Edward Greenfield obituary

The kindest and most considerate of critics, the conductor Sir Antonio Pappano said of him – and few who read Edward Greenfield, who has died aged 86, in his almost 30 years as a Guardian music critic, or who followed his reviews in Gramophone magazine, or who listened week by week to The Greenfield Collection, his long-running series on the BBC World Service, would have disagreed.

Yet this accolade was in a sense controversial. There were those who read him, who sat alongside him as critics, or among those who oversaw his copy at the Guardian, who found him too kind, too considerate; who wanted more of a cutting edge. They were not going to get that from Greenfield. He was against that approach temperamentally, but also on principle, as he explained in a statement he called his credo, which he wrote on his retirement as chief music critic in July 1993. Critics, he wrote, are “expected to be sour. I would much prefer it if, instead of ‘critic’, we could find a crisp word meaning ‘one who appreciates’ … My own consistent belief is that the music critic must aim at appreciation above all, trying never to let the obvious need for analysis in nitpicking detail get in the way of enjoyment … My aim always is to go to a concert, or put on a CD, wanting to like.”

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That is not to say there weren’t occasions he railed at, especially when he felt a director had subjugated some favourite opera to his own inappropriate whims. “Greeted with vociferous booing”, he recalled of a performance of Die Walküre at Bayreuth, “in which I enthusiastically joined.” Yet Greenfield was always the sum of his many enthusiasms: for the society of friends, whom he loved to entertain at lavish lunch parties; for good food and good wine on these and other occasions; for the house he bought and rescued from near dereliction in a street in Spitalfields, east London, far less smart when he found it than it is now; and above all for music and for musicians.

Greenfield was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, to a father named Percy and a mother called Mabel – names that, as he used wryly to observe, dated him. The Greenfields came from Yorkshire, but his father’s work, once he had switched from solicitor’s clerk to running labour exchanges, had taken him to Lincolnshire and then to Essex. Ted’s brother, Peter, was six years older. Their parents were ambitious for them, their mother particularly, and music soon became an essential part of Ted’s life, with piano and singing lessons and a place in a percussion band. There were also elocution lessons, which was why as a familiar radio voice he verged on the plummy.

From the local primary school he moved in the month the second world war was declared to Westcliff high school for boys, before being briefly evacuated with his brother to Belper in Derbyshire. Back at Westcliff, his passion for music developed, though, fearing music might for too much of the time cover ground with which he was familiar, he chose to read modern languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. First, though, in 1947, there was national service: and here – appropriately, for he was no natural soldier – he was posted to the Royal Army Educational Corps, where he was promoted to sergeant, had a spell with the British army of the Rhine in Germany and, characteristically, made friends with whom he stayed in regular touch thereafter.

At Cambridge, he soon decided to drop modern languages and read law instead, going on to take bar finals. This was not out of any conviction that he would become a lawyer; indeed, he had no settled notion of what he wanted to do with his life, except that music would be an essential part of it. But his time at Cambridge also included activity in the Cambridge Union and in the Labour Club, of which he was elected chairman.

At the university appointments board, discussing potential careers, he was asked: what about journalism? He responded with his habitual enthusiasm, especially when it occurred to him that this might open the way to becoming a music critic. Accordingly he wrote to the editor of his favourite paper, the Manchester Guardian, AP Wadsworth, who replied that, though the paper had no vacancies, “you might send me some of your stuff”.

His reward was a summons to Manchester, where the editor told him, in what he would later describe as the most joyous statement he could ever remember hearing: “I suppose we’d better have you.” That moment settled the course of his life. He began as an assistant to Wadsworth, though increasingly with opportunities to write for the paper, including coverage of byelections. That led to an offer from Wadsworth of a place on the political staff in London. His first instinct was to say no; he had only just acquired his own flat in Manchester.

What clinched his decision to move was his hopes of starting a record column. If he went to Westminster, he asked the editor, could he do that as well? “I suppose so,” said Wadsworth. So off he went, becoming an all-purpose deputy to Harry Boardman, the sketchwriter, and the kindly but irascible political correspondent, Francis Boyd.

In 1964, just after he had trailed Alec Douglas-Home on his doomed election campaign, Greenfield was offered a post as assistant to Neville Cardus, the celebrated Guardian writer on cricket and music. Once again, life had worked out exactly as he had hoped. True, Cardus got first choice of concert reviewing and the Guardian also had, in Philip Hope-Wallace, a notable opera critic, but here he was working for the paper which, as he once said, had become his religion, in the territory he had always most coveted. By 1977 he was established as chief music critic of the Guardian, a regular contributor to Gramophone and a familiar radio voice, to which he would add the co-editorship of what later became the Penguin Record Guide.

In all these roles, the kindness and consideration that Pappano would later celebrate were there in abundance. Opera was one of his chief delights, especially Puccini, about whom he wrote a book, Puccini: Keeper of the Seal (1958). But his greatest musical god, from the time he first heard the Eroica symphony, was Beethoven. Listening to such great music, he said in his credo, was for an agnostic like him the spiritual equivalent of a full religious experience. It also introduced him to prominent musicians, a great number of whom would become his friends.

His house in Spitalfields, to which he moved from a Hampstead flat too small to accommodate all his records, was a kind of visual summary of Greenfield’s life. On the bottom floor were the old LPs – about 40,000, he reckoned. The floors above were thronged with CDs, mostly sent for review, some neatly stacked and others accumulating on every available table and shelf. The walls of his sitting room were full of pictures, many based on photographs, commissioned from his friend Jeffrey Spedding, of visitors to his drawing room, including William Walton, Yehudi Menuhin and Michael Tippett; of other musicians he came to know well, such as Leonard Bernstein and André Previn; and of past heroes, Sibelius, Elgar, Mahler, Puccini and Beethoven. Ted in Spedding’s pictures is sometimes in the old-fashioned garb he favoured: knee breeches, riding boots.

His 2014 memoir, Portrait Gallery: A Life in Classical Music, celebrated too his associations with such great figures as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Joan Sutherland, Mstislav Rostropovich and Jacqueline du Pré, whose company he so much enjoyed and would later recall with what he somewhere describes as the “boyish enthusiasm” that lasted throughout his life.

Besides his book on Puccini, he published studies of Previn (1973) and Sutherland (1972) – after three decades, as he wrote in the Guardian in the late 1980s, “still the voice of the century”. He was appointed OBE for services to music and journalism in 1994. In 2002 there came another honour he cherished, installation for a year as master of the Art Workers’ Guild.

In his final years a condition that was never fully explained deprived him of his balance and made him immobile. Though his condition suggested that this would no longer be possible, he remained in his high house in Spitalfields, helped by carers from Tower Hamlets council and by devoted friends. His mobility had gone, but his optimistic spirit had not.

On the score of his second symphony, Edward Elgar – another of Greenfield’s most admired composers – inscribed a line from Shelley: “Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.” Despite his frustrating afflictions, that was never remotely true of Greenfield. The spirit of delight, kindled by the visits of friends, by morning drinks in the sitting room and music on radio or CD, or simply by living in Spitalfields, remained with him until the end.

In 2010, he entered into a civil partnership with Paul Westcott, who survives him.
David McKie

Meirion Bowen writes: I met Edward Greenfield for the first time after I’d spent six months or so of a bleak postgraduate year at Cambridge. My former Birmingham University tutor, Nigel Fortune, suggested that I work as a music critic and put me in touch with Ted. He was a lovely man, helpful in all kinds of ways.

Our interests dovetailed very well: he was delighted that I had a passion for contemporary music, so gave me as much work as possible, writing about new music concerts, festivals and operas. He focused mainly on recorded music, was steeped in everything that had been recorded and had a huge record collection, reflecting his love of opera, star singers and instrumental virtuosi.

To work with him was generally easy: he didn’t like arguments. Possessed of a great sense of fun, he encouraged my satirical streak. Stories of his exuberant partygoing certainly fit with the entertaining side of his personality. I shall miss his generosity and kindness.