The musical heritage of Great Britain is as long established as that of any European country and has enjoyed several golden eras. Nevertheless it has to be conceded that there was an awful ring of truth about the nineteenth-century German jibe ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ (‘the land without music’), for at that time British music had been at a low ebb since the death of Handel. Many reasons have been advanced to account for this and they point to one conclusion: what the Germans were essentially referring to as ‘music’ was opera and, more specifically, the genre that had grown out of opera—orchestral music. During the nineteenth century the German-speaking countries had a virtual monopoly of symphonic and orchestral music, and its influence on the rest of Europe was immense. Lacking a native operatic tradition, and thereby the organisations that engaged orchestras on a permanent basis, Britain was regrettably slow to turn to this rapidly developing medium.