Ena Baga

Ena Baga (5 January 1906 – 15 July 2004) was a British pianist and theatre organist. She is best known for improvising accompaniments to silent films, both in the 1920s and during the revival of interest in silent films that began in the 1970s.

Ena Rosina Baga was born at Clerkenwell in 1906, to an Italian father, Constantine, and an Irish mother, Charlotte. Her father conducted a cinema orchestra for silent films. After the family moved to Southend, 12-year-old Rosina began playing organ for the Roman Catholic Church.

Tony Moss, co-founder of the Cinema Organ Society in 1952, and compiler of the excellent biography "BAGATELLE - Queens of the Keyboard" (ISBN - Pub 1993) writes the following: "Born on 15th January 1906 at 45 Colebrook Row, off the City Road and near the Angel Islington, she was christened Ena after the Queen of Spain. The Royal Ena, daughter of Princess Beatrice and Henry of Battenburg, and grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, was in the news in 1906 as she was to marry Alfonso XIII, King of Spain on 21 May that year. Returning to the Royal Palace after the ceremony, a bomb was thrown at the new Queen Ena's coach and she and the King were lucky to escape with their lives.

The two Ena's never met but Ena Baga was much later commanded to appear at Balmoral before King George V and Queen Mary, who, as the Prince and Princess of Wales, had been present in Madrid on that near fateful day. But, we are jumping ahead. Ena, the future 'Queen of the Keyboard', was the fourth daughter of Constantine Joseph Baga, born in Liverpool, the son of an Italian and whose mother came from Cork. There was also Italian blood on her mother's side, again one generation away, and her mother's maiden name was Draghi. Her mother's father had a flair for stocks and shares and had been pretty successful, whereas her father's father was a devotee of Donizetti and Italian composers of opera and sang opera in Italian all day long! He had come to England with Giuseppe Garibaldi, who he recalled had kissed the ground when they disembarked at Folkestone."

In the 1920s, when silent film theatres began replacing orchestras with one organist playing a theatre organ (as a cost-cutting measure), Baga became an organist for silent films, improvising music that dramatized the emotions or actions depicted in the film. In 1928, when "talking pictures" arrived, she provided music for the intermission between the opening "B-movie" and the feature movie.

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