Chamber Music in Manchester before the First World War

By the beginning of the twentieth century Manchester could boast three main platforms for chamber music. The Brodsky Quartet Concerts in the Gentlemen’s Concert Hall had been established in 1896 and continued the tradition by which Charles Hallé had introduced chamber music into the Gentlemen’s Concerts.Footnote ⁸ Founded in the 1770s, the Gentlemen’s Concerts had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, become the city’s principal and certainly most exclusive concert series. Charles Hallé had been invited to Manchester by an already influential German community to take over their direction in 1848; and he continued in this position even after the establishment of his own orchestra a decade later. The introduction of more chamber music into the programmes of the Gentlemen’s Concerts not only mitigated potential competition between them and the concerts given by the Hallé Orchestra, but also provided a vehicle for Hallé to showcase his own talents as a pianist.

Adolph Brodsky, initially appointed by Hallé in 1895 as leader of his orchestra and professor of violin at his newly founded Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM), had succeeded Hallé as the college’s Principal after the latter’s death in October of that year. He is remembered today largely for having given the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic in December 1881.Footnote ⁹ A subsequent career as both concert soloist and chamber musician had included posts as professor of violin at the Leipzig Conservatoire (1883–91) and as leader of Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony Orchestra (1891–93). In Leipzig Brodsky had formed his first string quartet, and after his Manchester appointment he lost little time in establishing his own quartet there. Second violinist Christopher Rawdon Briggs, violist Simon Speelman and cellist Carl Fuchs were all Hallé players and on the staff of the RMCM, founded by Charles Hallé in 1893.

By the end of the century, chamber concerts were also well established at the Schiller-Anstalt, established in 1859 in honour of the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller as a cultural meeting place for the city’s growing German population. Adolph Brodsky chose the Schiller-Anstalt for the debut of his newly established string quartet in 1895 and the quartet continued to be regular visitors, an arrangement facilitated by the fact that its cellist Carl Fuchs organized the Schiller-Anstalt concerts.Footnote ¹⁰

A third venue at which chamber music could regularly be heard – and which also included performances by the Brodsky Quartet – was at recitals given under the auspices of the Ancoats Brotherhood. Founded as Recreation in Ancoats in 1881 by the Manchester councillor Charles Rowley, it aimed to bring cultural enlightenment to one of the city’s poorest areas through a regular programme of afternoon lectures and concerts.Footnote ¹¹ Conversely, both the Brodsky Quartet concerts and those at the Schiller-Anstalt were evening concerts, aimed at the kind of well-off middle-class and culturally educated audience in which Manchester’s large German community was substantially represented and which in some cases provided financial sponsorship. It is telling, for example, that by the turn of the century patrons of both series were already able to book tickets by telephone. In 1900, an annual subscription to the Brodsky Quartet Concerts, which offered five concerts for the price of four, cost 10/- – approximately the equivalent of £84 in 2025 prices.Footnote ¹² Subscriptions to the Schiller-Anstalt concerts in 1900 were higher, with only four concerts for 15/- and single tickets twice the cost of those at the Brodsky concerts; 5/- or nearly £42 in 2025 prices. The higher cost can be explained in part by a preference for booking top foreign musicians, which between 1898 and 1904 included the violinist Joseph Joachim, the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, and the composer Richard Strauss, who appeared in December 1904 in a concert which included his own Op. 6 Violin Sonata and Op. 13 Piano Quartet, performed with members of the Brodsky Quartet.Footnote ¹³

Repertoire in the two evening concert series’ was largely weighted towards the Austro-German canon. In both, Beethoven emerges as the most performed composer, with, in the case of the Schiller-Anstalt, Brahms a close second, including the Manchester premières of several of his chamber works. The String Sextet, Op. 18, the String Quintets, Op. 88 and Op. 111, and the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 were all first heard in Manchester at the Schiller-Anstalt concerts.Footnote ¹⁴ Visiting artists, such as those cited above, were often products of or trained in the Austro-German tradition. The outbreak of war with Germany in August 1914 thus presented a major challenge, not merely in ethical terms, but in practical ones. It also brought to a head signs of changing attitudes that had been evident for some time. This is a significant observation that deserves of greater elaboration.

Pre-war Decline

While it is understandable that the status of Manchester’s German community would change radically during the Great War there were signs that the chamber concerts they supported were facing challenges before 1914. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Manchester’s chamber (and, for that matter, orchestral) concerts represented a strong, German-facing musical tradition in a thriving city with the UK’s largest German population, yet by the end of the Edwardian decade the musical landscape was changing. In 1903, after years of declining income, the Gentlemen’s Concert Hall was demolished and the land sold to the Midland Railway Company for a hotel. By 1909, takings from the Brodsky Quartet Concerts had declined by almost 50 per cent, and they continued to fall until the concerts ended in 1919, despite slight decreases in ticket prices and cheaper venues. From the middle of the decade the Schiller-Anstalt presented noticeably fewer foreign artists and reduced its number of concerts. During the 1911–12 season it closed, ostensibly for refurbishment, and never re-opened. In proposing that the concerts would move to the new Milton Hall on Deansgate, the Schiller-Anstalt’s concert schedule for the season reminded its patrons that ‘As hitherto, German songs will take a prominent place in the programmes’. In truth, the organization was facing financial difficulties; by the end of 1911 it was in liquidation and its building on Nelson Street was advertised for sale.Footnote ¹⁵

As for the Ancoats Brotherhood, despite Rowley’s claims that his agenda of social improvement continued to find favour with the predominantly mill-working population of Ancoats, by the turn of the century the Brotherhood’s patrons were drawn largely from Manchester’s more liberal-leaning middle class southern suburbs, eager to demonstrate their sympathy with Rowley’s own Fabian values.Footnote ¹⁶ This gave rise to a lengthy but anonymous attack in the pages of the Manchester Courier:

The Ancoats Brotherhood survived the war, only to be closed down shortly afterwards by Rowley himself, unwilling to deliver its organization into other hands.

A letter from William Eller, a member of the Council of the RMCM, to the Manchester Guardian in October 1913 further criticized ‘the steady falling off in subscriptions to the Hallé concerts’ and ‘the still more marked falling off in support for the Brodsky Quartet Concerts’,Footnote ¹⁸ while another, signed by ‘an English lover of music’, commented that

The above comment also needs to be viewed in the context of the growing interest in French music in the city. Lucie Barbier had founded the French Concerts in Manchester in 1907. They ran for the following two years, concentrating largely on chamber and instrumental music.Footnote ²⁰

Eller also commented on the indifference shown by Manchester audiences to other than visiting foreign artists, highlighting the lack of support for local performers and pointing out that even foreign musicians of the stature of Hans Richter were less admired when they were resident in the city.Footnote ²¹ After the outbreak of war, in March 1915 the music critic Samuel Langford noted in the Manchester Guardian that:

Langford here hints at a further problem occasioned by the war itself; that of the lack of available performers. This is significant in that it articulates one of the prime motivations for Sydney Nicholson’s initiatives in establishing the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts. Later the same year there was an allusion, mostly likely again written by Langford, to ‘the gradual deterioration of our chamber music’, in the pages of the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ²³

These views, together with others expressed elsewhere in the press, hint at the likelihood of Mancunians having to rethink their attitudes to repertoire in a post-war scenario in which German music was no longer pre-eminent. On Christmas Day 1915, the Manchester City News published an article by one Frederick Clarke entitled ‘English Music – Its Chance after the War’. He began:

Concerning the future of chamber music in Manchester, one musician – then the organist of Manchester cathedral – took up Clarke’s implied challenge.

Sydney Nicholson

In the face of such fears as to the future of music in Manchester, Sydney Nicholson emerges as an unlikely saviour. If his name is known at all it is as the founder, in 1927, of the School of English Church Music, which in 1945 became the Royal School of Church Music. His career in Manchester, where he was the cathedral’s organist from 1909 to 1918, and where he played a major role in maintaining the city’s chamber music concerts during the First world War, has hitherto received scant attention. Nicholson himself afforded little space to these years in his own autobiographical writing.Footnote ²⁵ He did, however, admit, when offered organist’s posts at both Canterbury and Manchester, to opting for the latter because of its fuller musical life.Footnote ²⁶ Nicholson was the third and youngest son of Sir Charles Nicholson (1808–1903), a leading businessman and company chairman who had been created a baronet in 1859, and his wife Sarah (1839–1923), a talented artist. Footnote ²⁷ He received music lessons as a young boy, but his interest in church music only blossomed when he was a student at New College, Oxford. In his own words:

From Oxford, Nicholson went to the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Stanford for composition and Walter Parratt for organ. Thereafter, various teaching and organist posts led to Nicholson’s accepting, in 1908, the organist’s post at Manchester cathedral in succession to James Kendrick Pyne.Footnote ²⁹ Given where Nicholson’s career as a church musician was eventually to take him, it is telling that one of his earliest activities after his Manchester appointment was to lend his support to a diocesan call for the establishment of a Church Music Society in the city.Footnote ³⁰ Nicholson left Manchester for Westminster Abbey at the end of 1918. In 1928 he resigned the Westminster post in order to devote himself to furthering the cause of English church music.Footnote ³¹

Nicholson was thus in Manchester during the duration of the First World War, playing his last service on New Year’s Eve 1918 and also playing the previous month for the cathedral service that celebrated the Armistice. The cathedral’s Capitular Records show that the outbreak of war in August 1914 brought little real change in the daily life of the cathedral beyond the introduction of a weekly ‘Special intercessory service for the war’.Footnote ³²

In Manchester Nicholson continued to compose. Two of his most substantial works from this period are the cantata 1914, premiered with the Hallé Orchestra under Eugene Goossens in February 1918, and the Piano Quintet, written between February and May 1918 and first performed by Lucy Pierce and the Brodsky Quartet the following November.Footnote ³³ Less well known is the role Nicholson played in the establishment of what became Manchester’s Tuesday Mid-day Concerts, which would emerge as a new model for concert-giving during the war.

The Impact of War

In March 1915 – the same month in which Langford had expressed his own concerns about the impact of the war on Manchester’s concert life – a letter from Nicholson addressing the issue of music in wartime appeared in the weekly Manchester City News:

The idea must have been in Nicholson’s mind for some time, as two months previously he had written to his mother:

His concern was echoed some months later, also in the Manchester City News, by an anonymous correspondent who offered the information that

The writer also notes that between January and Easter 1914 his friend had 22 concerts, but between October 1914 and March 1915 only seven, and that his savings had dropped from £200–£300 to £50.

In fact, the administrators of the city’s premier concert series, The Hallé Concerts Society, had already realized in the early weeks of the war that special measures were needed to maintain continuity. On 15 September 1914 Gustav Behrens, Chairman of the Society and Secretary to the Council of the RMCM, addressed the guarantors of the Hallé Concerts Society, reminding them that

Behrens is affirming here the belief, echoed many times in the Manchester press, that the continuation of musical activity during the war was vital as a means of maintaining morale. He also sought approval for a measure whereby continuation of the Hallé Concerts in times of economic uncertainty was to be facilitated by members of the orchestra having agreed

In effect, the orchestral players agreed to work for half pay.

Nicholson’s Proposals

Nicholson was sufficiently concerned about the potential impact of the war on musicians’ livelihoods to convene a meeting to discuss his own proposals as early as the Friday following the appearance of his letter. Taking advantage of his cathedral connections, he arranged for it to be chaired by the Dean of Manchester, and intended that it meet with the intention of creating a committee to oversee the project he envisioned. A single letter offering a kind of back-handed support came from one W. Baxter, Secretary of the Manchester Branch of the National Orchestral Association, complaining that military bands from outside the area were coming to Manchester and taking work from local musicians.Footnote ³⁹ Nicholson himself returned to his proposal the following month, reiterating his intention that

Despite the concern for maintaining public morale, the above suggests that for Nicholson this was secondary to the desire to keep musicians in pocket. A further aim, to offer concerts to the injured in military hospitals, he barely mentions. More details are forthcoming in a letter to his brother Archibald, which reveals that Nicholson had become involved with an existing scheme which he found wanting:

The first such concert in Manchester had taken place at the Red Cross Hospital in Crumpsall on 5 May 1915, by which date subscriptions to a charitable fund for injured servicemen had already reached £228 and over 60 musicians had already been engaged to perform.Footnote ⁴² This was in addition to the increasing number of concerts with similar aims being given elsewhere in Manchester. A concert given at the Gaiety Theatre on 9 May 1915 offers a typical example. Given ‘for the wounded soldiers of Manchester and District Hospitals’, it was attended by the Lord Mayor and Chief Constable as well as a large number of doctors and nurses and contained a new patriotic song Our England, with words by a local J.P. and music by one of the concert organizers, W. H. Rains. It was sung by Sam Fitton and income from subsequent publication was used to buy an ambulance.Footnote ⁴³

The hospital concerts did not, however, necessarily realize Nicholson’s high aim of bringing good quality classical music to hospital audiences, and Nicholson himself hinted that this might have had a direct bearing on the formation of what emerged as a separate concert series to run in parallel with the hospital concerts:

Nicholson subsequently claimed that the idea to hold lunchtime concerts was also prompted by the success of the lunchtime organ recitals he regularly gave at the cathedral.Footnote ⁴⁵ The hospital concerts continued under Nicholson’s directorship, but their programmes now tended to consist of a mixture of entertainments including variety shows, dramatic productions and cinema presentations as well as occasional orchestral and choral concerts. Thus were born the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts, a product of war but destined to survive it. Nicholson himself hinted that this was a long-term intention when, writing towards the end of the war, he expressed a hope that the end of the hospital concerts would not imply the end of the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts, which he wished to see continue into the post-war era:

The Tuesday Mid-day Concerts

Given the decline in the city’s appetite for chamber music cited above, founding a new chamber series in Manchester in 1915 might have been seen as risky, despite Nicholson’s altruistic motives. A notice in the Manchester Guardian in October that year suggests he was also keen to find a regular place for amateur performers, who would presumably perform without fee:

The programme for a concert given by the Music in Wartime Chorus in December 1915 suggests that some of its members were actually lay clerks from the cathedral choir.

While Nicholson retained overall supervision of the hospital concerts as Director of Entertainments, directorship of the new midday concert series was ceded to William Eller, thus giving him the opportunity to address his recent observations on the decline in support for concerts in Manchester. The first of what were initially called the Tuesday Popular Concerts, which offered songs alongside lighter works for violin and piano played by Leonora Gray and Ethel Hall, took place on 9 November 1915. Tickets were sold singly rather than by subscription and prices were kept at an affordable level. In 1915 admission was set at 6d (2½p), with printed programmes priced at 1d (c.½p). The latter reminded the audience that the concerts had been set up

Press reports give only sporadic indication of the size of audiences, but some indication is contained in a set of programmes held at Manchester Central Library, where some of the early programmes up to July 1916 include handwritten annotations (possibly by Eller) recording the number of programmes sold. Nicholson himself was disappointed with the initial response, commenting on the first concert that ‘the programme was most attractive, the artists first-rate, the concerts well advertised, and the audience numbered – about twenty!’Footnote ⁴⁹

And in a review of the second concert the previous week, given by a string orchestra drawn from the Hallé, the Manchester Guardian reported that

Nicholson’s letters to his mother tell the same story. ‘The audience was disappointing’, he wrote of the first concert.Footnote ⁵¹ Of the second ‘Our Tuesday concerts are not very successful as regards audience & so far we have lost heavily’.Footnote ⁵²

The situation improved with a piano recital by Frederick Dawson given as the third concert of the series and which, according to the Manchester Guardian, attracted a ‘large and enthusiastic audience’.Footnote ⁵³ Nicholson saw this as the hoped for turning point in the concerts’ fortunes.

The concerts were renamed the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts in March 1916 but remained under the auspices of the Manchester section of the Committee for Music in Wartime until it was disbanded, and from March 1919 continued as an independent series.Footnote ⁵⁵ In June 1922 they were renamed the Manchester Tuesday Mid-day Concert Society. Thus, by their nature, the concerts differed from their evening counterparts. Lasting less than an hour, they provided lunchtime entertainment for what the Manchester Guardian referred to as the city’s ‘business men’ as a break from work:

As a concession to these ‘business men’, smoking was allowed. The presence of women in the audience appears not to have occasioned special mention!

During the war performers gave their services for free, enabling overheads to be kept at a minimum. Some indication of income and expenditure is included in one of Nicholson’s weekly letters to his mother, from April 1916:

Nicholson was well aware of the contradiction this implied, given his aim of providing performers with an income, but accepted it as a temporary expedient so long as the war continued. Only from March 1919, when the Mid-day Concerts were run as an independent series, did the question of regular fees for performers arise.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nicholson subsequently mentioned that some of the wartime costs were also underwritten by wealthy benefactors.Footnote ⁶⁰ The concerts were moreover not restricted to a fixed short season but, initially, took place throughout the entire year. Only in 1925 were they abandoned during the summer months.

Programmes, Repertoire and Performers

The wide variety of performers, and the repertoire they presented, marks the most significant difference between the Mid-day Concerts and chamber concerts elsewhere in Manchester. The Brodsky Quartet appeared in the Mid-day Concerts, but now only as one of many ensembles, several of whom represented a younger generation of musicians, including current or former students of the RMCM. The Brodsky Quartet was moreover temporarily disbanded during most of 1915. Brodsky himself had been in Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně in Czechia) at the outbreak of war and was interned, as a Russian citizen on Austrian soil, until he was able to return to Manchester in April 1915. The cellist Carl Fuchs was less fortunate. German by birth but now a naturalized British citizen, he was visiting relatives in Germany when war was declared and was constrained to remain in Germany for its duration, initially as an internee at the Ruhleben camp outside Berlin, but thereafter allowed to pursue a limited concert career in the Darmstadt area. He did not return to Manchester until early in 1919.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, the quartet made no more than five appearances at the Mid-day concerts throughout the rest of the war.

Since programming implied a flexibility which privileged no particular genre, string quartets per se by no means predominated. At least in the early years, chamber works with piano were commoner, often featuring pianists who on other occasions appeared as solo recitalists. The RMCM-trained Lucy Pierce, for example, took part in a performance of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in May 1916 and offered a solo recital two weeks later, which moreover included the first performance in Manchester of the Ravel Sonatine. Adolph Brodsky joined Pierce and Walter Hatton for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio – a work Brodsky consistently championed in Manchester after having introduced it to the city’s audiences – in August 1916.Footnote ⁶² There were also numerous violin and piano duo performances, often of a lighter repertoire; Kreisler transcriptions appear to have been particularly favoured.

Occasionally concerts also featured local choral societies. These frequently offered English part-songs and overtly patriotic items, mirroring the repertoire of the numerous local glee clubs which managed to maintain their activities during the war. Among those who appeared were the Manchester Orpheus Glee Society and the Manchester Vocal Society, as well as the Hallé Choir. Around Christmas-time there was an annual carol concert given by the choir of Manchester cathedral under Nicholson’s directorship. That given on 2 January 1917 was duly patriotic in opting for a concert of English, French and Russian music.

The overwhelming majority of the wartime concerts contained vocal items. That many of the vocalists were women testifies, not merely to an inherited gendered view of women as performers, but also to the lack of male performers in wartime, notably after the introduction of conscription by the first of the Military Service Acts in March 1916.Footnote ⁶³ More significantly, the vocal repertoire offered more scope for, if not total avoidance, then at least the marginalization of Austro-German music. Regarding the inclusion of German music, a certain ambivalence prevailed, and not just in the Mid-day Concerts – as witnessed by the continuing popularity of the Hallé’s Wagner nights at the Free Trade Hall. In September 1916, the critic Thomas Moult noted that

German-language songs did appear, but the evidence of the programmes suggests that they were often sung in English and were outnumbered by those from other national traditions. Moreover, the inclusion of a fair number of vocal items by J.S. Bach could be justified, as with the German repertoire sung at the cathedral, by reference to their origin as sacred music. Handel’s German roots could more easily be overlooked, given his long-standing assimilation into British musical culture. Along with songs and choral pieces by British composers, those by composers representing Britain’s allies were particularly popular. All the repertoire sung by Manchester Vocal Society at its concert in March 1916, for instance, was English, French or Belgian.Footnote ⁶⁵ Edith McCullagh included English and Russian songs in her vocal recital the following September and a choral concert in June 1917 included Elgar’s recent For the Fallen as well as Russian and Scandinavian items.Footnote ⁶⁶ Two recitals from 1918 are specifically designated an ‘All British song recital’, the first marking St. George’s Day.Footnote ⁶⁷

Repertoire and Innovation

In one sense the Mid-day Concerts were able to introduce new repertoire to audiences, in that the vocal items were also frequently the most modern items in the programme. The ‘Recital of modern English music’ given by E. Gibson Young in June 1916, included Quilter’s song ‘Passing Dreams’, published in 1904 and the organ-grinder’s song from Elgar’s incidental music to The Starlight Express, completed in 1915.Footnote ⁶⁸ Three months later he offered songs by Vaughan Williams, Quilter and Ireland, all written between 1904 and 1913.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bantock’s Lament of Isis, published in 1910, was sung by Gertrude Brookes in her recital in July 1916.Footnote ⁷⁰

The amount of French music, and in particular newer repertoire, featured in the programmes is striking, not least for its almost total pre-war absence from the Brodsky Quartet or Schiller-Anstalt Concerts. Music by Debussy is especially prominent; in one of the programmes Eller even ventured to ally his music with the younger generation of musicians who performed at the concerts:

Frederick Dawson had included Clair de lune in the very first piano recital of the series, in November 1915, and he played Reflets dans l’eau and the Toccata from Pour le piano in his return recital the following January. Piano or choral music by Debussy features in no less than eight concerts during 1916 alone.Footnote ⁷² There was also a performance of La demoiselle élue in September 1917, in a concert which featured a second performance of Elgar’s For the Fallen. The proliferation of Debussy’s music is moreover not confined to the Mid-day Concerts; between October 1916 and March 1917 one could elsewhere have heard three performance of his recent Cello Sonata – including what is likely to have been its British première. Beecham also introduced several Debussy pieces into his Hallé concerts.Footnote ⁷³

Neither the increased involvement of female performers nor the diminished role played by Austro-German repertoire emerge as particularly surprising in concerts motivated by the war. What does is, firstly, that they are by no means restricted to their vocal content and, secondly, their continuance into the post-war period. While it can be claimed that as soloists they were occupying roles regarded as acceptable for female musicians, the appearance of all-women chamber ensembles might have been seen as more novel, particularly when they chose to offer a canonic repertoire more associated with male quartets. The Edith Robinson Quartet’s debut in October 1916, featuring Beethoven’s Op. 95 and the Schubert Quartettsatz, is almost a challenge to Adolph Brodsky by a former pupil.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although Robinson’s quartet had been formed before the war, it was still constrained to operate in a musical environment in which professional openings for women were restricted. Speaking of the situation in London, Leanne Langley has commented on parallels between the condescending language used by the press to report women’s emergence into the hitherto male world of professional music and that used to describe the movement for women’s suffrage.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the context of Manchester, Dave Russell has reported à propos the Edith Robinson Quartet, that

The Post-war Period

With Arthur Catterall’s quartet, the Edith Robinson Quartet represented the generation of Brodsky pupils who appeared as chamber musicians at the Mid-day Concerts alongside the Brodsky Quartet itself. It is this younger generation which proved the mainstay of the Mid-day Concerts as they moved into the post-war era. Of the nine quartets who appeared at the Mid-day Concerts between their inception and Brodsky’s death in 1929, five were all-female: the Edith Robinson Quartet and those led by Isabel McCullagh, Katharine Kendall, Rhoda Backhouse and Jo Lamb.

The contrast between recitals by this younger generation and those associated with pre-war concert life is striking, the more so after the war. It also positions the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts as an important venue for the promotion of contemporary music. Although the Brodsky Quartet made the single largest number of appearances during the post-war period (25), the remaining quartets between them made up the majority of the total number (34 out of 59).Footnote ⁷⁷ The Catterall Quartet itself gave 16 concerts and the Edith Robinson Quartet nine.Footnote ⁷⁸ The internment of Brodsky and Carl Fuchs at the outbreak of the war, effecting a break in their Quartet’s activities, and subsequent fluctuations in its membership exacerbated its difficulties in re-establishing itself after the war. Yet its appearances were often advertised as ‘Special concerts’ and were also more expensive – as though something of the spirit of the pre-war Brodsky Quartet Concerts was being evoked within the context of a very different post-war musical environment.

As for repertoire, the Brodsky Quartet was content to counter the varied programmes of the Mid-day Concerts by playing what it had always played. Apart from singular novelties such as Nicholson’s Piano Quintet, the Quartet’s repertoire at the Mid-day Concerts is notable for its sticking to predictable Brodsky warhorses – no fewer than four performances each of the Schubert String Quintet and Beethoven’s Op. 132, for example. Out of a total of 29 works played in total, 12 are by Beethoven and the number of individual composers only just reaches double figures.

In contrast, the Catterall and Edith Robinson Quartets in particular offered newer and less familiar works, which formed no part of the Brodsky Quartet’s repertoire. A Catterall Quartet performance of Beethoven’s Op. 18 no.3 was given alongside Frank Bridge’s Cherry Ripe Footnote ⁷⁹ and in October 1921 they paired a late Haydn quartet with the G major quartet by Arnold Bax, barely three years after its publication.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nor did they always pragmatically programme a novelty against a more familiar work. A 1922 performance of the Debussy quartet was paired with Holst’s songs for voice and violin, premiered in 1917.Footnote ⁸¹ The Mid-day Concerts also spawned a number of imitators. Catterall initially took the lunchtime concert model for his own chamber music series, before establishing a series of evening concerts with Hamilton Harty after the war. Edward Isaacs offered lunchtime piano recitals and even the Brodsky Quartet started their own series of Monday Noon concerts, which ran to three performances before the venture was abandoned. These were intended to continue the Brodsky Quartet Concerts, which had ended in 1919, having latterly also moved to an afternoon slot.

The Edith Robinson Quartet included a movement from Reger’s Op. 109 String Quartet in a concert in February 1924. Footnote ⁸² When they repeated it in July the programme bore the observation that ‘Reger is a composer little known in Manchester’. A greater novelty featured in their concert in April 1923: the première of the first string quartet by the twenty-year old Manchester composer Eric Fogg, given with the Fantasie by Ernest Walker. Other ensembles also contributed newer repertoire. Piano quartets by Chausson and Jongen were played by the Birmingham Quartet in October 1922.Footnote ⁸³ As the Beatrice Hewitt Piano Quartet they performed a movement from Herbert Howells’s Op. 21 Piano Quartet in December 1922.Footnote ⁸⁴ Edith Robinson and Carl Fuchs joined Frank Merrick in a performance of Ravel’s piano trio, completed in 1914, in July 1923.Footnote ⁸⁵ Perhaps the most radical programmes in the entire post-war series were those given on 30 September and 7 October 1919, when Eric Fogg and James Loughlin played works for piano duet by Stravinsky, and the concert by Manchester Contemporary Music Centre in September 1926, which included Prokofiev’s Overture on Jewish Themes and the Cello Sonata by Huré.Footnote ⁸⁶ The Stravinsky in 1919 was the Cinq pièces faciles for piano duet, dating only from 1917 and first performed the following year. The performance is noted as ‘The first time in Manchester’; they were played again the following month.

Despite the innovative nature of the Mid-day Concerts and notwithstanding the emergence of new and younger performers, the post-war press still felt moved to note a problem in revitalizing the musical life of Manchester. The problem was even taken up at national level by The Times, which in an article from September 1920 saw it as part of a general malaise affecting the city’s post-war music scene. ‘Music in Manchester’, it begins, ‘seems to be undergoing that process of change which is inseparable from certain signs of decay’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Its argument in favour of reconstituting the Hallé Orchestra as a municipal undertaking makes no reference to other genres of music-making, or indeed to any of the city’s more recent ventures in concert-giving. Instead it looks more backwards than forwards, justifying its reference to decay by emphasizing the loss of a pre-war tradition associated with Hallé, Richter and Brodsky and exemplified by the recent demise of the Gentlemen’s Concerts. A younger generation of musicians is briefly acknowledged, but with the caveat that

Two years later, Samuel Langford used the pages of the Manchester Guardian to address the specific issue of revitalizing a chamber music tradition in Manchester. Langford had been a staunch supporter of the Brodsky Quartet Concerts prior to and during the war, and his opening sentence here sets the tone for an article whose underlying theme is the difficulty posed in trying to recreate the tradition which they embodied:

The following month the Manchester Guardian returned to the theme, this time in an anonymous article. The occasion was the inauguration of the Manchester Chamber Concerts, the city’s first new evening chamber music series since the war and promoted by Arthur Catterall and Hamilton Harty:Footnote ⁹⁰

Whether or not the anonymous author was Langford himself, Langford’s signed review in the same issue damns the evening’s performance with faint praise, not least in comparing Catterall’s interpretation of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet unfavourably with Brodsky’s own. His closing paragraph is less than optimistic:

Moving Forward: The Legacy of the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts

These and other post-war comments carry a common theme: that Manchester’s pre-war chamber concerts had proved an act that was going to be hard to follow. It emerges, for example, as a common trope in the numerous obituaries that followed Adolph Brodsky’s death in January 1929. Writing later that year, Neville Cardus spoke for many in his observation that:

In all of these writings there is little or no acknowledgement of the role played by Sydney Nicholson or the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts in reshaping a chamber music culture in Manchester, let alone their potential to become the ‘permanent memorial’ of which Nicholson had spoken in 1918. Moreover, such lack of acknowledgement coexists with the continuance of the concerts into the post-war years, while other attempts at establishing evening series more in keeping with the pre-war model met with mixed success. The Catterall/Harty Manchester Chamber Concerts came to an end in 1925, and Manchester subsequently lacked an evening series of chamber concerts until the founding of the Manchester Chamber Concerts Society in 1936. Although the Society still flourishes, it is the model established by the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts that can claim an unbroken presence in the city since 1915, and of which the legacy lives on in the present Manchester Midday Concerts.

In conclusion, one can say that the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts were born of circumstance and constrained by it to challenge an established tradition. Not only did they establish a new model of concert-giving in Manchester, they witnessed that model taken up elsewhere during and after the war, and it is to Nicholson’s credit that he was able to look beyond the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts as a mere temporary expedient and envisage them as playing a role in the city’s post-war concert life. They were able to offer audiences a younger generation of performers, many of them women, who frequently introduced a more contemporary repertoire than had been the norm in pre-war evening chamber concerts. Their survival to become the present-day Manchester Midday Concerts positions them as a major player in the revitalization of Manchester’s chamber music culture in the early twentieth century, a process which moreover came to recognize the impossibility of resurrecting a pre-war golden age.