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Michael
Tanner
my teacher
15 April 1935 – 3
April 2024
The title image is taken
from "Likenesses" by Judith Aronson,
a superb book of portrait
photographs
published in 2010 by the
Lintott Press
in association with Carcanet
Press, Manchester:
ISBN 978 1 85754 994 2.
The illustration of Odoreida’s piano is by Lt.-Col. Frank Wilson
and appears on p.56 of
“Supermanship” by Stephen Potter,
published in 1959 by Rupert
Hart-Davis.
Both have been
lifted with heartfelt if proleptic thanks.
Posted on 12th July, this piece is possibly subject to revision as
reflections appear;
a concise version has appeared in the autumn 2024
issue of Opera Now.
20 minute read
éYou can download a PDF of
this present version
here.
When he died, in
early April this year [2024], Michael Tanner was very nearly 90
years old; for many readers he had been the opera critic of The
Spectator for quarter of a century, and for others their Moral
Sciences mentor at Cambridge over nearly forty years. Saddened
to learn the news, I found I wished to put down some thoughts, which
follow.
At the end
of my first year reading philosophy at Cambridge, in 1975, my
director of studies, assessing my interests and inabilities, told
me, “I think you’re one for Michael Tanner next year.” I had
never heard of Dr Tanner. Yet this verdict, itself also much
chattered among my contemporaries, came with an eyelid
flicker suggesting a plot. Be it poisoned, glittersome or
leaky, I had been handed something akin to a chalice, if not a grail.
In the autumn I took up this vessel. Entering his rooms for
the first time, sidling down past its overflowing contents, past an
orange-shaded standard lamp, to a zone of compressed habitation in
front of the gas fire-place, to meet the man in the red jumper and
leather trousers, of eagerly poised, oft-tilting head, I felt
completely at home. Fortunate enough to have a Study in my
parents’ home, I too knew a more or less square room, with a
fire-place, a piano, shelves and tables piled or laden with
innumerable books and LP recordings, and narrow access down the side
of it all; with one difference — in mine you could see the floor.
Tanner and I seemed to pick up from an earlier conversation that had
never in fact happened, of course, and my 2 o’clock supervision
ended around eight in the evening.
That was to be below the average duration thereafter and it was not
unusual only to manage back to my room at 2 or 3 in the night,
sometimes by climbing in over the bike sheds at the back of
Pembroke. Occasionally we took an evening meal together,
possibly in the so-called Grad-Pad, but I remember rather few of
those; the more usual pattern was that I would bring a pineapple and
a bottle of whisky. He, of course, no longer could drink, but,
like Colonel Sternwood, he was happy to watch me and would share the
pineapple. We also shared a passion for spade-worthy dark
coffee made in a Bialetti machine over a gas ring by the fire, and
served in large cups in the form of chamber-pots, fashionable at the
time, decorated perhaps with Victorian advertisements for corsets.
The room was an inner sanctum in so many ways, a live shrine, so to
speak, of a passion for the flowering of our civilisation — “a
twentieth-century version of Hume’s library” he once called it —
represented by those musty, almost holy whiffs of the paper of books
and the cardboard of record sleeves, competing with pagan whiffs of
that macadamesque coffee and what I am sure was inexpensive but
generously applied eau de Cologne.
What on earth did we talk about? For we did talk and talk; it was
not always ‘philosophical’ — my essay was a springboard and while it
was always clear he had read it carefully, it was never annotated —
but could be peppered with gossip. His ability to offer a
concise ‘put-down’ was very sharp, either of a contemporary in the
faculty or from a wider field. Once, holding a copy of the
latest volume by Lacan he frowned: “Just shows you how fast the
French have to run to stand still.” Not quite gossip but of
the ilk in tone. Of a distinguished Germanist I had also
studied with, “He’s so vain he wears his hair to look like a
toupé.” Michael had a subtle and ironic understanding of
vanity, based finely on a certain glimpse of self-observation.
In my day he fancied he resembled James Dean, of whom he had a very
large photograph on the door leading to his bedroom. I made
the mistake of seeming unconvinced.
Though he showed great understanding towards me when I went through
a standard-issue crisis, we seldom spoke on personal matters.
On the rare occasions when he spoke of his alcoholism, then defeated
by drastic but long-lasting treatment that had even been the subject
of a profile in The Sunday Times, I think, I recall that his abiding
memories of it were the problems of dealing with all the empties,
in a suitcase in the woods, and of dealing with the tendency to inanity on the part of his
fellows at High Table as they downed drink at dinner. He gave
two-hour lectures and brought a thermos in his briefcase — strong
coffee, but a legacy of the erstwhile need for surreptitious drink.
Amidst the talk it is my recollection that it was quite rare for us
to share a recording together as if at a concert or recital, and
that if we did it was of something of the highest vibrancy to our
spirits — a recent performance of Die Winterreise that Hans
Hotter had given in Tokyo, an unofficial tape of the Busch Quartet
in Op.130 come to mind. The underworld of such tapes was the
work of a global network of enthusiasts; recording companies did not
approve, though it was known that Callas, for instance, did
encourage these ‘live’ tapes to flourish, even of her
under-estimated rival Leyla Gencer, much to our benefit now that
copyright worries have subsided and allowed such material to be
released officially. One collector, possibly in Norway, had an
exhaustive collection of Flagstad pre-war; another, in America, had
the tapes from after the war; Michael put them together and managed
thus to have the whole career. The BBC had a very sloppy
policy of wiping tapes, and subsequent official issues of gems such
as Goodall’s Mastersingers and Horenstein’s Das Lied von
der Erde came about solely after an amnesty with Tanneresque
enthusiasts who had taken the first live transmission. In
reverse, the Ring cycle that he used for his weekly evening classes
on the tetralogy, to which I was not invited, came from tapes that had been smuggled out of
Broadcasting House for a night, to be copied. Or was that the
Toscanini Brahms cycle from the Royal Festival Hall? (Both
have now been issued, some three decades after, by Testament.)
At my first supervision I was so pompously proud to have been taken
on as his pupil, ‘this year’s protégé’ as people had it behind my
back, that I assumed the slowly turning tape deck was there to
record our conversation. No, it was Shura
Cherkassky’s lunchtime recital from Manchester after all.
This ancient cluttered chapel contained very large photographs of
D.H.Lawrence and Schoenberg, as well as James Dean, standing like
statues of saints amidst the rubble of learning and listening.
Frederick Hartt's monumental book on Donatello was there, propped by
a very large studio loudspeaker. The
record collection was both deep and wide. That’s to say, he had a
wide range of love of music, but also had a passion for how
different performances of that music enhanced its richness.
Wide or deep, his love could bubble into sheer glee — I recall the
day the stall on the Market had put the Bob Dylan Budokan 1978
LPs on sale, or when Murray Hill issued the Furtwängler Milan
Ring, news that quickened his step to a trotting gait, wearing
his collectors’ spurs. Be it of Dylan or Furtwängler, record collectors all have their sundry
‘versions’ fetishes, but in few if any cases does one feel that so
much is at stake as when Tanner would pull out an LP, not even
necessarily some extreme rarity none of us could hope to find, and
promote its glory. He bought LPs of artists he did not care
for — such as Fischer-Dieskau, Karajan, Sutherland — on the basis of
“knowing the enemy”. Of his heroes however — in that
congruency they would be Hans Hotter, Furtwängler and Callas — he
could unfailingly dig out the clinching snippet to leave you in no
doubt. And on top of all that, knowing it would alarm people,
he would explain that “the tapes are the hub of my collection.”
We made many record-buying excursions, across Cambridge or in
London, and, in my second year of study with him, when I had a car,
out to Norwich or even Lowestoft. My haul might come to nearly
100 LPs, usually less than half his ‘bag’. You must remember
that there was no internet, nor easy advertising by the little
specialist shops who in any case seldom had anything as
technologically sophisticated as a list of their stock. So,
each excursion was an adventure. We would set off for Ives’ in
Norwich, for instance, not knowing if the haul would be few or by
the dozens. Like any true collector, Michael did not need a
list of his own collection, and could spot a variant at a glance;
and he would share my excitement when at last, after years, I
happened upon an LP he had long wished for me. For some reason,
Cherkassky’s Beethoven Op.111 comes to mind, not quite a rarity,
let’s say an oddity: “Oh yes,” he chewed to me from another stack,
“just wait till you get to the istesso tempo.” He
shared my excitement when I graduated to a ten-&-a-half-inch reel-to-reel
deck, and made me tapes of my favourite least available glories.
That generosity was most evident in the way in which Tanner allowed
undergraduates to borrow LPs from his collection, if they turned up
during a fifteen minute window before dinner in Hall. During
my extended supervisions I was often a witness to how succinctly
Tanner would guide their exploration of the repertoire, or fashion
their taste in performance, sometimes with a withering opinion that
was more directed at the overwhelming conventionality of classical
music reviewing, than at the poor beginner’s bewilderment. On
another level he told me once how he had started to play the 1939
Mengelberg performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion to
Raymond Leppard, a doyen of ‘authenticity’ in performance — who told
him he would leave the room if Michael persisted he listen on.
“Not a ‘musician’ in our sense,” he uttered to me from behind the
lamp shade.
His no-nonsense, robust and focussed intellect — after all, I was
there to study philosophy, at least some of the time — was balanced
by a complete sensitivity to the absurd. He remains more or
less the only peer with whom I have had proper conversations about
Stephen Potter’s gamesmanship books, he relishing that Odoreida’s
cluttered piano in Supermanship, a suitably Nietzschean title
by the
 way,
so resembled his own, ‘in constant use’. This sense of the
absurd (a word he relished to utter, the second syllable coming with
a torque that suggested the fashioning of a dowel) was of course
laden with serious intent, belonging to his ingrained disdain of
what we usually call ‘authority’; an ironic disdain given the rank
he achieved as an authority not least on Wagner and Nietzsche, not
to mention in the college hierarchy.
It was clear from his (very infrequent) recollection of National
Service, in RAF Intelligence, in Germany, that he had no higher an
opinion of military authority, or any other officialdom, than Spike
Milligan. Not that ‘disdain’ was always strong enough: his
masticatory declamation gave words such as ‘loathe’ the resonance of
a strangled neck, as he despaired of people’s possible sheer
wrong-headedness or sad tendency to unthinking stupidity.
Indeed, his manner of declamation was part of the point.
Perhaps it is intrinsic to most lecturers that their style resembles
in some way the lesson they seek to impart. Of course.
But again with Tanner one sensed that more was at stake. And I
am tempted to think that this was achieved by a sort of back-handed
insouciance — as if he counter-balanced the vital importance of
these skills, tastes, passions, values and all, with a recognition
that most people don’t care, perhaps cannot care, and, well, that’s
their loss. He was an evangelist by example, not by speech.
I have no recollection of ever anything being ‘rammed down my throat’.
On the contrary, I have an indelible memory of him, as so often, in
that red jumper and craning his head round the lamp, gazing,
imploringly, lost for words — yes — at the Kyrie of the 1935
Toscanini Missa Solemnis or Hotter delivering the
Karfreitagszauber. He knew well the seventh proposition of
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, that there are things of which one
cannot speak. But must all the same.
At this moment we might address the subject of Tanner’s relationship
with Wittgenstein and indeed with philosophy in general. Some
might start and ask, “There was one??” The answer can be simple or
complex, the one not excluding the other. The simple answer is
that he taught what the gritty philosophers regarded as a soft
subject, aesthetics, rather than hewing the coal faces of logic or
ontology, where you have to wear goggles at the face. And his
speciality, in those days quite innovative in itself, was to look at
the so-called ‘continental’ tradition, the German romantics in
particular, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche especially. The
superficially assumed disconnect of most of these writers to the
mainstream flowing from Berkeley, Locke and Hume, gave his course the
character of a backwater. Yet this is where Wittgenstein
strikes a dischord; on the one hand, Wittgenstein had become the
pivotal figure in hard philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon field, yet was
a figure whose roots in the German tradition such as Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche were underestimated, and whose almost poetic power was
at utter odds with that other tradition.
A fine television documentary on Wittgenstein by Christopher Sykes,
later to become Hockney's sympathetic biographer, first aired in 1989 and
now available in a VHS home tape
version on YouTube
here,
features Tanner, in his study, cushioned among books, elaborating
Wittgenstein’s philosophical progress with language and meaning.
It seems aptly characteristic — a word which he pronounced as
kahra’tistick — that he is seated facing sideways to the camera,
leaning round to the viewer, his fine, open fingers explicating
clarity or flicking a cigarette. His exposé is perfectly judged
for a television audience, and we witness his signature clarity and
judiciously unexpected phrasing. We also come up against
councel given by Wittgenstein himself, to the young Norman Malcolm,
when Malcolm was offered a philosophy teaching post in America:
basically don’t — you will be asked to cheat yourself, and others.
Malcolm disobeyed, as did Tanner. But as a teacher of
philosophy, Tanner took Wittgenstein’s warning completely to heart.
Let me explain myself better. In various obituaries I noted
that Tanner was referred to as a music or opera critic — true — and
as a philosopher — untrue. As widely read in philosophy as it
would be possible to be while ‘having a life’, as we’d say, he was
superbly able to lay these thoughts and thinkers before you, as well
as offering ideas towards your ability to appreciate or criticise
them. Many of his writings on Wagner, for instance, or
Nietzsche, reveal his superb ability to be completely fair-handed —
while despatching a text or writer to a deserved, dusty oblivion of
nonsense. Hence he admired my first essay, on Richard
Wollheim’s Art and its Objects, as a splendid ‘hatchet-job’,
then a phrase much in vogue in some philosophical quarters.
His variations on reductio ad absurdum were Beethovenian in
effect. But he did not philosophise. There is no
doctrine or seminal insight or crucial tool of his that has lingered,
either as a seed or a plague upon the field of philosophical
endeavour. Nor had he any pretentions to having contributed in
that way. I do not know, but I cannot believe he had ever
expected to be offered a Chair in philosophy at Cambridge, he knew
too well the then emerging requirement for productivity in print
that that entailed. And in that sense he adhered nobly to
Wittgenstein’s fear that what would be expected was just such
churning, as illuminating and insightful as a cement mixer, and did
no such thing.
Instead, nobody interested by the creations and insights of
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Wagner can afford to overlook Tanner’s
cogent and vivid accounts — including sundry introductions to
translations. His guide to reading Nietzsche that prefaced the
CUP translation of Daybreak, in its first edition, is one of
the finest elaborations we have; in later editions of course it was
replaced by something less quirky and of little merit. Both in his lectures and in his
writings, however, he achieved a very delicate balance between
exegesis and — well, something like enticement. He encourages
you to think for yourself, though that hackneyed phrase does not do
enough, for it underplays the way in which Tanner expected you to
engage with the texts at stake. He had doubts about how
effective it was to the world’s enlightenment that people study such
matters, but he had no doubt about the importance of such matters.
How the inner self is to engage with the outer — perhaps even indeed
whether — had, for Michael, a self-evident answer, and his life’s
mission was to make it a shade evident to others.
I do recall one idea of his however that has never left me: we
called it The Tanner Triangle. Its principle was that you
assign each point of a triangle to a given artist, his work, and the
audience. The length of the lines between each point
represented the ‘closeness’ between these aspects. Thus for
instance with a cerebral composer such as Schoenberg, the two lines
between audience and the rest would be rather long, but the line
between artist and work very tight and short.
 As the basis for
a pretentious after-dinner parlour game this has some potential,
doodling the triangles for Proust or Dittersdorf, but
its value is hidden by that superficiality: for its value is to reinforce the
idea of the importance of the audience in the whole process — our
very own importance in the whole business of deep communication —
reminding us that this variable gives life to it all. That
this ultimately reflects the later Wittgenstein’s thoughts on
language as social tool is something to be elaborated elsewhere; that this vital
spring in the life of artistic expression was central to Tanner’s
passion for the arts, on the other hand, is something that I am
seeking here to celebrate.
Back in the day, in my spasmodic guise as an arts critic, I was sometimes
asked to give a talk on the rôle of the critic, especially the
critic of performance. Some thought this a beastly task,
others vacuous. My gist was always simple: the job is to
create an audience, so that those who were there might relive their
experience maybe with richer or wider or just different enthusiasm,
ears & eyes, and those who hadn’t attended just kick themselves.
Nobody had trained me to hold so lofty or daft an ideal, it just
seemed to be right and to form some sort of buttress against the
pointlessness of being rude. It was only later that I realised
that my mentor in this regard had been Michael Tanner and that he had never said or suggested any
such thing.
Of all my teachers, from Kindergarten to degree, Tanner is the one
of whom I’m stuck to recall something he actually taught me.
Yet he was perhaps my greatest teacher. And that’s just it.
He opened doors, and cajoled. His criticism appealed, like
Cromwell, “in the bowels of Christ”, to the possibility of the
sublime, towards the fullest realisation of the expression of art,
towards an understanding that might, just might redeem our frail
misunderstandings and lazy complacencies — all, as he once put it in
a short radio talk, for a “temporary warding off of ultimate defeat”.
Few have his urgency of intelligence that matches and indeed
dovetails with what we suppose to be the usual urgency of sensuality.
His fascination was with that process, and his teaching by example.
Yet to the idea of being in some way an aesthete he told me once,
curling round with conscious irony from behind that lamp, “I can’t
stand that poofy attitude to art.” For art was in no way an
accessory, but a necessity. In this way of life he differed
profoundly from most of his fellow critics.
Such manly pessimism, as well as the Sisyphus-like heroism needed to
survive it, had its voice for Tanner in the world of German
romanticism, the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and indeed
of Wagner, whose thinking Tanner took as seriously as the music.
(I might observe here that though he is most of all taken as a prime
Wagnerian, he once told me, “I can never quite escape the feeling
that the greatest opera of all is Fidelio” — which I took to
be a confession of a closet optimist after all.) Despite later
volumes, I still regard his extended essay in the 1980 Faber
Wagner Companion as the finest introduction to the composer,
because of his conscientious exposition of the intellectual
procession of the dramas. It is a very long contribution which
Tanner had had to fight to have included without cuts.
But it is very strong, at once rich in research and knowledge, and
warm in personal commitment. Indeed, his exposition of Die
Meistersinger, debunking the supposed antisemitism of the
character of Beckmesser, caused Leonard Bernstein to summon him to
the Savoy, whereupon the great man told Tanner that he had now
renounced his refusal to conduct the opera — but that nonetheless it
was now too late for him to take it on. I believe their
discussion also included Bernstein’s more complicated conversion to
Parsifal, which he also had never chosen to conduct.
Tanner’s telling of the encounter was memorable for his disdain of
the monogrammed knitwear.
Tanner’s various writings on Nietzsche press home the point that there is
no ‘philosophy’ to be found, no Dummies'-Guide crib, rather a way of thinking, which was at
heart what made Tanner himself tick in that fetching, wise and
frequently witty plurality of single-mindedness with which he
welcomed all human expression that expanded his life and, if we make
the effort and pay attention, ours. Too bloody bad for
you if you don't.
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