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.
There is no area of human endeavour on which we get a greater variety of opinions than on broadcasting, for the simple reason that everybody not only is but feels involved – as a listener and/or viewer, a broadcaster, or one who hates it all and makes a moral issue of it: I know more than one respectable mind who refuses to have a television set in the house – for his family’s sake and indeed his own. With a fair measure of boredom, then, the reader will expect yet another opinion from me – or rather, not another: by now, it is impossible for any opinion to be new.
Language, logic, style – these are usually thought to be aspects to wind up a review with, concerned as they are with the secondary ‘how’ rather than the primary ‘what’. Yet so much of your ‘what’ can depend on your ‘how’, so many of your reasons are rationalised motives, that your manner will easily yield a bird’s-eye view of your matter. And no ‘how’ is more enlightening than the basic one: how do you start your book, symphony, movements, chapters?
The well-nigh drug-like fascination which Vienna has exerted upon the Western world at all emotional and intellectual levels – Johann Strauss’s as well as Arnold Schoenberg’s, the Schnitzel’s as well as Arthur Schnitzler’s and Sigmund Freud’s – was bound to result in an attempt to explain it all, or most of it, or that part of it that has a hypnotic effect on the investigator himself. The question then naturally arises how far he has fallen victim to the myth whose reality he is trying to uncover – to the belief that what comes from Vienna is Viennese, has to be, couldn’t come from anywhere else. It is a question that will be answered in about 2,500 words’ time; hard fact will intervene.
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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