Andrew Porter, who has died aged 86, was the most erudite and perceptive music critic of his generation. A dauntingly well-informed writer and a prose stylist of the first rank, he shared his extensive knowledge generously in the service of the art to which he was entirely dedicated.
Opera and vocal music were closest to his heart, and he was involved with Opera magazine from 1953 until his death. The centre of his expertise and enthusiasm was Verdi: he famously unearthed in the Paris Opera library the performing materials of the full original version of Don Carlos, and reassembled them part by part.
This brought to light nearly an hour’s additional music: the reconstruction was performed by the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and published in 1974. But although he co-authored with David Rosen a valuable source-book on Verdi’s Macbeth (1984), Andrew never wrote the big study of the composer or of opera in general which would have been his natural subjects: the daily and weekly deadline was always his preoccupying stimulus.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, to Andrew, a dentist, and his wife Vera (nee Bloxham), he studied at Bishops Diocesan college, and as a keyboard player accompanied rehearsals and played continuo for the conductor Albert Coates. He then read English (1947-50) and was organ scholar at University College, Oxford, where he met his great mentor, the critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor.
Some of Andrew’s earliest reviews appeared anonymously in the Times during the Festival of Britain in 1951; he sometimes wrote for the Daily Express, which he claimed never cut a review, but it was as music critic of the Financial Times from 1952 onwards that he had a decisive impact on British cultural life.
There he contributed to the creation of a flourishing arts page and pioneered extended, thoughtful reviews that put music in context. As radio, public subsidy and the LP were making a wide variety of classical music ever more available, he enabled it to make sense to a new generation of listeners. His open-minded commitment to contemporary music meant that he was ready to support the radical innovations of William Glock’s Proms and Third Programme from 1959 onwards. As editor of the Musical Times (1960-67), he enabled musical scholars to write approachably and lucidly for a wider public.
In 1972 he was invited by the editor William Shawn to join the New Yorker, and (after a year’s gap in 1973-74 for a visiting fellowship at All Souls, Oxford) he quickly became the most respected writer on music in the US. The New Yorker fitted Andrew’s style perfectly: he was unconstrained in the length of his reviews and could gather together relevant performances across a long period.
He was supported by the magazine’s famous fact-checkers and by editors who debated grammar with him but rarely dared to suggest major changes to his prose or punctuation. He had total freedom in what he wrote about, and the collected books of his reviews, from A Musical Season (1974) to Musical Events 1983-1986 (1989) are among the richest and most thoughtful of such collections. The composer Virgil Thomson’s memorable accolade was that never before “has the New Yorker had access through music to so distinguished a mind”.
In 1979, a period of teaching and directing opera in the US beckoned, and Andrew suggested that the New Yorker ask me as a young novice to fill in for him. High above West 71st Street, he cooked my wife and me an elegant lunch that we ate on the balcony of his apartment looking over Broadway, his table, floors and piano being entirely covered with papers and scores.
Then he disappeared, and three enormously enjoyable years ensued, during which he would dart back from time to time and Shawn would accommodate two music columns. The debt was partly repaid in 1992, when Gillian Widdicombe, arts editor of the Observer, invited him back to this country when I left that paper to go to BBC Radio 3.
By then Andrew was slightly out of tune with the temper of the rapidly changing times, and soon felt constrained by space limits and irritated by editing; he then moved to the Times Literary Supplement (1997-2009), until even they changed one semicolon too many. As he made clear in a severe Hesse Lecture at Aldeburgh in 2000, the British print media no longer embodied his dauntingly high standards, but he was still enthusiastic about going to events and writing for Opera right up to the end.
He had a profound, TS Eliot-like sense of history and context, and for him every performance affected our understanding of a piece. Indeed we would sometimes wonder how long one of his opera reviews could eloquently hymn the glories of past productions and forgotten singers before he turned to the performance in hand. Andrew’s critical stance was not one of extreme praise or extreme blame, but of evenhanded, detailed observation, describing a singer’s voice with precision, usually with a few reservations about misaccenuation, mispronunciation, phrasing or breathing.
Unlike those critics for whom writing is an extension of their natural verbosity, Andrew’s views rarely became fully articulated until they were written down. I love a colleague’s story of him arriving at the FT offices one evening, having attended the premiere of a new Britten song cycle, in an agony of indecision, musing, “Oh dear, can Britten really set words? Can Peter Pears really sing?” before going into the next room, from which the sound of furious typing was heard; he then emerged with a sheaf of paper and a seraphic smile, saying: “It’s Britten’s greatest song cycle.”
Andrew could be vigorous in his judgments: we find him one week praising a Colin Davis Messiah for its “irresistibly high-spirited sheep ... plainly delighted to have gone astray” and the sense of “happiness that seemed to flow from the platform and fill the hall” the next week observing of Leonard Bernstein that “if one averts one’s eyes, one hears something less extraordinary than the performance he mimes”. His closest and most successful involvement in opera was through his many excellent translations of Mozart, Gluck, Rossini and notably of Wagner’s Ring cycle (recorded by ENO), models of clear, direct language responsive to the original. His attempt to enter the world of directing opera with a “period-style” staging (following the original production book) of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino was less happy, and reviewing it was something of a challenge; his directing career never quite took off.
Andrew was a shy, often uncommunicative, but warm and gentle person, most comfortable with a few very close friends such as the writers on music Diana McVeagh and Max Loppert and most recently John Allison of Opera, and (while in New York) the scholar and publisher husband-and-wife Barry and Claire Brook. He inspired great loyalty and affection from those of us who had the good fortune to work with him, and from all those who learnt so much from the immense range of everything he wrote.
He is survived by his sister, Sheila, a notable publicist for opera at Covent Garden and in New York.
• Andrew Brian Porter, music critic and scholar, born 26 August 1928; died 3 April 2015