Up for auction the "English Composer" Herbert Menges Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1964.
ES-4593E
Herbert
Menges OBE (27
August 1902 – 20 February 1972) was an English conductor and composer, who
wrote incidental music to
all of Shakespeare's plays. Siegfried
Frederick Herbert Menges was born in Hove on
27 August 1902. His father was German and his mother British. His elder sister was the violinist Isolde Menges. Herbert appeared in public as a violinist at
the age of four. He later abandoned the violin for the piano, and he studied at
the Royal College of Music under Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Other teachers included Mathilde Verne and Arthur De Greef. Menges's
mother Kate founded the Brighton Symphony Players in 1925 and the first concert
was given in the Hove Town Hall on 18 May 1925, conducted by Herbert Menges. After some years the Players evolved into the
Brighton Philharmonic Society, forerunner of the Southern Philharmonic
Orchestra, a professional group based in Brighton from 1945 which also gave
regular concerts in Portsmouth and Hastings. Menges was a powerful advocate of
the regional professional orchestras. He remained the orchestra's musical
director for the remaining 47 years of his life, during which time it became
the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra in 1958, and conducted the orchestra 326
times. He conducted the
premieres of a number of works by contemporary English composers. In
1931 he became musical director of the Old Vic Theatre, in which capacity he wrote (or arranged from
composers such as Henry Purcell) incidental music for all the plays of William
Shakespeare, and numerous plays by other writers. Notable among these was his music for a 1949
production of Love's Labour's Lost. He
was associated with the productions of John Gielgud from 1933 onwards. His assistant there for
three years was John Cook. He remained
with the Old Vic until 1950. From 1941 to 1944, alongside Lawrance
Collingwood he conducted performance in London and around Britain for operas
with the Sadler's Wells Theatre Orchestra,
before returning to the Old Vic company when it moved to the New Theatre. He toured with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson to Paris, Germany, the Low countries and
New York, where he also conducted the CBS Symphony Orchestra.
He also became musical director of the Royalty Theatre in London. In 1931 he founded the London Rehearsal Orchestra, whose purpose was to help young
musicians learn difficult pieces. In 1951 he wrote the music for the
Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh Broadway
production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. That same year, Malcolm Arnold dedicated his A Sussex Overture,
Op. 31, to Herbert Menges and the Brighton Philharmonic Society. He
considered that he had a strong affinity with Bach and conducted the Viennese
classics and composers such as Verdi and Tchaikovsky with restraint, while his
Brahms and Dvorak are warmer in his interpretations. His rehearsal and conducting technique were
commended for their economy and he would often forego the baton in more
expressive passages. A later critic, discussing his recordings,
praised the rhythmic acuity, superb internal balance in the orchestra and the
precision of attack he achieved, comparing his approach with Paray and Monteux. He had conducting engagements with
the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra, the Liverpool Philharmonic
Orchestra, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He
became Director of Music at the Chichester Festival
Theatre from 1962. Herbert Menges was appointed an
Officer of the Order of the British
Empire in 1963. He died on 20 February 1972, in London, aged 69. His name now appears as tribute on some
Brighton and Hove buses. Many of his letters and scores are held
at McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
He was married in 1935 to Evelyn Stiebel and had three children,
Nicholas, Christopher (an Academy
Award-winning cinematographer) and Susannah.