1 The main histories of the London Symphony Orchestra are Hubert Foss and Noël Goodwin, London Symphony: Portrait of an Orchestra (London, 1954); Maurice Pearton, The LSO at 70 (London, 1974); and Richard Morrison, Orchestra: The LSO: A Century of Triumph and Turbulence (London, 2004). The present account shares some material with all of these, but the argument is greatly extended by detailed reference to the orchestra's financial records.

2 For a trenchant analysis of the ideology pursued by the founders of the self-styled movement, and the divergent paths of their successors, see Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (2nd edn, Manchester, 2001). See also Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot, 2002), and Colin Eatock, ‘The Crystal Palace Concerts: Canon Formation and the English Musical Renaissance’, 19th-Century Music, 34 (2010–11), 87–105.

3 As described in Henry J. Wood, My Life of Music (London, 1938), 278–9; see Lionel Tertis, My Viola and I: A Complete Autobiography (London, 1974), 23, and Arthur Jacobs, Henry J. Wood: Maker of the Proms (London, 1994), 99–101.

4 See Leanne Langley, ‘Building an Orchestra, Creating an Audience: Robert Newman and the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts’, The Proms: A New History, ed. Jenny Doctor and David Wright (London, 2007), 32–73. Promenade concert programmes can be searched at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive>.

5 On Russian music in London's concert life, see Part 1 of Gareth James Thomas, ‘The Impact of Russian Music in England 1893–1929’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2005), including a calendar of British premières (pp. 269–78); and Philip Ross Bullock, Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England, Royal Musical Association Monographs, 18 (Farnham, 2009), esp. pp. 32–7.

6 See Leanne Langley, ‘Joining Up the Dots: Cross-Channel Models in the Shaping of London Orchestral Culture, 1895–1914’, Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley, ed. Bennett Zon (Farnham, 2012), 37–58.

7 Raymond Holden, Richard Strauss: A Musical Life (New Haven, CT, 2011), 121–3; in more detail, idem, ‘Richard Strauss in London’, Richard Strauss-Blätter, 37 (1997), 25–8.

8 David Wright, ‘Sir Frederick Bridge and the Musical Furtherance of the 1902 Imperial Project’, Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot, 2006), 115–29 (pp. 118, 129). See also Simon McVeigh, ‘A Free Trade in Music: London during the Long 19th Century in a European Perspective’, Journal of Modern European History, 5 (2007), 57–93.

9 William Maitland Strutt, The Reminiscences of a Musical Amateur (London, 1915), 37. Not until 1908 were autumn concerts (typically three before Christmas) regularly included. See also Myles Birket Foster, The History of the Philharmonic Society of London 1813–1912 (London, 1912), including complete programmes; and Cyril Ehrlich, First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford, 1995).

10 For more on these series, see George Henschel, Musings and Memories of a Musician (London, 1918); Michael Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge, 1995); and Christopher Fifield, True Artist and True Friend: A Biography of Hans Richter (Oxford, 1993).

11 Orchestral Association Gazette (hereafter OAG, from 1901 incorporated in the Orchestral Times and Military Band Record), December 1894 and January 1895; Companies House records, no. 42578 (registered on 27 November 1894, wound up on 11 March 1895). This was an attempt to formalize Henschel's London Symphony Concerts, and indeed the name London Symphony Orchestra was used in his advertising from 1894 to 1897.

12 Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford, 2002), 303–6.

13 The speech is reproduced in the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union's Musicians’ Report and Journal, March 1901, 1–4.

14 By contrast, the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra (initiated in 1895, becoming a year-round, fully salaried orchestra the following year) was essentially a commercial attraction for visitors (Stephen Lloyd, Sir Dan Godfrey: Champion of British Composers (London, 1995), 31–2). Further on the LCC's music policy, see David Cormack, ‘A Bayreuth Extension Lecturer: Carl Armbruster and Music in the Parks’, Musical Times, 152 (2011), 61–86.

15 See the accounts of municipal music in William Johnson Galloway, Musical England (London, 1910), esp. pp. 49–53; and in David Wright, ‘Music and Musical Performance: Histories in Disjunction?’, The Cambridge History of Musical Performance, ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell (Cambridge, 2012), 197–200.

16 ‘Common Time’ [Walter Bernhard], ‘Musical Gossip of the Month’, Musical Opinion, 26 (1902–3), 355.

17 William Boosey, Fifty Years of Music (London, 1931), 66. See also Simon McVeigh and Cyril Ehrlich, ‘The Modernisation of London's Concert Life around 1900’, The Business of Music, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool, 2002), 96–120.

18 See Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford, 1985), 123–6. On the new attention to orchestral training in Britain, exemplified by the founding of an orchestral class at the RCM during the 1880s, see David Wright, ‘The South Kensington Music Schools and the Development of the British Conservatoire in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130 (2005), 236–82, esp. pp. 249, 268–75.

19 Ehrlich, The Music Profession, 209–17.

20 OAG, May 1898.

21 OAG, July 1895.

22 London, British Library (hereafter GB-Lbl), RPS MS 312, fols. 1^v–2^r (1908 spring season). Further on comparative fees, see Ehrlich, The Music Profession, 162–3, and Morrison, Orchestra, 15.

23 Wood, My Life of Music, 134–5; Eric Coates, Suite in Four Movements: An Autobiography, ed. Ian Lace (London, 1986), 134.

24 Guy Routh, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain 1906–79 (2nd edn, London, 1980), 60, 63, 70, 93, 101. It is not possible to match dates and occupations precisely.

25 Wood, My Life of Music, 278; Morrison, Orchestra, 16.

26 Musical Standard, 21 (1904), 385.

27 Ehrlich, The Music Profession, 164–85.

28 Compare the more aggressive stance taken by Chicago musicians around this time; see Sandy R. Mazzola, ‘When Music is Labor: Chicago Bands and Orchestras and the Origin of the Chicago Federation of Musicians, 1880–1902’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1984).

29 ‘We confess we are unable to work up much sympathy for either side.’ Musicians’ Report and Journal, May 1904, 9.

30 Henry Wood, About Conducting (London, 1945), 44.

31 Tertis, My Viola and I, 23; and OAG, December 1897, citing an article in The Rival. For many decades Wood insisted on checking each player's instrument against a tuning-fork before allowing them onto the platform (Wood, My Life of Music, 128).

32 OAG, August 1900, referring to an ‘official declaration’ three years previously.

33 OAG, September 1900.

34 OAG, February 1902.

35 OAG, August 1902.

36 As reported by the film director Humphrey Jennings (Foss and Goodwin, London Symphony, 1; among a number of valuable first-hand accounts).

37 Observer, 8 May 1904.

38 Jacobs, Henry J. Wood, 99. Some increase in fees was offered in mitigation.

39 Morning Post, 9 May 1904; cf. Musical Opinion, 27 (1903–4), 599, 694–5 (citing The Times).

40 Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1904.

41 ‘Queen's Hall Symphony Concerts’, Daily Telegraph, 3 June 1904; ‘The Queen's Hall’, Pall Mall Gazette, 11 May 1904.

42 ‘New London Orchestra: A Great Scheme’, Daily News, 24 May 1904.

43 LSO minutes, 5 October 1908.

44 LSO minutes, 17 January 1912.

45 ‘New London Orchestra’, Daily News, 24 May 1904. In truth there are resonances both with the Professional Concert (1785–93) and with the Philharmonic Society (1813–), each run as a collective enterprise by the musicians themselves.

46 Companies House records, no. 83608 (registered on 17 February 1905). The membership differed slightly from the orchestra listed on 9 June 1904.

47 Musical Standard, 21 (1904), 385 (cf. p. 409).

48 LSO minutes, 30 June 1905.

49 LSO minutes, 16 February 1910.

50 Transcribed in Morrison, Orchestra, 22–3.

51 Subsequently, Henschel himself made a specious connection with the LSO proper, an association that has sometimes misleadingly found its way into histories of the orchestra.

52 Strutt, The Reminiscences, 38–9. The Strutt family had been elevated to the peerage in 1821: William Maitland Strutt (1886–1912) was the youngest son of the Third Baron Rayleigh, a celebrated physicist.

53 Landon Ronald, Myself and Others: Written, Lest I Forget (London, 1931), 22–3.

54 Strutt, The Reminiscences, 151–4.

55 Quoted in Pearton, The LSO, 33.

56 See George Bernard Shaw's criticism of the Philharmonic's ‘pretty water-color sketches’ (28 June 1889; Shaw's Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London, 1989), i, 680); and ‘The recent attempt of the Philharmonic band, which began moderately piano, tumbled into a mezzo forte in the second section, and stuck there for the rest of the movement’ (7 December 1892; Shaw's Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London, 1989), ii, 756).

57 Quoted Shaw's Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (London, 1989), ii, 35.

58 Strutt, The Reminiscences, 42.

59 Michael Kennedy, Adrian Boult (London, 1987), 28. The same year, Boult recorded a rare criticism of the LSO's ensemble playing (Fifield, True Artist, 383).

60 Foss and Goodwin, London Symphony, 67–71; see also the reviews attached to the LSO programme booklet for 20 May 1912. These qualities are scarcely evident in the subsequent Nikisch recordings – unsurprisingly, given the conditions under which they were made.

61 See LSO minutes, 21 January 1906.

62 LSO minutes, 7 May 1912, et seq.

63 LSO minutes, 8 October 1913.

64 LSO minutes, 28 April 1907; Morrison, Orchestra, 28–9.

65 LSO minutes, 26 July 1911; Concert Account Book (concert on 15 January 1912).

66 The original programme included Glazunov's Sixth Symphony and Tchaikovsky's Theme and Variations, as well as works by Spendiarov and Liadov (LSO minutes, 25 September and 9 October 1912); but the only Russian content in the final programme (10 March 1913) consisted of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony and the British première of Glazunov's Spring.

67 [Unsigned], ‘New London Orchestra: A Great Scheme’, Daily News, 24 May 1904. The allusions would appear to be to Stanford and Mackenzie, although Harty's ‘Irish’ Symphony had just been premièred in Dublin.

68 [Unsigned], ‘New London Orchestra: A Great Scheme’, Daily News, 24 May 1904. The allusions would appear to be to Stanford and Mackenzie, although Harty's ‘Irish’ Symphony had just been premièred in Dublin.

69 ‘Musical and Dramatic Notes’, Daily News, 25 May 1904.

70 Complete programmes for the season are given in Foss and Goodwin, London Symphony, 28–9. Large collections of surviving programme booklets are in the LSO archive and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (the F. Gilbert Webb collection at Mus.318.d.30, with annotations about the music and sometimes the performances). See also the listings at <http://www.concertannals.blogspot.com/2009/05/london-symphony-orchestra-1904-1954.html> (accessed 4 January 2012).

71 LSO minutes, 27 May 1906, et seq.

72 Encouragingly, though, the rising enthusiasm of the audience on 5 May culminated in ‘a terrific outburst, which I have only heard exceeded once or twice in my life’ (Strutt, The Reminiscences, 76). Cf. Boult, reported in Kennedy, Adrian Boult, 30.

73 See LSO minutes, 18 March 1906, suggesting that two of four extra concerts might be paid.

74 LSO minutes, 15 July 1906.

75 LSO minutes, 19 June 1906.

76 Concerts on 19 November 1906 and 11 February 1907 (profit £46). In each case the choir was paid £125. Accounts for many individual concerts are given in the minutes, with a summary in the report of the AGM on 22 April 1907 (the minutes of this meeting, as with many subsequent AGMs, are misplaced in the Minute Book).

77 AGM, 22 April 1907.

78 Profits of £123, £168 and £147.

79 Income for the 1907–8 season includes £820 from subscriptions, spread equally across the ten concerts.

80 LSO minutes, 30 March 1908; Ethel Smyth, What Happened Next (London, 1940), 304.

81 LSO minutes, 28 April 1907 (Wood had introduced Mahler's First Symphony in 1903, the Fourth in 1905); LSO minutes, 16 May 1908, confirmed in the Concert Account Book (concert on 17 April 1909).

82 LSO minutes, 10 November 1908; Pearton, The LSO, 31. Further on Nikisch, see Raymond Holden, The Virtuoso Conductors (New Haven, CT, 2005), 37–59.

83 LSO minutes, 22 May 1910.

84 LSO minutes, 7 February 1913 (see also n. 66).

85 LSO minutes, 3 June 1910. Although Cowen's fee in 1906 was only 15 guineas (LSO minutes, 21 January 1906), his concert still made a loss of £53.

86 LSO minutes, 27 April 1913 (concert on 10 February 1913). In fact there was a small profit of £48.

87 AGM, 24 July 1913. Financial details are missing, except for a low income of £180 for the first Elgar concert that season (see Table 4).

88 See the student Adrian Boult's complaint that the Symphony Concerts were being turned into Concerto Concerts (LSO minutes, 14 December 1907); LSO minutes, 7 December 1906.

89 LSO minutes, 16 September 1906.

90 LSO minutes, 15 July 1906.

91 LSO minutes, 14 November 1907; his concert followed on 20 May 1908.

92 LSO minutes, 14 May 1909, 2 July 1909; Concert Account Book for 17 January 1910.

93 LSO minutes, 1 February 1908. In the end he received a fee of 25 guineas for his first appearance on 24 October 1910 in the Dvořák Concerto and unaccompanied Bach.

94 LSO minutes, 3 June 1910.

95 LSO minutes, 14 May 1913.

96 LSO minutes, 27 April 1913 (no such concert took place).

97 Mark Hambourg played the Tchaikovsky Concerto for only 40 guineas, including an exclusivity arrangement (LSO minutes, 13 and 27 April 1913; concert on 8 December 1913).

98 Further on Paderewski's drawing power, see Ehrlich, First Philharmonic, 164, 168–70. Paderewski was first approached in 1906 (LSO minutes, 29 June 1906).

99 LSO minutes, 6 June 1908 (concert on 1 May 1909).

100 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge, 2008), 304. The Philharmonic had in 1895 introduced a policy of devoting the entire second half of each concert to a major symphony.

101 Cf. the non-renewal of the French Copyright Agreement ‘in view of the very few occasions on which French music was played’ (LSO minutes, 1 February 1908), though this was subsequently revisited.

102 Thomas Beecham, A Mingled Chime: Leaves from an Autobiography (London, 1944), 67.

103 LSO minutes, 29 July 1907. The Reger was presumably the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Hiller (eventually, Tchaikovsky's Fifth was substituted for Brahms).

104 LSO minutes, 2 September 1907.

105 LSO minutes, 1 February 1908, 13 January 1908 (the première was on 19 January).

106 LSO minutes, 28 February 1908, 30 March 1908. Wolf's Italian Serenade was similarly replaced by a Beethoven Rondino for Fiedler's concert on 2 December 1907 (LSO minutes, 29 July 1907).

107 See McVeigh, ‘A Free Trade in Music’.

108 LSO minutes, 17 April 1910 (concert on 23 May 1910, a memorial for Edward VII). The political reference is unexplained, though it may refer obliquely to anxiety over the German situation, not least in view of the king's illness and eventual death on 6 May.

109 Richter's advocacy of British music, notably that of Stanford, dated back to the early 1880s; see Fifield, True Artist, 181.

110 For more on Elgar and the LSO, see Martin Bird, ‘A Very Good Idea at the Time: Sir Edward Elgar – Principal Conductor, London Symphony Orchestra’, Elgar Society Journal, 17 (2011), 22–36. I am most grateful to the author for his advice on certain points of detail.

111 Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford, 1984), 547.

112 1,073 and 1,151 programme booklets were sold respectively, compared to 656 at the previous subscription concert. See Jaeger's correspondence quoted in Kevin Allen, August Jaeger: Portrait of Nimrod: A Life in Letters and Other Writings (Aldershot, 2000), 260.

113 Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford, 398.

114 LSO minutes, 11 October 1909.

115 LSO minutes, 5 January 1911.

116 Concerts on 1 April 1911 and 29 June 1911. Beecham had been scheduled to conduct the first.

117 LSO minutes, 27 April 1913 (concert on 23 June 1913).

118 Musical Opinion, 29 (1905–6), 17; LSO minutes, 3 November 1905, 17 November 1905, 2 February 1906.

119 LSO minutes, 30 March 1908; Concert Account Book for 15 February 1909.

120 LSO minutes, 25 February 1909.

121 LSO minutes, 1 July 1908.

122 LSO minutes, 23 May 1909 (concert on 20 May 1909); the work was subsequently withdrawn.

123 LSO minutes, 25 August 1909, 1 November 1909.

124 LSO minutes, 2 May 1910.

125 LSO minutes, 27 August 1910. Thomas Evelyn Ellis (Eighth Baron Howard de Walden, 1880–1946) had been introduced to Holbrooke's music in 1908; a generous patron of British composers, he also wrote the librettos to Holbrooke's operatic trilogy The Cauldron of Annwn (1910–20), based on scenes from Welsh mythology. In the following decade he was appointed the LSO's first president.

126 LSO minutes, 12 May 1910, 27 August 1910.

127 AGM, 28 July 1911.

128 Wright, ‘Music and Musical Performance’, 187, 192.

129 LSO minutes, 3 June 1910, 1 July 1910.

130 GB-Lbl RPS MS 308, fol. 21^r; Ehrlich, First Philharmonic, 184. Elgar received an additional conducting fee of 35 guineas, Kreisler 200 guineas, but the returns were massive. Further on Elgar's financial relationship with the LSO and the Philharmonic, see John Duncan Drysdale, ‘Elgar's Earnings in Context’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2010), 289–92. By agreement with Novello, Elgar was by now the direct recipient of performing fees for such major works (First Philharmonic, 248).

131 LSO minutes, 25 February 1911, 13 and 21 March 1911. The delay is contrary to the normal account (for example, Moore, Edward Elgar, 608–9): the informal approach in Hereford on 17 February was in fact a prelude to the formal decision on 25 February, but a minute of 13 March indicates that Elgar was still considering the post. Clearly the fee offered then was a deciding factor, to judge from the satisfaction with which Alice Elgar recorded his acceptance in her diary two days later. See Drysdale, ‘Elgar's Earnings’, 290.

132 LSO minutes, 5 January 1911.

133 Elgar's rueful comment on the audience was captured by W. H. Reed: ‘What is the matter with them, Billy? They sit there like a lot of stuffed pigs’ (Elgar (London, 1939), 105). Contrary to some accounts, the LSO violinist was not in fact the leader at the first performance.

134 Elgar and his Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 743.

135 Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, CT, 2004), 144.

136 The Times, 13 February 1912 and 5 December 1911, also quoted in Bird, ‘A Very Good Idea’, 30, 28.

137 AGM, 20 July 1912.

138 LSO minutes, 21 June 1913.

139 Alongside the Franck symphony, after he rejected the Cockaigne overture and Schumann. LSO minutes, 1 August 1912.

140 LSO minutes, 1 August 1912.

141 Quoted in Bird, ‘A Very Good Idea’, 35, assuming that this is the same letter as that referenced in the following sentence. Since the quoted letter is currently unavailable, however, it is possible that it was written in 1912 to conclude Elgar's term of office as principal conductor, which is otherwise undocumented.

142 Quoted in Bird, ‘A Very Good Idea’, 35, assuming that this is the same letter as that referenced in the following sentence. Since the quoted letter is currently unavailable, however, it is possible that it was written in 1912 to conclude Elgar's term of office as principal conductor, which is otherwise undocumented.

143 Two all-Elgar programmes in 1926–7 coincided with the beginning of the famous recording collaboration and a revival of Elgar's reputation more generally.

144 Foss and Goodwin, London Symphony, 75. Further on British attitudes towards modernity and modernism, and towards Schoenberg and Stravinsky in particular, see the essays in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham, 2010).

145 LSO minutes, 30 March 1913; the request was turned down.

146 The Concert Account Book in its present state includes only the first three concerts of the 1913–14 season, though a summary of receipts for the season is to be found at the end of the sixth Minute Book.

147 Typed proposal in LSO minutes, 1 February 1914.

148 LSO minutes, 23 March 1914.

149 LSO minutes, 15 February 1914.

150 Further on the reaction against German music, see Lewis Foreman, ‘The Winnowing-Fan: British Music in Wartime’, Oh, My Horses! Elgar and the Great War, ed. Lewis Foreman (Rickmansworth, 2001), 89–131, esp. pp. 89–97; Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 83–5, 119–23, 142–5.

151 Quoted in Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford, 305.

152 LSO minutes, 9 March 1906.

153 For example, on 14 May 1908 the number of tickets sold across five prices was 907, bringing in £147, though the pricing structure differed slightly from that of the LSO (GB-Lbl RPS MS 312, fol. 52^r; the printed accounts give a slightly different total). The number of programme booklets sold provides another rough indicator, though of course they would often have been shared and for standard orchestral repertoire fewer books were sold: the typical LSO income was around £18 (720 books), rising to near £30 (1,200) on special occasions.

154 LSO minutes, 16 September 1908, 23 October 1908, 30 March 1909. A proposal for a one-guinea ‘expenses fee’ was rejected. The 12 dates in the ensuing series for which no fee was payable were specifically listed (21 September 1909).

155 GB-Lbl RPS MS 306, fols. 142^v–143^r.

156 Edward Baughan, ‘Music and Musicians: The London Symphony Orchestra’, Daily News, 10 June 1904.

157 I am grateful to Leanne Langley for bringing this document to my attention.

158 Foss and Goodwin, London Symphony, 9.

159 Smyth, What Happened Next, 304.

160 Delius: A Life in Letters, ed. Lionel Carley, 2 vols. (London, 1983–8), i, 301.

161 LSO minutes, 27 September 1910. The choir subsequently appeared at the LSO's own concerts.

162 LSO minutes, 19 February 1909 (concerts on 15–17 March); Ronald, Myself and Others, 28–31.

163 AGM, 16 February 1906; this seems, however, to have lasted only until 16 September 1907.

164 Moore, Edward Elgar, 455. The previous year, Harrison's orchestra had been the QHO under Wood (Wood, My Life of Music, 248–9).

165 LSO minutes, 11 April 1908 (see also 21 April 1908).

166 For the Bristol programme, see Foss and Goodwin, London Symphony, 72–3, where it is pointed out that the LSO was not identified by name. See also Pippa Drummond, The Provincial Music Festival in England, 1784–1914 (Farnham, 2011), 227–38.

167 Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford, 366–8.

168 Morrison, Orchestra, 35.

169 LSO minutes, 17 December 1905; AGM, 16 February 1906.

170 LSO minutes, 31 July 1907 (concert on 6 April 1908).

171 LSO minutes, 10 June 1906, 19 June 1906.

172 See Duncan Barker, ‘“From ocean to ocean …”: How Harriss and Mackenzie Toured British Music across Canada in 1903’, Europe, Empire, and Spectacle, ed. Cowgill and Rushton, 171–83. See also Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester, 2001), 454–7.

173 LSO minutes, 18 February 1907, et seq.

174 The often critical stance towards Elgar's symphonic repertoire was attributed by Ernest Newman to the unimaginative performances of Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra. See Richard Smith, Elgar in America: Elgar's American Connections between 1895 and 1934 (Rickmansworth, 2005), 158–9.

175 LSO minutes, 9 April 1905.

176 LSO minutes, 15 May 1906.

177 AGM, 16 February 1906.

178 AGM, 22 April 1907.

179 LSO minutes, 23 October 1908.

180 LSO minutes, 22 February 1909 (cf. 6 and 26 March 1909).

181 LSO minutes, 22 July 1910, 27 April 1913.

182 Further on the establishment of an enduring ‘canon of “middlebrow” music’ during this period, one that appealed across a wide social spectrum, see Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 386–90.

183 LSO minutes, 23 October 1908.

184 LSO minutes, 13 January 1908 (concert on 19 January).

185 Delius, ed. Carley, i, 332 (the première came about through the advocacy of Delius's publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel).

186 Only 10 guineas according to LSO minutes, 2 September 1905.

187 AGM, 22 April 1907.

188 LSO minutes, 26 March 1909.

189 LSO minutes, 25 February 1909; Ronald, Myself and Others, 34.

190 LSO minutes, 4 April 1909.

191 LSO minutes, 25 February 1909.

192 LSO minutes, 29 July 1909.

193 LSO minutes, 14 March 1910; AGM, 28 July 1910.

194 LSO minutes, 2 May 1910.

195 The financial basis is unclear: a sharing arrangement was discussed with Henry Mills the previous summer (LSO minutes, 3 June 1910).

196 LSO minutes, 17 October 1910; see also 22 December 1910.

197 LSO minutes, 9 December 1910.

198 For fees see LSO minutes, 14 January 1911.

199 LSO minutes, 5 May 1911, 23 April 1911 (the debt was paid off by 21 November); AGM, 26 July 1909.

200 LSO minutes, 27 August 1911, 27 September 1911, 9 October 1912, 31 October 1912, 1 June 1912, 14 November 1912.

201 LSO minutes, 17 September 1912.

202 See the description reproduced in Morrison, Orchestra, 49; also Frederick William Gaisberg, Music on Record (London, 1946), 137.

203 LSO minutes, 30 June 1905.

204 AGM, 22 April 1907.

205 AGM, 25 July 1908; LSO minutes, 17 June 1908, 16 July 1908.

206 AGM, 26 July 1909.

207 LSO minutes, 8 June 1912.

208 AGM, 24 July 1913.

209 Ehrlich, The Music Profession, 186–90; idem, First Philharmonic, 190–4.

210 LSO minutes, 21 April 1908.

211 LSO minutes, 1 June 1907; Ehrlich, First Philharmonic, 180.

212 In this case, towards forgotten masters of the eighteenth century (Beecham, A Mingled Chime, 57). The most recent biography is John Lucas, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music (Woodbridge, 2008). Beecham's concert programmes are listed in Maurice Parker, Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart, C.H. (1879–1961): A Calendar of his Concert and Theatrical Performances (Westcliff-on-Sea, 1985), together with the second supplement by Tony Benson (1998).

213 Strutt, The Reminiscences, 113.

214 LSO minutes, 25 November 1907, 31 December 1907.

215 LSO minutes, 8 January 1909; AGM, 26 July 1909.

216 Beecham, A Mingled Chime, 81; Companies House records, no. 96090 (registered as early as 16 December 1907).

217 Ronald, Myself and Others, 25, 33–4. The Sunday concerts continued unabated up to 1919, when a more commercial wind blew through the RAH management.

218 Strutt, The Reminiscences, 145.

219 Beecham, A Mingled Chime, 81–2.

220 Strutt, The Reminiscences, 146.

221 Coates, Suite in Four Movements, 122. Cf. Lucas, Thomas Beecham, 49–50.

222 Some were given permission to play for the QHO in 1912–13 (LSO minutes, 14 October 1912).

223 LSO minutes, 6–31 January 1910. The matter was clarified later in the year: ‘No Member can accept an engagement with any similar organisation, without the consent of the Directors in writing, but he may deputize with a similar organisation without such consent, if it does not in any way interfere with the L.S.O.’ (LSO minutes, 29 September 1910). The Philharmonic, with its venerable history and limited season, was regarded as a special case, and there was considerable overlap of personnel (Strutt, The Reminiscences, 65; Ehrlich, First Philharmonic, 180).

224 See Stephen Cottrell, Professional Music-Making in London: Ethnography and Experience (Aldershot, 2004), esp. pp. 57–76.

225 Reported in The Orchestral Gazette, August 1909 (citing The New Age, 8 July). The second quotation is cited from The Referee, 4 July 1909.

226 Adding the London Philharmonic, the Philharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic (‘all have fixed membership, but are essentially freelance orchestras’: <http://www.abo.org.uk/Information/About-Orchestras>, accessed 9 September 2012). For an insider's view of the development of London orchestras, see Basil Tschaikov, The Music Goes Round and Around (Peterborough, 2009). Further on the finances of the modern symphony orchestra, see Robert Beale, Music, Money, Maestros and Management: The Hallé: A British Orchestra in the 20th Century (Manchester, 2000).

227 The most extensive inquiry led to the Goodman Report on the London Orchestras (1965), which resulted in the status quo being maintained but also the founding of an overarching London Orchestral Concert Board.

228 H. G. Wells's futuristic vision inspired one of the first full-scale symphonic soundtracks, composed by Arthur Bliss but supervised and conducted by Muir Mathieson, a former student of the LSO leader W. H. Reed.