He increased the resident band to full symphonic strength and for more than forty years conducted concerts at popular prices.

At fifteen he was apprenticed for three years to Urban, the town musician of Elbing, with whom Manns learnt to make the best of limited orchestral forces, transposing and switching instrumental parts as necessary.

[2] When Manns was approaching the age for military conscription, he avoided active service by volunteering as a member of an infantry band stationed at Danzig, for which he played the clarinet.

He was then appointed conductor and solo violinist at Kroll's Gardens in Berlin, a post that he held from 1849 to 1851, when the venue was destroyed by fire.

[2] He resigned the position in 1854 when a junior officer reprimanded him for allowing his musicians to appear on parade with inadequately polished buttons.

[3] In the same year Henry Schallehn, who had recently established a military band at the Crystal Palace in the suburbs of London, engaged Manns as clarinettist and sub-conductor.

His resources are sufficient to constitute one of the finest bands in the kingdom, and we shall be glad to find the Crystal Palace orchestra achieve such a reputation under his conductorship.

When he took over, the permanent band was a wind ensemble, from which, with four specially engaged string players, Manns improvised an orchestra of about thirty-four performers.

Together, Grove and Manns made the Crystal Palace concerts the principal source of classical music at popular prices.

[2][7] Thirty years after Manns introduced the Tempest music, Sullivan wrote to him, "How much do I not owe to you, my dear old friend, for the helping hand you gave me to mount the first step on the ladder!

"[2] Among contemporary continental composers, Johannes Brahms (in 1863), Joachim Raff (in 1870), and Antonín Dvořák (in 1879) also first became known in England through Manns's Crystal Palace concerts.

[2] Some fragments of a live performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt conducted by Manns at Crystal Palace in 1888 are among the earliest surviving recordings of classical music.