The Hallé Orchestra

It is well to give a brief outline of the orchestra’s history from its inception up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Charles Hallé (1819–1895) was born Carl Halle in Hagen. After early music lessons from his father he studied in Darmstadt and thereafter in Paris – where he added the acute accent to his name to encourage a closer pronunciation of his surname. In Paris he made the acquaintance of a number of musicians, among them Chopin and Berlioz; it was the latter’s music in particular he was later keen to promote. In 1848, following the revolution which led to the abdication of Louis Philippe and the declaration of the Second Republic, Hallé left Paris for London, intending to make his career there. He found London full of émigré musicians and opted instead for a life split between the capital and the provinces. He was invited to Manchester by one of that city’s cotton merchants, Hermann Leo, one of the many German businessmen who had settled in Manchester and who throughout the nineteenth century formed there a substantial community of culturally literate patrons of the arts.Footnote ¹⁸ Initially Hallé was invited to direct an existing musical society, the Gentlemen’s Concerts, which had been established in the 1770s and which at that stage was the city’s premier concert society. He also gave a number of chamber concerts and piano recitals, supplementing his income throughout with piano teaching. In 1857 he was contracted to provide the musical content for the Art Treasures Exhibition held that summer in Manchester. He used this as an opportunity to try out an arguably more ‘meaty’ musical diet on the public, with entire symphonies and concertos being offered. The Gentlemen’s Concerts had hitherto veered largely towards the nature of miscellaneous concerts, mixing orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal items on the same programme.Footnote ¹⁹ He also gathered a body of musicians from Manchester, London and the continent, who spent the weeks of the Exhibition rehearsing and playing together, engendering a higher standard of playing than the public was used to. After this success, Hallé himself admitted he was loath to see these musicians depart for their homes, and he consulted with his friends as to whether he could make a ‘Grand Orchestral Concert Series’ a success financially. He took the plunge in January 1858, contracting the players for the season rather than concert by concert. It was the first time something close to a permanently contracted orchestra had been set up in England. There were other differences too; Hallé made sure that there were always seats available to non-subscribers, and he imposed no restrictions on subscribers. This was in direct contrast the practice at the Gentlemen’s Concerts, where membership was through an expensive annual subscription which contributed to the Concerts’ reputation for exclusivity. Hallé believed absolutely in the power of music to inspire, engage and thrill. He regarded it as part of his role to educate the public – introducing new and unfamiliar works, often by starting with extracts before performing an entire work, and on occasion repeating a performance a week or so later.

By the time Hallé died, rather unexpectedly, in October 1895, his orchestra was regarded as one of the country’s finest (one should bear in mind that London had no permanent orchestras at the time). Manchester mourned, with his funeral procession bringing the city to a standstill.Footnote ²⁰ It was in large measure the German community who came to the rescue in 1895, to ensure that Hallé’s legacy lived on, and who appointed the Hungarian born Hans Richter as permanent Principal Conductor in 1899. Richter presided over a period of great strength for the Hallé – maintaining its reputation for excellence and developing a close bond between the orchestra and the British composer Edward Elgar and his music that continues to this day. Following Richter’s retirement in 1911, his German protégé Michael Balling was eventually appointed. The 1913–14 season was only his second year in charge, but he was already ‘making waves’. The financial set-up for the Hallé was based on a guarantor system; the Concerts Society, formally established in 1899, was constituted from the first as a non-profit making body. The guarantors made themselves liable for payments in the case of debts or losses incurred up to a maximum of £100 each. We should remember that Charles Hallé had conducted, and often appeared as soloist, without taking the fees that the Society was now required to find – and in Richter they had to find substantial fees! It is partly against this backdrop that what follows needs also to be set.

The Hallé’s chief sources for the First World War era are concert programmes, including those kept by the orchestral Librarian in a series of notebooks and which also cover concerts outside Manchester. Complementing these are press reviews, chiefly from the Manchester Guardian. In the Henry Watson Music Library, housed in Manchester’s Central Library, are also a series of notebooks kept by Gustav Behrens (1846–1936), a member of the Behrens family of German engineers, friend of Hallé, architect of the Concerts Society and first Secretary of Hallé’s Royal Manchester College of Music.Footnote ²¹ These include comprehensive press cuttings for the period: both concert reviews and other articles, as well as copies of some correspondence. On the whole what we have is the public record – there is very little that gives real insight into matters behind the scenes – and the conclusions that we draw therefore need to be tentative. Although the Manchester press did occasionally report on meetings of the Hallé Concerts Society, the men (and they were mostly men at this time) who ran the Hallé tended not to engage in public debate with the press on the whole – openly ignoring any adverse criticism – but we have no way of knowing what they thought in private.

Balling’s Pre-War Tenure

As the 1913–14 season drew to a close there were grounds for optimism at the Hallé. In Michael Balling, officially appointed in 1912 to succeed Hans Richter, they had a relatively young and enthusiastic conductor, a pioneer in the mould of Hallé himself, who believed in making music accessible to all. He quickly set out his agenda for the orchestra and his thoughts on how it should be funded, which included his belief that it should receive municipal subsidy.

Nationally the orchestra’s reputation was high, with more out of town engagements, including concerts in Dundee and a weeklong appearance in February 1913 at the Edinburgh Beethoven Festival, as well as two concerts in London in October 1913.Footnote ²³ The new Chairman, Gustav Behrens, had been a key player in the formation of the Society; he was not merely a close confidant of Hallé’s but had also been instrumental in the appointment of Richter in 1899.Footnote ²⁴ There was a new Leader, Arthur Catterall, a native of Preston, who had been one of Adolph Brodsky’s prize pupils at the Royal Manchester College of Music. (He left the Hallé in 1925 to pursue his career in London.)Footnote ²⁵

Nevertheless, the orchestra was experiencing financial problems. There had been a deficit on the season of £1,649 and the number of subscribers had fallen. Moreover, Balling’s introduction of a new six-month contract for players implied committing to a fixed-wage bill before income for the season was known. Although Balling had done much to reinvigorate the programming, very little English music was being performed. This merely served to exacerbate the situation whereby Richter’s final seasons had been marked by growing press criticism of his over-dependence on German music in his programmes and the consequent lack of variety in the Hallé’s repertoire. Among those who took issue with this was the young and fledgling critic Neville Cardus, who was not alone in criticizing Richter in particular for his lack of interest in French repertoire.Footnote ²⁶

The 1913–14 season included Rachmaninov’s Hallé debut on 29 January. He played his own Piano Concerto no.2 and three of the piano Preludes in a concert which also included the Manchester première of Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien. There was another Manchester première on 19 March – that of Sibelius’s Finlandia – at the Pension Fund Concert where Balling shared conducting honours with Elgar, who conducted his own Falstaff and Enigma Variations.Footnote ²⁷ Balling departed for his home in Bayreuth in April – with all set fair for the coming seasons.

The War Years

It is difficult to ascertain what exactly took place within the Hallé Committee during August and September 1914 as no minutes survive prior to 1922, and even Behrens’ notebooks do not shed very much light on the first months of the war. Sir Thomas Beecham gives an account of how he became involved in his autobiographical A Mingled Chime, which makes a good story, but the subsequent involvement of Beecham with the Hallé suggests this should be taken with a pinch of salt. The Hallé’s relationship with Beecham evolved rather than being presented as the outcome of the single meeting he describes:

No-one could predict how long the war would last, so arrangements with Beecham were at least initially ad hoc. This is made very clear in Behrens’ speech to the guarantors at a special meeting on 15 September.

The guarantors endorsed the proposal that the players had already accepted.Footnote ³⁰

Behrens then wrote to Balling on 26 August ‘We feel ourselves that the whole matter of your conducting the concerts during the continuance of the war is fraught with many difficulties’ ending with ‘let us hope that … in the season following this you will be able to resume your position’.Footnote ³¹ The players were approached and agreed at once to accept the offer of half-pay for 20 weeks referenced above, with a promise that any profit on the season would be shared amongst them. Elgar also offered to conduct the opening concert of the season for ‘whatever you can give me’; [Granville] Bantock asked for expenses only and Beecham would take no fee. Chorus Master R.H. Wilson also took no fees throughout the duration of the war. Elgar eventually waived his fee of £26.5s.0d.Footnote ³² The magnanimity of the various conductors did not go unnoticed by the Manchester Guardian:

Collectively it seems to have emerged quite quickly that even with the challenges presented by the economy, blackout and transport difficulties, regional concerts would continue. Aside from the question of boosting the nation’s morale, it was pointed out by a number of leading conductors that suddenly making orchestral and theatre musicians redundant would cause a great deal of hardship. Of the 94 members of the orchestra in 1914, 89 were in fact British born, the remainder naturalized British subjects. Indeed, the German born Carl Fuchs, the orchestra’s principal cellist and a member of the Brodsky Quartet, was interned in Germany as a naturalized British subject throughout the war, only returning to Manchester in 1919. Brodsky, Hallé’s successor as Principal of the Royal Manchester College of Music, was himself also briefly interned in Austria as a Russian citizen but released in April 1915 following successful appeals by, amongst other, influential Manchester friends including Gustav Behrens.Footnote ³⁴

Repertoire

What then happened next? In terms of programming, it’s interesting that the anti-German sentiment displayed elsewhere did not make itself heard at the Hallé (or if it did, it was overruled). One justification that can be offered for this is that the Richter legacy was a strong one. Moreover, the German community in Manchester was not only a large one, but predominantly comprised of a professional and well-off middle class which was culturally literate and highly supportive of the city’s musical life as both audiences and patrons. Behrens himself was the descendant of German émigrés who had built up a successful engineering firm. A mere four days after declaration of war against Germany the Manchester Guardian, aware of a likely conflict of loyalties, warned its readers against turning against the city’s Germans.

German music, and Wagner in particular, was still performed regularly.Footnote ³⁶ The 1914–15 season closed with a ‘Grand Wagner operatic evening’ that included, inter alia, the whole of Act III of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.Footnote ³⁷ By way of comparison, at the Royal Philharmonic Society’s concerts in London there was no Wagner until 1916, no Beethoven until March 1918 and Brahms disappeared for the duration of the war. This did not, however, signal an overall turning away from German music. A glance at the BBC Proms Calendar for 1915, for example, shows a plentiful supply of German music.Footnote ³⁸ (In contrast, the absence of Wagner’s music from concerts in Paris throughout the war was largely due to the agency of Saint-Saëns.)Footnote ³⁹ The continued pre-eminence of Wagner at the Hallé Concerts also contrasted with other local concert series in Manchester itself. The Brand Lane Concerts, for example, substantially revised their programming plans, going so far as to explain why at the end of the season.Footnote ⁴⁰ Later in the war, even as news of the slaughter on the Somme reached home, the Hallé opened the 1916–17 season with another Wagner evening, and towards the end of the season offered a programme that included more Wagner alongside Elgar’s For the Fallen.Footnote ⁴¹

In 1914 the new season’s concerts opened not just with the British National Anthem, but also followed the interval with one of those of the allies. These appeared in rotation: for example, at the start of the 1914–15 season the anthems of France, Russia and Belgium were played on the 22 October, 29 October (appropriately for Rachmaninov’s visit) and 12 November respectively. In January 1917 starting times of concerts moved from 7.30pm to 7.00pm to try to get around transport and blackout issues. In February 1918 a concert included the cantata 1914, a setting of three of Rupert Brooke’s poems by fellow Rugby School alumnus and Manchester cathedral organist Sydney Nicholson, and Butterworth’s orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad. Along with the performances of Elgar’s For the Fallen, these provide some of the few examples of works directly relating to the war itself. The only wholesale change was to the programme for 14 November 1918, when the advertised programme was scrapped entirely and a largely patriotic one took its place. Ironically, the scrapped programme was another Wagner evening which was programmed to include Act II of Der fliegende Holländer and the closing scene of Siegfried. The altered programme was greeted with a marked lack of enthusiasm in the Manchester Guardian. Critic Samuel Langford wrote:

Interestingly, the decision of the Hallé to mark Armistice Day in 1920 with a programme that was largely Wagner was greeted with criticism in some sections of the local press.Footnote ⁴³

Newer Repertoire

One aspect of the orchestra’s wartime concerts which cannot be overlooked is the notable amount of new music which they presented. This was due in no small part to the agency of Beecham, for whom Britain’s wartime alliances provided the ideal justification for his drive to promote works by French and Russian composers, as well as newer British music, not least that of Delius. French music in particular had been largely absence under Richter, who is credited with asserting that there was no such thing as French music.Footnote ⁴⁴

For Beecham, however, it was precisely the most modern of French – and Russian – music that he chose to promote. During his first season, a concert in January 1915 gave Manchester its first taste of Petrushka. No lollipops either; he gave it alongside Delius’s Paris and Bax’s Fatherland. The Manchester City News commented ‘it gave those who are interested in what living composers of the “progressive” school are doing two works that are thoroughly typical of the modern school’. Paris was ‘a maze of harmonies, vague and shimmering’, while of Petrushka ‘the general queerness and breathlessness of the piece come with a shock to English ears. That the harmony is of the most advanced type goes without saying and many people will contend that realism is here carried beyond the point at which the art of music stops.’Footnote ⁴⁵

But, then, Beecham was never averse to a bit of shocking. The following month he gave them Firebird, scenes from Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet and the Prelude to Act 2 of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers. The press was again quick to pick up on his innovations:

There was more Delius and Stravinsky the next month: the Delius Piano Concerto, Sea Drift and Stravinsky’s Japanese Lyrics with the Debussy Nocturnes:

Delius was present at this concert, as he had been the previous month for the première of his first Violin Sonata, with Arthur Catterall and Robert Forbes, the latter on this occasion the soloist in his Piano Concerto.

Beecham knew what he was doing. In his address to the Hallé Concerts Society at the end of his first season he remarked that ‘My object was to break fresh ground and introduce the musical public of Manchester to one or two schools of music with which … they were fairly unfamiliar – for instance the Russian schools.’Footnote ⁴⁸ The same article described the coming season as ‘not quite so modern’, since Beecham’s innovations had been ‘the subject of much criticism’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, the tenor of the Manchester Guardian’s criticism, mostly from the conservative Samuel Langford, was to remain distanced throughout Beecham’s tenure, and one needs to turn to the Saturday Manchester City News for fuller coverage. Previewing Beecham’s next season, they informed readers that:

The novelties included Debussy’s Petite suite and the Ravel Pavane and Daphnis et Chloë, scenes from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, Debussy’s The Blessed Damozel (Goossens deputizing for an indisposed Beecham) and the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Daphnis was a particular challenge.

There was a further performance of Petrushka, which the reviewer mistakenly took to be its Manchester première. Finding the music ‘difficult to grasp’ without staging, he nevertheless praised Beecham and the orchestra:

There was new British music too: as well as Delius, works by Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax, Balfour Gardiner, Ethel Smyth and Ralph Vaughan Williams. An article from May 1917 summed up Beecham’s approach. While it supports the notion that Beecham’s Manchester crusade was a conscious one, it suggests that he was being a little two-faced in his willingness to tap into the Richter legacy of heilige deutsche Kunst when it suited him:

Players and Personnel

There were also purely logistical problems caused by the war that had an impact on programming, with communications and transport issues leading to changes in soloist and repertoire on more than one occasion. These are detailed in the Hallé Librarian’s notebooks, now held at the Hallé Archives.Footnote ⁵⁴ These also contain both details of concerts and planned and final versions where changes were made. Thus one can see that, for instance, on 19 October 1916 the indisposition of the Belgian baritone Auguste Bouilliez occasioned his replacement by Edward Burke and a consequent change to the projected Wagner item in the programme. The following month a concerto appearance by Ferruccio Busoni was replaced by one by Eugène Ysaÿe, playing Viotti, Beethoven and Saint-Saëns. On 1 February 1917 a whole programme, which was to have featured William Murdoch as soloist in Delius’s Piano Concerto, was changed when Eugène Goossens replaced the Russian conductor Emil Mylnarski and three weeks later the pianist Mark Hambourg had to step in to replace the indisposed violinist Renée Chemet.Footnote ⁵⁵

Financial woes continued – subscriber levels were still falling although numbers of non-subscriber tickets were up. Attendances were understandably hit by the curtailment of some railway services, the blackout and general hardship occasioned by rapidly rising prices, especially for food.

The pre-season Promenade concerts – introduced under principal viola Simon Speelman in 1905 – were re-branded and given a marketing ‘makeover’.Footnote ⁵⁶ A deal was done with impresario Brand Lane so that he now used the Hallé for his orchestral concerts; the Hallé season itself was altered to 15 concerts as a result and they were not all now given on Thursdays as they had been. With the Promenade and Brand Lane concerts the season thus extended to 32 weeks, so that musicians were paid for longer. As the war progressed, though, the players were still on half pay and inevitably it led to trouble. The matter was brought to a head shortly after the Armistice in a dispute over pay that at one point reduced the number of contracted players to just two.Footnote ⁵⁷

At this point, the orchestra’s membership was entirely male. During the course of the war, 27 players served in the armed forces, of whom two – G.A. Bennett (horn) and Frank Tipping (violin) – were killed in action.Footnote ⁵⁸ The resulting vacant seats were filled by women, who arrived in the ranks of the orchestra for the first time in October 1916. Hitherto they had only appeared in programmes as an ad hoc second harpist. Their inclusion in the player body went unremarked by the critics. Since the Hallé’s earliest surviving minute book only dates from 1922 we have no official record of the decision to employ them and no photographs of the orchestra from that time; all we know is their names: Miss L. Dunlop and Miss E. Richmond were in the first violins; Miss G[ertrude]. Barker, Miss C[larice]. Dunnington, Miss A. Kirkman, Miss J. Morris and Miss O. Walker in the second violins whilst Miss M[argaret] Dunnington played the ‘cello.Footnote ⁵⁹ Several of these had studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM) – founded by Charles Hallé and which opened in 1893 – and their role as string players reflects the social limitations placed on women as musicians; the RMCM’s pre-war student registers show that the number of principal studies undertaken by women were largely limited to the disciplines of singing, violin and piano.Footnote ⁶⁰

The following season Miss Morris’ name had gone, and a Miss Burrows appeared, along with Mrs Rawdon Briggs in the violas. Helen Rawdon Briggs was the wife of Christopher Rawdon Briggs, who had been Leader of the Hallé from 1905 to 1913. He was also a member of the Brodsky Quartet, playing second violin until increasing tinnitus forced his retirement after the First World War. His wife also played with the Quartet as a second viola on occasion and, after the death of the Quartet’s violist Simon Speelman in 1920, eventually became its permanent violist after Frank Parks had filled the post for an interim period. In October 1918 Miss O. Walker moved to the first violins. The season following the end of the war saw six women remain in the string section but at the end of this season Hamilton Harty was confirmed as permanent Principal Conductor and he dismissed them.Footnote ⁶¹ He did not claim a lack of ability in women players but argued that it was impossible to create a ‘complete unity of style’ in a mixed orchestra; rather more prosaically he also pointed to the difficulties of making separate arrangements for women whilst the orchestra was on tour.Footnote ⁶² His decision went neither unnoticed nor uncriticized; composer Ethel Smyth attacked it in the press as ‘unutterable rubbish’ and a brief argument was waged between the two in the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ⁶³ The argument, however, was lost; one of the lasting legacies of the war was the continued acceptance of women as players, although not until 1940 did the orchestra fully accept them as members.Footnote ⁶⁴

We know from the RMCM archives that Gertrude Barker was also a student and contemporary of Frank Tipping, playing together in student quartets. She effectively took his place in the strings when he left to join the Royal Flying Corps. He had briefly been one of the youngest players to be employed in the orchestra, being only in his teens when appointed and 21 when he died on active service in August 1917 – one of the few RMCM students to be counted among Manchester’s war losses.