A few years ago in Chicago, I acquired a treasure, the notebooks of the legendary conductor Hans Richter, who did so much to promote the music of Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner and Elgar. I have always felt an affinity with Richter for there are similarities in our lives. He was a fellow Hungarian, whose early conducting engagements were at the Budapest Opera House and in Munich. For twenty-five years he conducted in Vienna but for over thirty he regularly worked in London, and ended his days in Manchester as Hallé's successor. His appearance in London must have been like a sudden burst of light on the English music scene. According to George Bernard Shaw, who was not always generous with praise, Richter produced noble results. He was also a frequent conductor at my old opera house, Covent Garden, where he gave the first performances of Wagner's Ring in English.

When Christopher Fifield asked me to write the foreword to his biography of Richter, I turned once again to my treasure, the conducting notebooks. To protect them they are as I received them, wrapped in tissue paper in a transparent perspex box lined with silver paper. There are six books covering his entire career, three bound in leather and three backed with linen on boards, now covered with beige wrapping paper for protection. The earliest book has a blue-edged label with the printed address of a Budapest stationer stuck on the front, on which is stencilled the dates 1865–1884 with the words ‘Dirigier Buch’ written in Indian ink in the middle. The ink, however, has faded little and in a firm hand Richter has written details of his first concert in his home town of Raab. For the next forty-seven years he kept a methodical record in the six notebooks of every performance he gave. He obviously loved numbers and marked every tenth performance starting again at every thousandth. The final entry was made in August 1912, a few months before I was born.

As his career progressed, the performances became so frequent that the record is astonishing to read. On 2 December 1892 he conducted Mascagni's opera L'Amico Fritz at the Vienna Court Opera.