Beethoven at dinner parties: how to bluff it

I’ve just been reunited with a man whose pungent and patronising views on great composers have haunted me for more than 30 years. His name is Gervase Hughes, and I’ve discovered from Wikipedia that he was an upmarket travel agent who died in 1984. I had no idea, because I knew him only through his book Fifty Famous Composers, published as a Pan paperback in 1972, which mentions his short career as an opera conductor but not his main source of income, which was apparently ‘offering European tours in Rolls-Royce cars’.

I lent Fifty Famous Composers (an expanded edition of The Pan Book of Great Composers, 1964) to a friend when I was at university, explaining that it was the wittiest and wisest introduction to the classical canon ever written. He promptly lost it. I was cross, but in a sense it didn’t matter. As a teenager I’d read and reread Hughes’s 50 pen-portraits of composers so often that I knew his judgments by heart. I’m sure I passed some of them off as my own, too, since Fifty Famous Composers is a magnificent bluffer’s guide. That’s no bad thing. Young people rushing to learn about a subject need ready-made opinions to serve up in a hurry. And, my goodness, Gervase Hughes had some beauties in his collection.

Thanks to AbeBooks.co.uk, miraculous reuniters of lost titles with their owners, I now possess a copy of Fifty Famous Composers again and can quote the exact words. Here’s an observation on late Beethoven:

Harsh music remains harsh no matter who put his name to it. Rather therefore than pay the customary lip-service to these extraordinary works (for their mysterious profundity, ethereal grandeur, inspired anticipation of the methods of Béla Bartók, etc.) let us recognise and accept that they are in parts rough-edged and excuse it by recalling that they were put to paper at a time when Beethoven had become stone-deaf: it is significant that alongside passages of almost divine beauty are some which in theory ought to sound well but in practice don’t…