Michael Tanner, who died yesterday at the age of 88, lived two parallel lives. To many Spectator readers, he was the magazine’s peerless opera critic: wise, passionate, thrillingly disputatious, intensely funny, extremely generous with the Semtex. Essential reading. He wrote The Spectator’s weekly opera column from 1996 to 2014 and continued to review – and raze to the ground where necessary – concerts, books, albums and opera, whatever we flung at him, right up until 2022.
To countless others, however, he was one of the great philosophical scholars. A celebrated authority on Nietzsche, he was the author of the introductions to the Penguin editions of The Birth of Tragedy (1993) – which he also edited – and Beyond Good and Evil (2003), a 1994 critical study of Nietzsche as part of the OUP’s Past Masters series, as well as a 1998 introduction to Schopenhauer. Watching him carefully elucidate and demystify Wittgenstein in this riveting BBC documentary from 1989 makes you realise why few who studied with Michael ever forgot him.
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