I have the 1980 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
edited by Michael Kennedy which is known affectionately in our household
as 'Dalton's Weekly' because the extremely abbreviated style allows it
to pack in huge amounts of information including detailed lists of works
('3 symphs., 2 pf. concs., vln.  conc.').  Certain pieces of information
are routinely included about composers; one is what exactly they died
of, and another is how many times they visited Britain.  (The Oxford
Dictionary of Music goes instead for embarrassing middle names and
precise birth and death dates).

 From this and other sources I know that lots of composers paid visits
to these shores.  Dalton's Weekly tells me that Dvorak came no fewer
than nine times.  On one of his visits he went to a choral service and
made disparaging remarks about Anglican chant, but nobody's perfect and
they did chant in a quasi-metrical way then that would sound odd to us
today too.  I think it was Birmingham rather than Eastbourne that he
tended to head for.

On the other hand, Brahms refused to come to England on the alleged
grounds that Englishmen did not smoke good cigars.

Chopin paid a visit towards the end of his life and gave concerts in
Scotland and England, including one in Manchester (it's noticeable how
much the English provinces feature in these tours).

Webern was mentioned in this thread and he came here five times (Dalton's
Weekly supplies the years).  Berg visited Cambridge, which he described
as the strangest town he'd ever been to.  He dined on High Table at
Trinity College, though history doesn't record whether he was served
creme brulee.

Haydn's visits are commemorated in the names of some of his symphonies.
And so on.  I haven't yet found a record of a visit by a great non-British
composer to my home town of Bath.  Perhaps the absence of a concert hall
deterred them (there still isn't a purpose-built one, though we can use
buildings like the Assembly Rooms for chamber concerts).  But I found
a musical connexion a few weeks ago on a sponsored walk which took me
through the Bath suburb of Widcombe.  A plaque on the side of a house
commemorates the fact that Strauss' sometime librettist Stefan Zweig
lived there for a year shortly before his death.

Virginia Knight
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Personal homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~ggvhk/virginia.html