Herbert Menges

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.

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