| Biography | Herbert Menges OBE (27 August 1902 20 February 1972) was an English conductor and composer, who wrote incidental music to all of Shakespeares plays.
Siegfried Frederick Herbert Menges was born in Hove on 27 August 1902. His father was German and his mother British. His elder sister was the violinist Isolde Menges. Herbert appeared in public as a violinist at the age of four. He later abandoned the violin for the piano, and he studied at the Royal College of Music under Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Other teachers included Mathilde Verne and Arthur De Greef.
Menges's mother founded the Brighton Symphony Players. Although it did not adopt that name until 1958,[4] the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra dates its genesis to a concert given by the Brighton Symphony Players on 18 May 1925 in the Hove Town Hall, conducted by Herbert Menges. He remained the orchestra's musical director for the remaining 47 years of his life, and conducted the orchestra 326 times. He conducted the premieres of a number of works by contemporary English composers.
In 1931 he became musical director of the Old Vic Theatre, in which capacity he wrote (or arranged from composers such as Henry Purcell) incidental music for all the plays of William Shakespeare, and numerous plays by other writers. Notable among these was his music for a 1949 production of Love's Labour's Lost. He was associated with the productions of John Gielgud from 1933 onwards. His assistant there for three years was John Cook. He remained with the Old Vic until 1950.
He also became musical director of the Royalty Theatre in London. In 1931 he founded the London Rehearsal Orchestra, whose purpose was to help young musicians learn difficult pieces.
In 1951 he wrote the music for the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh Broadway production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. That same year, Malcolm Arnold dedicated his A Sussex Overture, Op. 31, to Herbert Menges and the Brighton Philharmonic Society.
He had conducting engagements with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Sadler's Wells Theatre Orchestra. He became Director of Music at the Chichester Festival Theatre from 1962.
Herbert Menges was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1963. He died on 20 February 1972, in London, aged 69.
His name now appears as tribute on some Brighton and Hove buses.
Many of his letters and scores are held at McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
His son, born 1940, is the Academy Award winning cinematographer Chris Menges.
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