Music Richard Osborne
Sibelius’s remark that no statue was ever raised in honour of a critic probably tells us more about statuary than it does about music critics. Music needs no intermediary, yet laymen and practitioners have long been moved to write about it – from Plato in the fourth century to Wagner on the cusp of the age in which music criticism became a full-time profession.
It’s a profession that has thrived in Britain. Is it our literary heritage that helped bring this about, or the fact that we’re a pragmatic people, less inclined to judge by principle, as the continentals tend to do, more by instinct and practice?
Certainly, the quality of British music criticism was a factor in the years from the late-1940s to the mid-1980s, when London was the undisputed music capital of the world, not just for the range and quality of the music-making but as an international hub for recording and publishing. The twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1980, is one of the great British achievements; nor are we likely to see again so rich an outpouring of classic studies of composers and performers as we did in those years.
‘We all eat at the same table,’ Colin Davis remarked at a lunch given in his
honour by the Critics’ Circle. It was some table, a feast of Lucullan proportions attended by an extraordinary array of writers. One of the most exotic was the critic, collector, administrator, publishing consultant and raconteur Felix Aprahamian (1914–2005). The Boydell Press recently published his Diaries and Selected Writings on Music, expertly sifted and edited by Lewis and Susan Foreman. It’s a discursive 400-page volume, but what a tale it has to tell for those who have the time to dip and burrow.
The Aprahamian parents settled in England in 1900, anticipating new massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. Though Felix – short and broad and somewhat Middle Eastern in appearance – said that he looked like ‘a thousand rabbis’, the family was Protestant. His father wanted him to go into the City but, for reasons that were never clear, even to Felix himself, music possessed him entirely. In 1930, aged fifteen, he fluffed his matriculation after spending precious hours autographhunting at a festival in honour of the composer and organist Sigfrid Karg-elert.
As things turned out, this would be his education. A born socialiser, who had inherited his mother’s affability and mischievous eyes, he didn’t merely admire his favourite composers; he actively befriended them.
Aged nineteen, he visited Delius at his home in Grez-sur-loing (‘and nearly killed him with questions’). He then charmed his way into St-sulpice in Paris, where he perched on the organ-bench alongside the 89-year-old Charles-marie Widor, spellbound by the recognition that the old man played his music exactly as written.
By 1937, he was arranging for the young Olivier Messiaen to prolong his stay in London to perform on a better organ than the one the BBC had provided. Not untypically, his collaboratrice in this was the wife of the First Secretary at the French Embassy; a woman whose passion for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins had caused her repeatedly to petition Rome for his canonisation.
Aside from Bach, Felix principally loved French and English music written during his own early lifetime. He was too gregarious to write a book (what promised to be a bedizened autobiography never got beyond page three), which is why Boydell’s anthology is so important. Classic pieces – written for such institutions as the BBC Third Programme, the BBC Home Service’s Sunday-morning ‘Music Magazine’ (later Radio 3’s ‘Music Weekly’) and the long-gone but not forgotten Music & Musicians – provide first-hand memories of the likes of Poulenc, Messiaen, Milhaud and Duruflé.
He wrote brilliantly, too, on Wanda Landowska, Nadia Boulanger, Victor De Sabata and Sir Thomas Beecham, the ‘conjuror-conductor’ and fellow Delian on whom Felix partly modelled his appearance and manner.
Berlioz said the good critic only writes when he has things to praise or blame, about which he cares. It explains why Felix was happy to tend the byways of the repertory as No 2 music critic on the Sunday Times, a 41-year stint during which he survived three proprietors, six editors and four arts editors, few of whom had the remotest idea who he was.
Felix lived for all but four of his ninety years in his parents’ house in Muswell Hill. Stuffed to the gunwales with scores – 5,000 for organ alone – gramophone records, concert programmes and a lifetime of newspaper cuttings, it was one vast archive.
He called it ‘The House of Usher’, although, with its miniature Japanese garden, Monet bridge and ceaseless flow of laughter, it was anything but.