During my studies as a music student at Manchester University and the (then) Royal Manchester College of Music in the 1960s, I often encountered the name of Hans Richter. The first occasion was during the preparations for a performance of Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto which I conducted. The score and parts came from the vaults of the college's orchestral library and each copy bore Hans Richter's signature in the top right-hand corner. I also went regularly to rehearsals and concerts given by Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra, which Richter had taken over five years after the founder–conductor's death in 1895. Fifty years ago, there were still teachers and players in Manchester who had tales to tell of the formidable Richter, many of them having been pupils of Hallé orchestra members, who in turn had played under the great conductor during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Hans Richter (1843–1916) was one of the first career conductors to gain international fame. Prior to this, conductors were usually composers, such as Berlioz and Wagner, or performing composers such as Hans von Bülow and Liszt. Richter was hardly a composer; on 13 January 1871 he completed an arrangement of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll for piano duet and solo violin but he also wrote three works of his own, a short two-part piece for four horns (Im Walde and Nachtruhe), a Romance for horn and piano (Am See) and a Concert Overture in F minor, written in 1878. He was a fine pianist and organist and was reputedly able to play all orchestral instruments except the harp. He could sing to a standard that kept the curtain up at an early performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger in Munich, when he stepped in for the indisposed Kothner. It was, however, as a horn player that he started his professional life as a musician in a Viennese theatre from the autumn of 1862 until the spring of 1866.

After a few low-profile attempts from 1865, his conducting work began in earnest in Munich in 1868 and ended in Bayreuth forty-four years later in 1912. Most of it was focused on four major musical centres of the nineteenth century, Vienna, London, Bayreuth and Manchester, his influence in each place lasting long after he had departed.