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. He would talk brilliantly about ‘the mediocre taste of the multitude’, not in a sneering way, but because he had dedicated his life to an exploration of music, and he knew how precious a gift music is. So I thought of him last week when Alfie Boe and Katherine Jenkins, self-styled ‘opera singers’, formed a two-pronged attack on a world they clearly despise.

Master Boe, who has at least undertaken a couple of major roles in British houses, played the Wat Tyler card. ‘I don’t believe,’ he said, ‘in the class system of the operatic world.’ Miss Jenkins, who has never sung an operatic role on a professional stage, denounced those stuffed shirts who ‘want to keep opera small and elitist, and I think it should be for everyone’.