Having concluded his epic English Ring, Richter returned north to Manchester, where he found the mood of the orchestra, its administrators and his public disgruntled at his prolonged absence during the jubilee season and because of the inferior capabilities of his substitute Beidler. He finished the concert season with Bruckner's Te Deum and Beethoven's Choral Symphony on 12 March 1908. After a single concert with the London Symphony Orchestra (23 March), he was supposed to fulfil a long-standing engagement to conduct two concerts (on 26 March and 9 April) for the Philharmonic Society, of which he had been an honorary member since 1905. He had accepted them on 4 July 1907 but wrote to Francesco Berger, the society's secretary, at the beginning of March 1908 withdrawing from the engagements for family reasons, which would take him to Austria-Hungary at the beginning of April. A flurry of correspondence took place between a tired Richter and the panic-stricken and annoyed committee. They tried to get him to conduct at least the first of the two concerts, but Richter was adamant in his refusal. They were given instead to Henry Wood and another rising young English conductor, Landon Ronald. Richter had been offered £60 per concert (Nikisch was offered £50 for a single one) and Wood and Ronald each received thirty guineas for stepping into the breach. Surprisingly, negotiations began immediately to include Richter in the list of conductors engaged for the 1908–09 season but all the dates were Thursdays, Hallé concert days. Richter did not dare to absent himself more than his plans for another winter series of operas in English at Covent Garden would allow and so discussions were abandoned. Back in 1887 he had been invited to conduct for the society but declined out of loyalty to his manager Vert. As a result Hans Richter never conducted for the Philharmonic Society.

The German opera season at Covent Garden in the summer of 1908 consisted of Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung, Tannhäuser, Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Der fliegende Holländer and two performances of Gluck's Armida with Destinn in the title role. Herbert Thompson described the Ring operas as: