Sir Robert Mayer, a financier, philanthropist and patron of Britain's most famous youth concerts, which bear his name, died Jan. 9 at his home in London. He was 105 years old.
Generations of English youngsters, including Queen Elizabeth II and her son and heir apparent, Prince Charles, became acquainted with classical music through the concerts that Sir Robert and his first wife, the former Dorothy Moulton, started in 1923. The first Lady Mayer, a soprano and former concert singer, died in 1974.
Queen Elizabeth went to her first Robert Mayer concert at the age of 6 and Prince Charles attended his first at the age of 4 with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. After 20 minutes, however, his fidgeting became so conspicious that the Queen Mother had to take him home to Buckingham Palace.
Sir Robert was knighted by King George VI in 1939. On his 100th birthday, in 1979, Queen Elizabeth was present at a glittering tribute to the philanthropist when the London Philharmonic Orchestra and choir performed at the Royal Festival Hall.
The first of what came to be called the Robert Mayer Children's Concerts was held in the Central Hall in Westminster, with ''no adult admitted except in charge of children,'' as the program put it.
The Mayers got Adrian Boult to conduct it and to explain each piece in advance. Each child was charged a shilling admission because, as Sir Robert explained in an interview years later, ''they wouldn't appreciate it otherwise.''
Over the next 60 years, the music offered at the concerts was both of high standard and educational - Beethoven's Rondino in E-flat, to show how the woodwinds work, for example, and Mozart's Serenade, to demonstrate the strings. ''You give children good music, well performed, and explain it, and they can't help but like it,'' said Sir Robert.
The idea for the concerts grew out of a visit the Mayers paid to New York in 1919. While here he had what he later described as ''the experience that changed my life,'' when he and his wife attended one of a series of Saturday- morning children's concerts conducted by Walter Damrosch. The Mayers returned to England determined to make the same sort of thing available there.
Robert Mayer was born in Mannheim, Germany, with an unusual musical talent. At the age of 8, after two years of study under Felix Weingartner at the Mannheim Conservatorium, he gave his first public piano recital. Three years later he was introduced as a rising young artist to Johannes Brahms. Music was to remain one of the great loves of his life.
Nonetheless, his parents insisted he go into business and in 1896, at the age of 17, he was sent to London to join the prominent banking firm of the Seligman family. He became a British citizen around the turn of the century and, ultimately, a very prosperous merchant of industrial metals. He dealt principally in copper and served as an executive of the old American Metal Company, a predecessor of Amax.
Sir Robert is survived by the second Lady Mayer, the former Jacqueline Noble, whom he married in 1980; a son, Adrian Mayer, a professor of anthropology at the University of London; a daughter, Pauline Samuelson, of Bishop's Stortford, near Cambridge; nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.