Anthony Bernard's birth was registered as Alan Charles Butler in West Ham, then classified as Essex,[2] in early 1891.
[citation needed] Further family research has uncovered that Bernard was the illegitimate child of Casselden and the Edwardian band leader Thomas Bidgood.
[citation needed] The adopted surname of Anthony Bernard therefore seems to have derived from his mother's use of Barnard, though her reasons for doing so remain unclear.
[citation needed] Anthony Bernard studied with Joseph Holbrooke, John Ireland, Leonard Borwick and Sir Granville Bantock.
[citation needed] With W. H. "Billy" Reed (leader of the London Symphony Orchestra) as violinist, Bernard was the pianist in the premiere performance of Edward Elgar's Violin Sonata in E minor, on 13 March 1919 at a semi-public meeting of the British Music Society.
[4] In 1921 he and Reed attended a luncheon convened by Elgar, the other invitees being Arthur Bliss, Eugene Goossens, John Ireland and Adrian Boult.
The purpose of the meeting turned out to be Elgar's suggestion that Bliss, Goossens and Herbert Howells each write a new piece for the 1922 Three Choirs Festival, to be held in Gloucester.
That year Anthony Bernard formed the London Chamber Orchestra (LCO), and led them in unfamiliar and better-known repertoire from the early masters through to contemporary composers such as Frederick Delius.
[citation needed] He conducted the first performance of Christian Darnton's Octet for flute, clarinet, bassoon, cornet and string quartet, on 26 March 1927.
[9][10] He also conducted the first concert performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Christmas Carol Suite, on 17 December 1929 in London.
Later in life, he wrote a great deal of incidental music, both for the theatre (such as In Parenthesis (David Jones) and Queen Mary (Tennyson, 1947)) and for radio plays by Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis (1951), and Ion and Bacchae), Shakespeare (The Tempest (1951) and A Midsummer Night's Dream) and others.
Elgar started to revise and shorten the piece after its first performance by Fanny Davies in 1901, and even toyed with the idea of turning it into a piano concerto.