The cook, the critic, the composer and the love child

Michael Kennedy, who died on New Year’s Eve, was the Sunday Telegraph’s music critic when I was for a while assistant arts editor there about 20 years ago. He was of course musically knowledgeable beyond reproach, but his writing had the compulsive readability of a man who was always a journalist, a storyteller.

He was elitist in his taste but populist in his communicative instincts, something that I rapidly absorbed as I subedited his copy. Critics are usually obsessively protective of their work, often wounded by disagreement rather than stimulated. Kennedy was an exception, robustly open to the possibility of others improving and developing work he could get nowhere with.

One Sunday in 1992 he produced an extraordinary article about Edward Elgar – of whom of course he was a major biographer. The Sunday Telegraph arts editor, John Preston, headlined it ‘The mysterious Mrs Nelson’. It concerned Kennedy’s so-far frustrating search to locate a cook, a Mrs Nelson, whom Sir Kenneth Clark had reported had borne a daughter by Elgar.