We have lost an unforgettable teacher and one of Britain’s great critics

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Richard Bratby has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Michael Tanner (1935-2024), who died earlier this month, had such a vital mind and stood so far above the common run of music critics that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. For a philosopher to concern themself with the inner game of opera is not unknown (think of Friedrich Nietzsche and Roger Scruton). To do it as perceptively and as readably as Tanner is rarer. For two decades, starting in  1996, his weekly Spectator opera column offered as thorough and as stimulating an education in musical aesthetics as one could hope to receive; intellectual red meat served with forensic clarity and a mischievous, subversive smile.

I don’t know what I expected when, after 15 years as a reader, I invited him to speak to a pre-concert crowd in Birmingham about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.