of accompanists". Of Harty's early compositions, Kennedy singles out the Trio (1901) and Piano Quartet (1904) and the Comedy Overture, premiered at the Proms in 1907. The Times said of this piece: Among those whom Harty accompanied in his early days in London was the soprano Agnes Nicholls, whom he married on 15 July 1904. In the same year, Harty made his debut as a conductor, in the first performance of his Irish Symphony by the Dublin Orchestral Society, at the Feis Ceoil music festival in Dublin. Reviewing the premiere, The Times called the piece, "a work of much promise ... received with enthusiasm. It has many ideas, always freshly expressed, and the airs are developed with more than common variety and beauty." The following year, Harty's arrangement of Irish songs was included alongside works of Stanford and Vaughan Williams at a recital by Harry Plunket Greene.<ref>"Mr. Plunket Greene's Recital, The Times, 4 February 1905, p. 9.</ref> Among Harty's compositions from these years, Kennedy mentions a setting of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (1907), a Violin Concerto (1908) dedicated to and premiered by Joseph Szigeti, the tone poem With the Wild Geese (1910) and the cantata The Mystic Trumpeter to words by Walt Whitman (1913). Through his wife's professional connections, Harty secured his first important conducting engagement in London. He conducted the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in a performance of With the Wild Geese in March 1911. The performance was well received, and Harty was engaged to conduct the LSO again during its 1912–13 season. Hoping to repeat his success as a composer-conductor, he gave the first performance of his Variations on a Dublin Air in February 1913. His concerts this time were not successful with the critics or the public, and the orchestra made a loss. Although the LSO did not invite him back for the next season, Harty was invited to conduct Tristan und Isolde and Carmen at Covent Garden in 1913. His performance as an operatic conductor was less than a triumph. After Carmen, the critic of The Times complained that "Mr Harty's rigid beat and inflexible tempi petrified [the] delicate and fragile phrases, and made them sound like quotations from some forgotten German score". Harty later admitted that he was not greatly in sympathy with opera as a genre: "Opera seems to me a form of art in which clumsy attempts are made at defining the