valparaíso hasta el Lago Llanquihue y de regreso : 7 de febrero de 1847 al 20 de junio del mismo año

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Señor Aquinas Ried fundador y comandante de la 2a Germania de Valparaíso

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Arrived Sydney, NSW, 1 April 1839 (per Augustus Caesar, from London, 17 November 1838)
Departed Sydney, ? 23 February 1840 (per Nautilus, for Norfolk Island)
Departed Norfolk Island, ? early 1844 (for Valparaíso)
Arrived Valparaíso, Chile, by September 1844

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The immediate purpose of this page is to document as closely as possible the early life and musical and medical career of James Aquinas Reid, from his birth in Scotland in 1809, to his arrival in Australia in 1839, and his final embarkation from Norfolk Island, for Chile, sometime during the summer of 1843-44.

I had been trying to flesh out the biography of the mysterious Dr. J. A. Reid since writing about his brief musical career in Sydney, Australia (March 1839-February 1840) in my 2011 doctoral thesis.

I had then already made contact with musicologist Shelagh Noden (University of Aberdeen), who had found evidence of Reid's musical and medical career in Aberdeen and Glasgow during the 1830s, and letters and later copies of some of his compositions (Noden 2010, Noden 2014).

But only after I had submitted my thesis did I discover that, in March 1840, Reid had gone to Norfolk Island as an assistant colonial surgeon under the new commandant and fellow Scot Alexander Maconochie. There Reid also become a key contributor to the implementation of Maconochie's famous reform system, and very plausibly the source of the latter's oft-reported interest in music as a reformative tool (see below). But although I was collecting what little information I could find about his Norfolk Island sojourn, I had no idea of what happened to Reid after around 1844-45.

Then, early in November 2012, I received an email from Rob Wills, of Brisbane, who had been researching some convict memoirs in the State Library of New South Wales. The catalogue record for this collection refers to Dr. J. A. Reid also as "Dr. Aquinas Reid", and a quick google search led me directly to a very unexpected conclusion: that Reid and Dr. Aquinas Ried [sic] of Valparaíso, Chile, were one and the same person.

I had already for some time suspected that the eminent Australian medical historian, the late Bryan Gandevia (1925-2006), had taken an interest in Reid, and this crucial clue also led me to material he had collected on "Aquinas Ried" now in the History of Medicine Library, of the Royal Australian College of Physicians in Sydney. These include Gandevia's own copies of several Chilean publications dealing with Reid/Ried, notably Keller and Fonck's 1927 Dr. Aquinas Ried: Leben und Werke.

As I then realised, there is a mass of references to Aquinas Ried (as it is always spelt there, a Spanish phonetic variant of his original surname) in Chilean and other American sources, literature both primary and secondary, historical and contemporary. In Chile, Ried is not only himself clearly considered to be something of a minor national hero (a civic leader, medical pioneer, explorer, naturalist, founder of fire brigades), but he also fathered two sons later prominent in Valparaíso affairs.

As a musician, Aquinas Ried is credited with having composed the first Chilean "national opera", Telésfora (the libretto only of which now survives), and he also composed several more operas there.

Chilean accounts agree that the "English Doctor" had, nevertheless, been born in Regensburg, Bavaria. But whether there, or more likely in Scotland, Reid was, indisputably, born into a prominent Aberdeen Catholic family, and, as was family tradition, he was sent to be schooled at the Scots College in Regensburg.

According to his countryman and fellow Catholic, the Sydney journalist (and keen musical amateur) W. A. Duncan, who had met him previously in Scotland, Reid had composed an oratorio based on Milton's Paradise lost that was performed in Glasgow. Among works composed by Reid that were performed in Sydney during 1839 were his Mass no. 1 in C, sung at St. Mary's Cathedral, and excepts from an opera Zriny, performed in a concert.

Reid appears to have gotten into serious financial trouble after contracting to buy the business and stock of the Sydney music retailer Andrew Ellard (not to be confused with his son Francis Ellard) early in 1840. After having spent less than a year in Sydney, Andrew Ellard sold up his stock and returned to Dublin. In what he might well have though to be an inspired move, Reid contracted to sell off much the stock to his new employer Alexander Maconochie, for use by the Norfolk Island prisoners. But, having received only 46 pounds from Maconochie (which he, Maconochie estimated more likely valued at 200 or 300 pounds), Reid remained saddled with further debts to Ellard and others, which dogged him for several years to come, as he recorded in a series of 9 letters (now in the State Library of New South Wales) written from Norfolk Island to his friend, the artist Henry Curzon Allport (brother and brother-in-law of Joseph and Mary Morton Allport of Hobart).

Reid was Maconochie's highly valued assistant early in his reform project, and, since Maconochie had never before expressed any professional interest in music, it is likely that Reid prompted and possibly even scripted parts of the policies Maconochie outlined in documents in 1840.

A couple of years later, when Maconochie's own position was increasingly in question, Reid had a spectacular falling out with his employer after it was discovered that Maconochie's daughter, Mary Ann (Reid had been her music teacher) had conceived a passion for him, which he eventually returned, leading to her father charging him with breach of parental trust, this apparently having occurred sometime around the new year of 1842.

Mary Ann (d. May 1855, aged 32) was of marriageable age, and one might have thought that Reid, a well-educated and cultured surgeon and musician, might have been considered a good catch, were it not that his debts disqualified him, as perhaps also the fact that he was a Catholic.

Reid later claimed that the affair with Mary Ann was only a pretext, and that Maconochie was eager to distance himself in order to be able to blame Reid for the failure of his reforms. Reid was moreover vindicated when, shortly afterwards, in mid 1842, Mary Ann Maconochie similarly conceived a similar passion for her new music teacher, the convict Charles Sandys Packer, and had to be sent back to London and the custody of an aunt.

A long and detailed letter from Reid to the Anglican chaplain Thomas Beagley Naylor, charting the history of his relationship with Miss Maconochie, now in the State Library of New South Wales, is transcribed below as DOCUMENT 12; as so too, in a different collection in the State Library, is a letter from Maconochie to Reid reprimanding him for being too lenient with prisoners - see DOCUMENT 10 below.

There is, I suspect, considerably more to the story of Reid's time on Norfolk Island than I have yet been able to document.

There would seem to be some likelihood that he went there originally partly at the behest of the Catholic hierarchy in Sydney, and perhaps more specifically of the vicar-general Bernard Ullathorne, to provide assistance to Maconochie, if at all possible, in his reforms, a project of crucial importance to the Catholic party in Sydney.

He also appears to have acted, on at least one occasion, as a Norfolk Island correspondent for the Catholic newspaper the Australasian Chronicle, then still being edited by its founder W. A. Duncan, who had not only known Reid in Scotland, but who was also a member of St. Mary's choir, in Sydney, during Reid's tenure there.

Interestingly, after Ullathorne's successor as vicar-general, Francis Murphy, removed Duncan from the editorship of the Chronicle late in 1842, Reid was encouraged by a clerical correspondent (perhaps the Francsican priest Joseph Platt) to consider returning to Sydney to take up the editor's chair , combining that post with that of organist of St. Mary's Cathedral. That this never eventuated (and was, perhaps, never likely to) was yet another of the many disappointments Reid suffered, before making, late in 1843, the radical - and as it turns out, personally transforming - decision to seek his future in the Catholic colonies of South America.

An otherwise unidentified mid 20th-century author, named, Evans, also ascribed to Reid the collecting of the series of nine original manuscript convict lives now preserved in the State Library of New South Wales; see below Convict autobiographies.

Rob Wills considered this proposition in his excellent 2015 study, Alias Blind Larry, a biography of the author of one of the nine accounts, James Lawrence (Laurence; alias George Frederick Laurent). In his afterword dedicated to Reid, Wills also discussed the accounts of the other authors in some detail, in particular that of David Jones, comparing Jones's original manuscript with Reid's later recounting of his story in Chile, as printed (in German) in Keller 1927 (see DOCUMENT 13).

I have received information and kind messages from two of Ried's Chilean direct descendants, Ana Maria Ried Undurraga (2012-13) and Jens Bücher (2015). According to the latter, Aquinas had three sons, not two as usually reported. The eldest Hermann was born c.1847; he played the violin being a young boy, and went probably to Buenos Aires where he worked as an artist (or perhaps musician?), and never came back to Chile. Bücher warns that he has no proof of this, but draws on memories of what his mother told him about a family member that he now believes may have been Hermann. The second son, therefore, was Gustavo (1850-1927), and the third Arnold (1856-1927/8).

Aquinas Ried is mentioned in a very large number of Chilean and other American sources - musical, cultural, medical and scientific - both historical and modern. For the time being, I have only cited the earliest and most important of these below.

Chronology (summary)

1809 September 7 (Aberdeen, Scotland)

Birth of James Reid (Records of the Scots Colleges 1906)

1809 September 17 (Aberdeen, Scotland)

Baptism of James Reid, St. Peter's Catholic Chapel, Aberdeen; James son of William Reid and Elizabeth Fraser (born October 1784, Lonmay, Scotland; baptised 30 October 1784, Strichen) (Aberdeen Catholic Register, Scottish Catholic Archives; sighted Noden, August 2015)

Later in Valparaíso, he was supposed to have been born at "Strahlfels" [recte Strahlfeld], in Regensburg, Bavaria, in about 1810 (Fonck 1895).

The Aberdeen and Regensburg records identify him only as James; he assumed the second forename "Aquinas" later, perhaps as a confirmation name.

In correspondence, James Reid referred to his "uncle", the Catholic priest and composer, Charles Fraser (1789-1835), of Aberdeen (Gillis 1835), also an alumnus of the Scots school in Regensburg. Charles Fraser was indeed his mother's brother. Another family member was Elizabeth's maternal uncle James (Gallus) Robertson, OSB (1758-1820), ordained priest in 1782, who was still a professed monk at the Scottish monastery at Regensburg when James Reid arrived there as a boy in 1817 (Noden). Robertson was a missioner at Strichen, Scotland, in 1784 when Elizabeth Fraser was baptised.

At the time of Reid's birth, the priest-in-charge at Aberdeen since 1799, and until his death, was Charles Gordon (1772-1855), popularly known as "Priest Gordon", also himself a composer, and much later copyist of the Dufftown manuscripts that contain two works ascribed to "J. A. Reid".

I do no yet know whether James's sisters were younger than him, older, or both; since W. A. Duncan described them in his concert review (23 August 1839) as Miss Reid and Miss M. Reid, Catherine, by convention, must have been the elder of the two.

1819 April 18 (Aberdeen, Scotland)

Birth of James Reid's younger brother, John Reid. He was already studying for the priesthood when his siblings left for Australia in 1838. Also a composer, he served under Charles Gordon as priest and choirmaster at St. Peter's Catholic Chapel in Aberdeen until his death in 1854, aged 35 (Noden).

1817 November 1 (Regensburg, Bavaria)

James Reid entered the school of the Scots Benedictine Monastery, Regensburg (Ratisbon) as one of 3 new scholars; under abbot Benedictus, alias of Charles Arbuthnot (1737-1820) (Records of the Scots Colleges 1906); his maternal uncle Charles Fraser had been a pupil there from 1799 until c.1805.

1829

James Reid completed studies at Regensberg and returned to Scotland (Records of the Scots Colleges 1906).

1830 August (Munich, Bavaria)

James Reid graduated with a doctorate from Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat, Munich (Lira 1969).

? 1832 (London, England)

Having, with help of a paternal uncle, studied medicine, James Reid was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons, London (Lira 1969); Noden has seen a letter of the 1830s in which he refers to "the expense of graduation in London."

? 1832-35 (Aberdeen, Scotland)

After graduation, James Reid returned to Aberdeen, "for more than four years", after which (? after Charles Fraser's death in 1835) he moved to Glasgow.

1835 March 12 (Glasgow, Scotland)

Reid's uncle, Charles Fraser, died at Aberdeen. In a letter James Reid states that all the music sung at his funeral, on 19 March, was composed by Charles (only one work survives, in the Dufftown MSS) (Noden)

1837 April: (Glasgow, Scotland)

Oratorio on Paradise Lost performed at St. Andrew's Catholic Chapel, Glasgow; in Australia in 1839, W. A. Duncan identifies it as James Reid's composition.

1838 March (Glasgow, Scotland)

James Reid conducts concert at Ducrow's Arena, Glasgow. Noden cites a letter in which Reid writes:

In Glasgow I have laboured a good deal both in the medical profession and as director of the choir . . . As director of the choir I succeeded in raising a splendid orchestra and in giving 4 Oratorios.

1838 November 17

Three Reid siblings sail from London on the Augustus Caesar; also on board are Catherine's future husband William Bower, and Henry Curzon Allport and family.

1839 April 1 (Sydney, NSW)

James, Mary, and Catherine Reid arrive in Sydney, NSW, on the Augustus Caesar. Only Catherine and Mary Reid appear on any of the published incoming passenger lists; perhaps due to lack of space, James arrived among the 22 steerage passengers. Since Bower's name did not appear on the cabin passenger departure list, perhaps James changed places with him during the voyage because he (Bower) was ill.

1840 February 15 (Sydney, NSW)

Catherine Reid marries William J. Howard Bower, Sydney.

1840 February 22

James Reid almost certainly sailed of Norfolk Island, either with his new employer Alexander Maconochie, on the convict transport Nautilus, or on the Governor Phillip.

1842 January (Norfolk Island)

Reid's affair with Mary Ann Maconochie having been discovered by her parents, his ongoing personal relationship with Maconochie is broken, and their professional relationship compromised.

1844 May

News of Reid's resignation as assistant surgeon, Norfolk Island, received in Sydney (HRA).

1844 September 18 (Valparaíso, Chile)

After arriving in Valparaíso, he phonetically altered the spelling of his surname, and identified himself as Aquinas Ried. His first professional musical engagement was the performance of a mass composed by him at the Iglesia Matriz, Valparaíso ("la misa de gracias compuesta pro D. Aquinas Ried") (Lira 1969).

1846 January 21

Mary Reid and Catherine and Henry Bower sail from Sydney on the Jane Goudie for London.

1846 November

The lyric company of the Teatro de la Victoria, Valparaíso, produces the opera Teléfora.

? 1846

In Valparaíso, James Aquinas Ried marries Catalina Canciani (b. Caterina Canciani, San Vito al Tagliamento, Friuli Venezia Giulia, 12 February 1829; arrived Chile, 1834; died Santiago de Chile, 10 November 1915), daughter of Giobatta Canciani and Maria Tisinan, nice of the Italian merchant, Antonio Canciani, and sister-in-law of Fernando Flindt.

? 1846

? Hermann Ried Canciani born; he played violin as a child (Parker de Bassi 2001)

1850 September 11

Gustavo Ried Canciani (died 4 June 1927) born in Valparaíso, Chile.

1851 June 4

Ried is one of the founders of the Cuerpo de Bomberos, Valparaíso.

1856, April 28:

Arnoldo Ried Canciani (died 1928) born in Valparaíso, Chile.

1866 March 31

In the Spanish bombardment of Valparaíso, Aquinas Reid lost his house, together with his library and musical, medical and literary manuscripts, valued at the time at $54,000 (Fonck 1927, Lira 1969).

1869 May 17

Death of James Aquinas Ried died in Valparaíso (Lira 1969).