Hans Keller, who came to Britain in 1938 after the Anschluss, worked for many years for the BBC’s Music Department. He wrote for the BBC magazine the Listener, and when Karl Miller and Mary-Kay Wilmers, who had both worked there, started the LRB he began to write for it too, and to send many combative letters to the editors. ‘Dear Hans,’ Miller wrote to him in 1980, ‘Every day I find a large accumulation of letters of contention and complaint addressed to me. Most of them are from you.’ He died in 1985 and is pictured on the cover of the LRB of 3 September 1987, to accompany a piece about him by Donald Mitchell. Nicholas Spice wrote about his life and his criticism in the paper in 2021.
In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the...
The husband-and-wife team of Hans Keller and Milein Cosman looks at Stravinsky in his later years from two very different points of view: on the one hand, that of the rational music critic and...
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