Geoffrey Toye

Edward Geoffrey Toye (Winchester, 1889 – London, 1942) was an English conductor and composer. His work spanned musical theatre, opera and ballet in interwar England.

He trained at the Royal College of Music and, after his early years in London theatres, gained notoriety in 1914 by premiering Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony at the Queen's Hall. After his war service, he conducted three seasons with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company between 1919 and 1924. In 1921 he was in charge of the music for the first revival of Ruddigore since 1887; it appears that the rewritten overture and other changes were his work, although they were not acknowledged in the vocal score published to mark that revival.

From 1925 he was associated with Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, as both a producer and a member of its board, and he was co-director with her at Sadler's Wells between 1932 and 1934, when opera and ballet came to be based there. He shared the direction of the Vic-Wells Ballet with Constant Lambert, including the company's first overseas tour, to Copenhagen, in 1932. He composed the ballet Douanes for Ninette de Valois, and his greatest success as a composer came in 1935 with The Haunted Ballroom. That same year he was general manager of the Royal Opera House; his insistence on engaging the Hollywood singer Grace Moore for La bohème led to a clash with Beecham, and he left the post before the year was out. He later returned to the D'Oyly Carte as a conductor and, for the 1939 film version of The Mikado, acted as adapter and producer.

His legacy is associated with the renewal of British ballet, the establishment of opera at Sadler's Wells and the dissemination of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire. As a composer he is remembered chiefly for The Haunted Ballroom; he also wrote the operetta The Red Pen, with a libretto by A. P. Herbert, broadcast on radio in 1927.