Robert Nicolas Charles Bochsa was born in the Lorraine, France in 1787 and died in Sydney, Australia in 1856. He was a conductor and composer of opera, oratorio and ballet, working at first in Lyon and Bordeaux. In 1806, he entered the Paris Conservatoire and began to make a name for himself, becoming the official harpist to the courts of Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XVIII. He is credited with perfecting, if not originating, modern harp technique, and was the author of a famous Harp Method. He left for England in 1817 when a number of forgeries (to the value of £30,000) were discovered which used the names of his fellow composers Boïeldieu and Méhul, and of the Duke of Wellington. Bochsa was sentenced in his absence to twelve years in prison, and decided to evade the long arm of the law by staying in England. In London, he made the harp extremely popular and became the first professor of the instrument when the Royal Academy of Music opened its doors in 1827. Bochsa then proceeded to commit a different kind of fraud, namely bigamy, and then ran away with the wife of his fellow opera composer, Sir Henry Bishop. He and Ann Rivière went on a world tour, during which he performed on the harp, wrote an oratorio (The Flood) and a Requiem which was played at his own funeral.

Some sources use Bochsa’s middle name and refer to him as Nicolas, but the frontispiece of his Nocturnes Op. 50 carries the name Charles Bochsa Fils, the title ‘son’ being to distinguish him from his father, also a composer.