Who remembers the Scottish composer Ernest Bryson? He wrote a couple of forgotten symphonies and an even more forgotten opera called The Leper's Flute. But he has now found his place in history as the man who denounced Sir Edward Elgar as "stupid" and "impertinent".  It was all a bit of fuss about nothing much, according to letters found in the archive of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and now on show in the Picton reading room at the city's central library.  In 1924, officers of the Rodewald chamber music society wrote to Elgar, who by then had completed most of his greatest works, to invite him to become the society's president. Alfred Rodewald, a Liverpool businessman and musician who died in 1905, had founded and bankrolled the Liverpool Orchestral Society.  Elgar was not delighted by the invitation, apparently upset that the wishes of a close friend had been betrayed. "I am much honoured by the invitation; I cannot accept the post of president," he replied. "Alfred Rodewald was a very dear friend and if it were possible to carry on, under his name, some orchestral concerts I would be proud to be associated with the executive.  "Chamber music, in this case, is inadequate and it is a reproach to the musical taste of Liverpool that the orchestral concerts should have been allowed to disappear."  The society then invited Bryson to take on the job Elgar had spurned and forwarded to him the great composer's letter. In his reply, Bryson accepted the presidency and then went in for a bit of self-righteous spluttering: "I return Sir Edward Elgar's letter and do not understand why he should have seen fit to combine stupidity and impertinence in his reply to the society." Ouch.  "The benefits of insulting the leading composer of the day are dubious but the correspondence with Elgar certainly makes interesting reading and says a lot about the way things were done back then," said Vasily Petrenko, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's dynamic principal conductor, who helped launch Liverpool's year as capital of culture while leading his band from the top of a scissor lift.  Much of the archive has been collated by RLPO patron Vin Tyndall. The orchestra was then awarded a £50,000 heritage lottery grant to catalogue the collection, a process that took a full-time archivist and 30 volunteers two years to complete.  Items on show include programmes, autograph books (with the signatures of the Queen, Dickens, Paul McCartney and Rachmaninov), letters from Max Bruch, Sir Henry Wood and Sir Charles Hallé, and material relating to the all-woman McCullagh string quartet, founded in the 1920s. The archive also shows the rows did not only concern music: there was outrage when birth control campaigner Marie Stopes tried to book the Philharmonic Hall for a lecture.
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra unveils archive of letters from composers Ernest Bryson and Edward Elgar, as well as historical collection of programmes and autograph books