Herbert Menges

Herbert Menges OBE (27 August 190220 February 1972) was an English conductor and composer, who wrote incidental music to all of Shakespeare’s plays. Life and career 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, which he studied with Mathilde Verne and Arthur De Greef. After some years the Players evolved into the Brighton Philharmonic Society, a forerunner of the Southern Philharmonic Orchestra, a professional group based in Brighton from 1945 which also gave regular concerts in Portsmouth and Hastings. Menges was a powerful advocate of the regional professional orchestras. He remained the orchestra’s musical director for the remaining 47 years of his life, during which time it became the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra in 1958, and conducted the orchestra 326 times. incidental music for all the plays of William Shakespeare, and numerous plays by other writers. He was associated with the productions of John Gielgud from 1933 onwards. His assistant there for