Very few citizens of Fort Smith realize that in the late 19th century our city was home to a popular classical music composer and conductor for just over a year and a half.
Even fewer people know that the same individual was essentially run out of town on a rail after an incident involving a 14-year-old Van Buren girl exposed him as the "cad" and "lecherous dog" he had previously proven himself to be, according to historical records.
Richard Henry Stahl was born in the Austrian mountains on October 19, 1858. Very little is known about his childhood but ship registrations from late 1883 list a German passenger, 25, by the same name who landed in New York.
By early 1884, after just a three-week engagement. Richard was married to Lillian Memler, a debutante from a prominent Norfolk, Virginia family and a prominent regional actress of the time
Richard and Lillian traveled not only the United States but internationally as well for the next three years after Stahl and a fellow composer, whose name has been lost to history, wrote a successful operetta called "Said Pasha".
Stahl apparently talked his wife into giving him $1800 to back the production of the play, which got it start in San Francisco. Somewhere along the way, the "dashing and convincing" Stahl also forgot that the production and operetta also had a co-writer.
During the three years Richard and Lillian were married, everything seemed to be going along quite swimmingly. In 1887, songwriter Earl Marble of Washington DC asked Stahl to set his lyrics to music for a vanity composition for a young lady by the name of Elberta Crawford.
The daughter of an ex-judge from Tennessee, "Bertie" apparently fell in love with the song, and Richard, and their affair resulted in the "dissolution" of the three-year marriage.
And by "dissolution" we mean Richard just took up with Elberta, after being married while on the road, and started living as husband and wife without the benefit or divorce from Lillian.
But after just three months of marriage, the fact came out that Richard was a bigamist when his now estranged first wife sued him in an effort to get back her $1,800 she had sunk into his career.
That ended the short union between Richard and Alberta and the erstwhile showman. declared a few months later from a Denver stage that he would never marry again.
By 1892, Richard had reversed courses and, indeed, married again. This time he was married to the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia philanthropist, Leona Sherwood, but the legal woes continued for the young composer. In rapid procession, he was embroiled in legal matters in California, Chicago, New York City, and sometime in late 1893, after getting a divorce from Leona, Richard vanished from the face of the earth.
So much so, for the next two years, his first wife Lillian carried around a newspaper clipping telling of his death in Oregon state.
In 1894, a '"good looking and rakish" Richard Stahl resurfaced in Fort Smith. He never tried to hide his true identity and
plying on his success as a composer and conductor, started a music school in the city of 20,000 people on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border.
Things went well for several months.
At one point a touring orchestra that came through Fort Smith played a tribute to one of his songs while he sat in the balcony of s local opera house, surrounded by numerous female admirers. So many flowers were thrown into the balcony that it looked like "the young man had been drowned in a floral sea," according to a contemporary newspaper report.
Richard was the talk of the town. Not only did he teach music out of a studio in Fort smith, but he was traveling by Frisco train to Van Buren twice a week to teach piano to various children of that community.
On October 10, 1894 Stahl held a session for his piano students in Van Buren and the 14-year-old daughter of a railroad engineer had complained to her mother that afterwards the piano teacher had "put his arm around her and drawn her close".
The mother then approached her husband who decided that Stahl had "insulted" his daughter.
Stahl, who was considered quite the "dandy", carried a silver-tipped walking stick, which had been presented to him by his Fort Smith admirers, with him everywhere he went. Before he could get on the train to come back from to Fort smith, the railroad engineer confronted him, took his walking stick, and used it to nearly beat his brains out in front of the Van Buren depot.
There was some consideration into tar and feathering Stahl but law enforcement intervened and put him back on the train to Fort Smith. Two days later Stahl was arrested for "frequenting houses of ill repute" and after he was released on bail, he was never seen again in these parts.
But Stahl, the artist, endured. At least for a little while. He wrote another popular piece called "The Sea King", and struggled over the next several years trying to clear up his legal matters all across the United States. He also had another operetta, "Chong Ching", that enjoyed a a short Broadway run.
On June 5, 1899, at the age of 40 Richard Stahl, died in New York City from complications of rheumatism and heart failure. His body was returned to Philadelphia and two days later he was interred in the West Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Apparently, Stahl still was held in high esteemed by some people.
Although his funeral was a private family matter, it is said a young man slipped quietly into the darkened funeral parlor and planted a kiss on the forehead of the deceased musician just as the services came to a close.
It is said as the carriages drew up to take away the mourners, the young man stood outside wistfully watching them as they drove away.
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