Arthur Duke Coleridge (baptised, 1 February 1830 – 29 October 1913) was a nineteenth-century English lawyer who, as an amateur musician with influential connections, was the founder of The Bach Choir and the man who introduced the Mass in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach to the English concert repertoire.
[4] Coleridge's singing and his friendships brought him into contact with the Royal Academy of Music piano professor Otto Goldschmidt and his wife, the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, and it was through these connections that the idea for a London performance of J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor was hatched: the Mass had been performed in full for the first time only in Leipzig in 1859.
[4] He was also the founder of the Bach Choir in 1865 and of the UK version of the Mendelssohn Scholarship whose first recipient was the young Arthur Sullivan.
[4] Unlike Sterndale Bennett, whose devotion to Mendelssohn led him to reject later composers such as Schumann and Brahms, Coleridge was an enthusiastic promoter of new music and very catholic in his tastes.
He knew Liszt, Rossini and the now-obscure but prolific Ferdinand Hiller personally, and promoted the works of Schumann, Brahms and Wagner.