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. Michael arrived wearing jeans and a leather jacket, walked straight on without notes and delivered a 30-minute précis of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, which gradually evolved into a panorama of the Ninth’s precise significance not just in music, but across two centuries of European history and culture. You could almost hear the audience’s brains buzzing as they left.

An hour later we were still standing in New Street, locked in what – for him, I’m sure – was just a casual conversation about Wagner, but which for me was worth three years of Oxford tutorials. When I, too, started writing opera reviews for The Spectator, it was as a stopgap while Michael explored his many other interests. He must have been nearly 80 at that point (I would have placed him in his mid-sixties) but until recently it always felt as if I was simply minding his column until he was ready to come blazing back.