Sir Paolo Tosti’s Enchanted Sojourns at The Grand in Folkestone

Perched high above the English Channel on Folkestone’s elegant Leas, The Grand—once hailed as “the most perfect winter house in the Kingdom”—has long captured imaginations with its Edwardian splendour and storied past. In the summer of 2001, I made this architectural gem my home, seeking solace in its gracious halls and panoramic sunsets. This blog traces the fascinating cultural history of The Grand and its glittering constellation of associations—from Sir Paolo Tosti, whose haunting songs once echoed through its drawing rooms, to figures such as Enrico Caruso, Dame Nellie Melba and even Giacomo Puccini, all of whom, in various ways, were linked to the building’s luminous orbit. Intertwining personal recollections with archival discoveries, it also celebrates the enduring musical legacy of the hotel—now rekindled through the inaugural Paolo Tosti International Singing Academy in 2025.

Dr Emre Aracı is a music historian and composer. He is the author of a biography of Donizetti Pasha, master of music to the Ottoman sultans in 19th-century Istanbul, and has also chronicled the history of the city’s fabled Naum Theatre—once among the Orient’s most dazzling Italian opera houses. His CD recordings have been released by Warner Classics and Brilliant Classics.

It was in the summer of 2001 that I took up residence at Folkestone’s historic Grand Hotel—known as The Grand—in pursuit of a haven where my Edwardian sensibilities might find gentle refuge. As the world stepped boldly into the new millennium, I found myself instinctively turning in the opposite direction, drawn to a place where the air still carried the faint breath of a more gracious age. Perched high upon the Leas, commanding a peerless view of the English Channel, The Grand opened in 1903 as a luxurious residential hotel for the upper classes—a vision brought to life by the town’s enterprising mayor, Alderman Daniel Baker. His ornamental flair and the deft use of red brick and terracotta lent the building a certain theatrical dignity. At its height, the hotel was celebrated as a resort of distinction: one of those rare places where architecture, society, and the sea conspired to create a self-contained world of elegance and repose. 

And then there were the sunsets. Each evening, as the sun dipped beyond the western headland, I would watch from the cliff-top path as sea and sky dissolved into a Turner canvas—flushed with rose, gold, and the softest lavender. The silhouette of the hotel stood sentinel against that fleeting blaze, and next door, the Metropole—late Victorian, also grand, all red brick and terracotta—kept silent company. In those moments, I felt suspended between epochs: the past not entirely vanished, the present momentarily hushed, and beauty—undeniably—still within reach.

On the Leas—the past not entirely vanished, the present momentarily hushed (photo © Emre Aracı) 

When The Grand—initially known as the Grand Mansions—first opened its doors on 12 September 1903, the press proclaimed it “the most perfect winter house in the Kingdom, rendering a journey to the south of France quite unnecessary”. With some 250 rooms arranged into 30 self-contained suites, each comprising a hall, drawing room, bedrooms, dressing room and private bath, the establishment offered its guests the twin luxuries of refined hotel service and the privacy of an elegant private residence. Meals could be served en suite by special arrangement, a dedicated lift from the kitchens ensuring that the cuisine arrived promptly and piping hot. In the palm court, the hotel’s resident orchestra performed daily throughout the year—between four and six in the afternoon, and again from eight until ten at night—thus inaugurating, under the enlightened direction of Mr Baker, a veritable winter season in Folkestone, at a time when most coastal hotels closed their shutters for the colder months.

Presiding over this palace of hospitality was Signor Gustave Gelardi, a hotelier of rare pedigree who had spent fifteen distinguished years at Walsingham House on Piccadilly, bringing with him to the Kentish coast the poise and finesse of London’s grandest establishments. He was joined by Monsieur Dutru, his colleague from both the Savoy and Walsingham, whose reputation for culinary excellence had been forged under none other than César Ritz himself—the “king of hoteliers, and hotelier to kings”. The French menus, exquisite in every detail, were complemented by provisions sourced directly from Harrods, ensuring that the gastronomic standards matched the elegance of their setting. Even the hall porters’ livery—a blue-grey trimmed with cardinal facings—was a conscious evocation of the Empire period; “the men only want hair-powder to be facsimiles of what the French footmen are represented to have been”, noted the Folkestone Express with evident delight.

Grand Mansions in the Edwardian era (image © Emre Aracı)

The Grand weathered both world wars and remained in operation until the early 1970s. In the summer of 1955, Evelyn Waugh spent a week there—a detail that struck me as something of a revelation, given my long-standing affection for Brideshead Revisited. He had been driven down by Lady Diana Cooper. “Edwardian brick, very much like the Hyde Park Hotel, polite old servants, very dull kitchen and clientele”, he recorded in his diary with customary acerbity.

Following the hotel’s closure in 1974, the building was converted into residential flats. At the time of its relaunch, whispers began to circulate that King Edward VII had once been numbered among The Grand’s most distinguished guests, accompanied—inevitably—by Mrs Keppel. The story, though lacking any firm foundation, soon acquired the patina of truth, repeated with unwavering conviction in brochures and local lore alike. Yet, for all my efforts to corroborate this enticing anecdote, I could unearth no definitive archival trace of the monarch’s stay. What I did discover, however, was arguably more evocative: the name of Sir Paolo Tosti—His Majesty’s esteemed singing master and composer of those exquisitely delicate salon romances—was indelibly linked with the hotel. That The Grand had once welcomed Tosti, whose music so perfectly captured the spirit of Edwardian drawing rooms, struck me as the more poetic connection, and one altogether more resonant with the past I was hoping to find.

Tosti was a seasonal habitué of The Grand
 (image © National Portrait Gallery)

Sir Paolo Tosti (1846–1916) occupies a singular place in the musical tapestry of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras—a figure as much at home in the gilded drawing rooms of Mayfair as in the salons of continental Europe. Born in Ortona on Italy’s Adriatic coast, Tosti studied composition in Naples before gravitating towards the epicentres of fashionable society, where his gift for exquisitely turned melodies and delicate sentiment quickly won him the favour of royalty and aristocracy alike. Settling in London in the 1870s, he was appointed singing master to the Royal Family and became a cherished companion to Edward, then Prince of Wales. His ballads—Good-bye, For Ever and For Ever, and Serenata among them—became the soundtrack of an age intoxicated by romance and ritual. Knighted in 1908 and naturalised as a British subject, Tosti remained ever the graceful intermediary between Italy’s operatic warmth and England’s cultivated restraint, his music a wistful echo of a world fast retreating into memory. 

The British Newspaper Archive, updated daily and readily accessible online, offered an ideal point of departure in tracing Tosti’s little-known association with The Grand. It was, in fact, in the Folkestone Herald of 4 September 1909 that I came across his own words: “Folkestone, where for so many years now I have been a constant visitor, is an ideal place! The pure and bracing air always helps me, and when I feel the want of calm comfort, I come to ‘The Grand’, where, in peace and comfort, I think and work more easily than anywhere else”.

It was not merely as a passing guest that Tosti frequented Folkestone’s Grand Hotel; rather, he became a seasonal habitué of the establishment, composing several of his celebrated songs within its walls and actively participating in the musical life it fostered. One of the earliest such instances took place on Sunday, 4 September 1904, when he lent his presence, his artistry and his benevolence to a charity concert held in the hotel’s grand lounge—a performance vividly recalled in the Folkestone Herald the following week. The evening brought together a distinguished gathering of artists, including Madame Monteith, Signor Armando Lecompte, the principal baritone of the New York Metropolitan Opera, and Mr Walter Clifford, with Tosti himself accompanying the singers and conducting the proceedings with characteristic grace. Particularly moving was the participation of Miss Violet Beddington, one of Tosti’s own pupils, who sang several of his songs "most beautifully", while her mother, Mrs Beddington, performed pianoforte solos "in perfect style". A recitation by Miss Frida Kopp added a literary touch to the evening’s offerings.

The concert, warmly received by a large audience, was praised not only for its artistic merit but for the generosity of the performers who, in the words of the paper, gave their "valuable services" in support of charity. Indeed, the correspondent reflected that the pleasure derived from the concert was shared by both audience and artists, noting how Tosti’s "kind and graceful act" had left an indelible mark on the hotel’s annals. "There is not a town in England", the reviewer declared, "where his famous and really soulful compositions are more appreciated than here". One might well imagine that as summer drew to its close, the strains of Good-bye to Summer lingered poignantly in the minds of those present, even as they hoped Tosti’s sojourn in Folkestone might yet inspire a musical salutation to the coming spring.

A Night at The Majestic

While searching for traces of Tosti’s sojourns at The Grand, I came upon yet another, and altogether enchanting, connection with the hotel’s rich and little-known history—this time through the Beddington family—for Violet Beddington would later marry the writer and translator Sydney Schiff in 1911. Possessed of a substantial family income, Schiff published a series of novels under the nom de plume "Stephen Hudson", and was noted not only for his literary output but for his generous patronage of the arts. It was he and Violet who hosted the celebrated dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Paris on 18 May 1922—the occasion on which Marcel Proust met James Joyce, in the company of Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso. This extraordinary evening, in all its improbable grandeur, has been vividly explored in Richard Davenport-Hines’s A Night at the Majestic. Extremely beautiful and highly cultivated, Violet had already turned down several marriage proposals, among them one from Arthur Sullivan. This affair, along with the intricacies of Violet’s family background, would become the subject of Schiff’s 1925 novel Myrtle, which he dedicated to his friend Frederick Delius. Incidentally, Delius too would stay at The Grand in 1929, en route to the Delius Festival held in his honour at the Royal Albert Hall.

Ada was known as "Sphinx"
within Oscar Wilde’s circle

The Beddington family were indeed quite remarkable. Residing at the distinguished address of 21 Hyde Park Square in central London, they were regular visitors to Folkestone, where they passed their holidays in the refined surroundings of The Grand. Violet’s two sisters, Ada and Sybil, were likewise women of distinction, each possessing a measure of renown in her own right. Ada, a writer possessed of an enigmatic allure, adopted the moniker “Sphinx” within Oscar Wilde’s social circle—a sobriquet that reflected both her mystery and her magnetism. Following his release from prison, it was to Ada that Wilde turned in search of solace, drawn perhaps by the same intuitive sympathy that had earned her such a name. 

Tosti was a frequent visitor to the Beddingtons’ London home as well—so much so that Ada is believed to have based the character of Sir Tito Landi in her 1916 novel, Love at Second Sight, on him: “But the clou and great interest of the evening was the arrival of Sir Tito Landi, that most popular of all Italian composers. With his white moustache, pink and white complexion, and large bright blue eyes, his dandified dress, his eyeglass and buttonhole, he had the fresh, fair look of an Englishman, the dry brilliance of a Parisian, the naïveté of a genius, the manners of a courtier, and behind it all the diabolic humour of the Neapolitan. He was small, thin and slight, with a curious dignity of movement”.

Puccini and Tosti

Sybil, meanwhile, served as muse to the celebrated composer Giacomo Puccini, with whom she maintained a correspondence during one of her stays at The Grand. Notably, a letter from Puccini—now preserved in the Library of Congress in Washington—is addressed to Sybil at the The Grand, offering a glimpse into a friendship touched by the glamour and sentiment of a bygone age. It was, in fact, Tosti who first introduced Sybil to Puccini at a dinner party held at his London residence in 1904, during the composer’s visit to the capital for that autumn’s production of Manon Lescaut at Covent Garden. After all Puccini was no stranger to Folkestone, having passed through the town on several occasions during his continental travels; it was a familiar point of embarkation on his journeys between England and the Continent. In the spring of 1906, following a brief sojourn in London that May, he once again made his way through Folkestone, en route to Boulogne. As he boarded the steamer at Folkestone Harbour, his thoughts, as ever, were with Sybil. 

Boulogne steamer leaving Folkestone Harbour

Writing to her from Milan shortly thereafter, in a letter dated 7 June 1906, Puccini confessed: “How I hated having to leave you, when the moment came for getting on to the boat at Folkestone! It made me absolutely miserable to think of all I was going to miss—your charming and delightful company—and all your friends—and your dear sister—I felt as though my heart were being torn asunder”.

This deeply personal letter, and many others like it, was later published by Sybil’s son, Vincent Seligman, in his affectionate memoir Puccini Among Friends, a volume that offers rare insight into the composer’s private world and his enduring bond with the Beddington family.

Bruno Zirato, Enrico Caruso, 1922

The pang of separation—the heart’s yearning for an unattainable ideal—has long provided fertile ground for artistic expression, and none understood this more intuitively than Tosti. He distilled that very sentiment into his much-loved song Ideale, whose delicate strains speak of beauty glimpsed, cherished, and then lost. I was reminded of this emotional resonance while reading Bruno Zirato’s 1922 biography of Enrico Caruso, where I stumbled upon a rather moving intersection of Tosti, his Ideale, the great tenor himself, the nascent wonder of the gramophone—and, quite unexpectedly, The Grand in Folkestone. It was in 1906 that Caruso recorded Ideale; two years later, on 8 February 1908, Tosti, writing from The Grand, sent his friend a letter filled with quiet astonishment and affection. In the privacy of his hotel suite, the composer found himself overcome by the uncanny ability of the machine to preserve and relay feeling, as later published in Bruno Zirato’s Enrico Caruso: A Biography (1922):

“Dearest friend, I spent a good half hour, today, in listening to you sing, three times, Ideale. It is the first time that I have loved the gramophone. Affections, yours, Ciccio”.

Caruso recorded Tosti's Ideale in 1906

One senses in this brief note not only the warmth of a cherished friendship, but also the dawning of a new musical age—one in which voice and memory might defy the ephemerality of performance. For Tosti, who had composed Ideale as a private meditation on loss and longing, to hear it returned to him through this miraculous new medium, and in Caruso’s own inimitable voice, must have seemed a strange and beautiful kind of consolation. And for me, more than a century later, the journey to acquire that very same 1906 recording became a serendipitous odyssey of my own—its trail eventually leading to a dealer in Germany. A series of improbable coincidences conspired to bring it to my doorstep, concealed, of all things, within a humble pizza box. 

Later that afternoon, in my own suite, I placed the original HMV disc on a portable 1920s gramophone—kindly lent to me by a friend—and listened, not once but “three times”, just as Tosti had done at The Grand. In those moments, as Caruso’s voice filled the room with the aching strains of Ideale, I felt the presence of both composer and tenor as though they too had returned to bear witness. It was, in the truest sense of the word, magical—like the sudden reappearance of a long-lost friend at my doorstep, unannounced yet unmistakably familiar, stirring a wave of emotion I hadn’t known was waiting. Furthermore, I also believe that Caruso visited The Grand in person, as he is reported in the Folkestone Herald on 4 September 1909 to have said: “After visiting Folkestone I find it one of the most charming and invigorating watering-places”.

Dame Nellie Melba

Tosti was also acquainted with Helen, Countess of Radnor, whose family held the Estate of Folkestone, encompassing the very land upon which The Grand would later rise. The Earls of Radnor played a significant role in shaping the town’s character, contributing substantially to its planning and development throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The Countess herself was a devoted amateur musician, and presided over a ladies’ string orchestra composed entirely of women drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy. It was for this refined ensemble that Sir Hubert Parry composed his delightful Lady Radnor’s Suite. Tosti’s friendship with Lady Radnor dated back to the 1880s, when she was still Viscountess Folkestone. It was during this period that he took part in a charity concert she organised in aid of the Royal College of Music, held at Stafford House in London. That same spirit of musical camaraderie was once again in evidence when Dame Nellie Melba visited Folkestone to perform at a Grand Matinée concert at the now-vanished Pleasure Gardens Theatre on 16 July 1910. It was Tosti who welcomed his great friend to the town, and who lent his artistry at the pianoforte in accompaniment to her radiant and captivating performance. The climax of the afternoon came with Melba’s impassioned rendition of Tosti’s own song Good-bye, whose poignant final strains seemed to hang in the air long after the last note had faded, stirring in the hearts of all present a flurry of deeply-felt emotion.

It has long been my quiet ambition to see a blue plaque erected in honour of Sir Paolo Tosti at The Grand. Although I once commissioned a modest plaque of my own—now affixed to the wall of my suite for private satisfaction—I have always felt that Tosti deserves a more public and enduring tribute upon the very building he once knew. Moreover, his image graces the covers of two books I penned within these walls—The Grand Revisited and Folkestone Fragments—both conceived and completed under this roof. Little did I imagine, when I made The Grand my home a quarter of a century ago, that it would offer me not only shelter, but also inspiration—a place that would become not merely a residence, but a subject worthy of reflection, memory and prose.

The Grand Revisited and Folkestone Fragments are locally available at Waterstones in Folkestone

As I contemplated the idea of a memorial to Sir Paolo Tosti within the gracious interiors of The Grand—its corridors still echoing with the faded splendour of Edwardian soirées—a most felicitous communication reached me: the particulars of the inaugural Paolo Tosti International Singing Academy, to be held under our very roof from 21 August to 2 September 2025. That this noble endeavour should unfold beneath the esteemed patronage of Sir Antonio Pappano CVO and Dame Sarah Connolly DBE renders it all the more distinguished.

Inspired by the revered pedagogical methods of Marlena Malas, whose influence has shaped generations of vocal artists, the Academy promises a period of intensive training and artistic refinement for a select company of emerging singers. Each day will bring personal instruction from the eminent bass Matthew Rose and the exquisite mezzo-soprano Michèle Losier—both protégés of Madame Malas—alongside collective sessions and dramatic coaching designed to awaken not merely the voice, but the spirit of interpretation.

The Grand will host the inaugural Tosti International Singing Academy (photo © Emre Aracı)

What delight to think that the drawing rooms and sacred spaces of The Grand will play host to masterclasses graced by such luminaries as Sir Thomas Allen, Dame Felicity Lott, Kate Royal, Michael Chance and Sir John Tomlinson. In recitals of rare intimacy, the young artists will collaborate with pianists of international distinction: Bénédicte Jourdois of the Metropolitan Opera and Juilliard School, Anna Tilbrook, Julius Drake and Iain Burnside, whose artistry has long been a beacon in the world of song. And to think that this singular event will come to a close with a matinée recital of Tosti songs at The Grand, accompanied by Julius Drake on Tuesday, 2 September 2025—evoking, with moving elegance, the memory of a luminous afternoon long ago, when Tosti himself, in this very establishment, accompanied a glittering company in performance of his own beloved songs beneath these time-honoured ceilings. It is a vision both touching and true to his spirit, and I send my warmest wishes for the success of this most fitting tribute.

A full schedule and ticket information of the Tosti International Singing Academy may be found at:

www.ticketsource.co.uk/folkestone-on-song

© Emre Aracı 2025. All rights reserved.
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