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“... 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 analyst; on the other, that of the subjective visual artist. Milein Cosman’s vigorous sketches, made during the composer’s visits to London between 1958 and 1965, occupy over half the book ...”

“... Two scenes​ from his teenage years in prewar Vienna defined Hans Keller’s later life: one a kind of heaven, the other a window on hell. He was a viola pupil of Oskar Adler, a doctor and musician, and took part in the famously select chamber music salons at Adler’s house in the Neubaugasse, where on Saturday afternoons the luminaries of Vienna would play string quartets and talk about music ...”

“... 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 good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular. In ...”

“... about ‘musical wallpaper’, though the exchanges quoted here between David Drew (deploring it), Hans Keller (finding paradoxical good in it) and Shawe-Taylor (thinking of benefits to the elderly) centre on the transmission of Haydn’s complete symphonies. Worse was to come, including Mainly for Pleasure. In the years leading up to that first full ...”

“... a normal life, he lived an abnormal one ...’ By far the most penetrating contributions come from Hans Keller and Donald Mitchell, the editors of the important Commentary on Britten’s work in 1952. Keller is the only person who really approaches the question of Britten’s homosexuality and the constructive role it ...”

“... even when they aren’t happening, let alone succeeding. I once fell out editorially with the late Hans Keller over an article in which he had argued that Bryan Robson was an unsatisfactory player, and that the ethos of fire and sword and effort which he had been taken to exemplify was an illness of the British game. I thought that the denunciation of ...”

“... this much loved concerto nearly became a third piano concerto (a score left unfinished). It is, as Hans Keller said, the most violinistic of concertos, its virtuoso passages lying ‘marvellously on the instrument’ and ‘far easier to play than they sound’. The work is easily taken for granted, as it was by Saul Bellow in To Jerusalem and ...”

“... it had been ‘unwaveringly rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree ...”

“... newspaper criticism almost daily, or who have studied, say, Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, Hans Keller on Mozart, Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music or Alan Walker’s An Anatomy of Music Criticism, Kerman, like Lang’s Hindu ascetic, may seem in danger of losing the larger view. The complaint against musicologists is not new either: Carl ...”

“... idiom’. One might even speculate that, like many repressed artists (Stravinsky was another: Hans Keller notoriously diagnosed him as a sado-masochist), Ravel found it convenient to base himself on models. His so-called Debussyism is to some extent a modelling of this kind. In sheer sensibility, the two were profoundly different – which may go ...”

“... not perceive at any level. It is much the same with musicology: stimulating as it may be to read Hans Keller, his analysis of a Haydn quartet puts names and dockets on relationships we might hope to apprehend by our own cruder mechanisms. On the other hand, a richly fraught historical survey gives us new ears to piece out the meaning of the ...”

“... a distinction between them being impossible to make. It is interesting to note, however, that Hans Keller (so Revill reminds us) dismissed Cage’s lessons with Schoenberg as ‘public fantasies’: ‘so long as Schoenberg was alive, we didn’t hear about Cage’s studies with him.’ One way or another, Cage derived from Schoenberg the ...”

“... of a Parody Mass! Our advice will be greeted with a blast from his famous composition, Homage to Hans Keller for Four ...”

“... performance after taking a ‘vapour bath’. Relations between the orchestra and the conductor, Hans von Bülow, grew strained: Franz Strauss, father of Richard and the brilliant first horn of the Munich orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his ...”

“... was too tense, too wound up; later, he learned to be more generous with the power of the work. Hans Keller disliked Toscanini’s performances for what he perceived to be their energetic vehemence. The peculiar pleasure of Carlos Kleiber’s Beethoven performances resides in the sense they give of having world enough and time. But such an account of ...”