The phone call could include a long silence, followed by a giggle, then a burst of sharp opinion. Andrew Porter was a fastidious writer, a shy, intensely learned and lovable person, his glasses usually waiting to be wrinkled higher up his nose. He lived amid mountains of books and scores, a few old socks, nowhere to sit. He was the most distinguished, influential and elegant music journalist in the UK and US for 50 years, most of them spent working at the Financial Times, the New Yorker and finally the Observer. His work was as valuable as that of George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman.
His writings about opera ranged from important research into Verdi’s Don Carlos and English translations including Wagner’s Ring, to the surprising comment that Le comte Ory was Rossini’s best opera. He was insatiably committed to contemporary music, especially in the US, and dismissive of populists such as Philip Glass. The “give-’em-what-they-want” world, with celebrity conductors, was anathema. His passionate belief was: “Music Matters!”
He was boyishly handsome. A lifetime of smoking, and much else, barely withered him; he died with lung cancer aged 86. He was a patient, generous patron of younger writers, especially at the FT in the 1960s. I was fortunate toa be one of them.
Sunday papers published essays, the dailies reportage. But the FT, from 1953, developed the best arts pages in the world, largely thanks to Andrew Porter. Those were the days of overnight criticism. Coffee in the interval, race back to the office, then an hour or so to bang out your thoughts before they were grabbed from the typewriter. It was worth waiting to see typographic corrections planted into the page: Andrew made FT history by being so furious with a subeditor’s error that he tipped the metal tray containing the whole arts page on to the floor. He was passionate about commas and semicolons. Must remember to check mine later.
For Andrew, the most important thing was to be interested in what you reviewed; how could you write a good piece otherwise? So as the FT arts coverage grew, elevated into a glamorous page 3, he cultivated a small family with different interests. The page would be filed in the office, and Andrew would review it, with ticks and crosses for grammar or idea.
He disliked gratuitous comment and exaggeration. He phoned, early one morning, after reading my review of a performance of the St John Passion at the V&A Museum: “Gillian I do wish you would not go over the top about these young male singers. It’s embarrassing!” But I won that one! The young baritone who had sung Christus, his first professional appearance, was Thomas Allen.
Andrew left the FT in 1972, to go to the New Yorker, where his interest in the longer, wider article could best be developed, and subsequently published in hardback. But when flashy Tina Brown arrived as editor, it was no surprise that he wanted to return to the UK. Excellent coincidence. Nicholas Kenyon, another Porter protege, left the Observer to go to the BBC; the paper, where I was then arts editor, brought Andrew and his vast library back.
For many years, Andrew had a close friendship with John Pope-Hennessy, director of the V&A, British Museum, and European painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Andrew was frank and funny about homosexuality, long before the law changed. “I’ve got something I didn’t expect to have tonight,” he said when he bounced into the bar of a Cambridge hotel after a student opera performance. As he ate some of my sandwiches, I realised he was not referring to a hot meal. Then in New York: “I went into a bookshop and asked for The Joy of Gay Sex, and the chap said, ‘You’ll find that under DIY.’”
