Let’s hear it for elitism

Last month, on the most glorious of autumnal days, the world of music paid its last respects to Robert Tear. St Martin in the Fields was packed and the singing, as you can imagine, was magnificent. Sir Thomas Allen gave us Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, Sir John Tomlinson contributed Sarastro’s aria from Zauberflöte, and Dame Janet Baker read a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was some send-off.

Bob deserved no less. As well as being one of the finest tenors of the past half-century, he was a man of many accomplishments, not the least of which, as his agent Martin Campbell-White said in a splendid address, was being ‘effortlessly friendly’. A fellow of King’s, Cambridge, he was utterly without malice or pomposity. Any conversation with him could take in Four Quartets, Welsh rugby, Buddhism, Schopenhauer, and the foibles of his colleagues: ‘My dear, he really is the most frightful shit!’

On one thing he never budged: why great art matters.