The music critic Felix Aprahamian was a remarkable self-made man – an amateur who became a professional – whose enormous influence in musical circles was deeply rooted in his practical experience of promoting music in London, notably music by British and French composers. Felix long aspired to write his autobiography, and indeed he was informally assured of publication by the publisher John Murray, but without either a contract or, more importantly, a deadline, he never got round to it. He was enormously proud of this prospect – ‘Byron's publisher’, he would tell one – but sadly, despite the prompting of many friends, it remained a chimera. However, Felix's story of a life in music over three-quarters of a century is worth telling for its own sake, for the light it throws on music and musical life – particularly in London – over these years, and for the unique insights he brought regarding those composers in whom he specialized, many of whom he had known personally.

We are fortunate that the mere three pages he completed of his autobiography tell his family history. He was the son of an immigrant Armenian family – his father, Avedis Aprahamian (who had been born Hovanessian), was naturalised at the turn of the century. Felix lived until the end of his life in the family home in Muswell Hill, London, to which they moved on 1 January 1919, not long after the scare his parents had experienced when Felix contracted that great childhood killer of the time, diphtheria. Felix wrote:

Ernest Ansermet

Ernest Ansermet died on 20 February 1969. For nearly half a century – excepting the duration of the last war – he was a regular visitor to London, a city to which he was devoted. I think I can do no better than plunge into my first illustration, which is Ansermet conducting a muchloved score – Manuel de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat – of which he gave the very first performance here in London, with the Diaghilev Ballet in July 1919.

A month before that auspicious first performance of Falla's Tricorne, Ansermet had conducted another première for the Diaghilev Ballet here in London, that of the Rossini–Respighi La Boutique fantasque. We can see right away that we are dealing with a conductor whose fame and reputation were built not on his interpretation of the reach-me-downs of the classical repertoire – although it was a sore point with him that his Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms were not accepted by the pundits in the same way as his Debussy, Stravinsky or Falla – but on his championship of the newer, younger composers of his time.

In a series like this, I think it would have been so much more interesting for you to have heard someone discussing Ansermet's art as a conductor who knew him and worked with him in those distant days of the Diaghilev Ballet.

This book remembers that larger-than-life character in the musical world, Felix Aprahamian, critic on The Sunday Times for half a lifetime, record reviewer and familiar voice on the BBC both on Radio 3 and the World Service. Lewis Foreman met Felix Aprahamian in the mid-1960s and first visited and interviewed him at Methuen Park in 1969 in connection with ongoing research into the life and music of Arnold Bax and John Ireland which were eventually published in 1983 and 2011. Later both the editorauthors of this volume consulted Felix extensively when they were writing their book London, a Musical Gazetteer (2005). Felix was a legendary but remarkably approachable character, whom we first encountered at early meetings of the Delius Society, and later at concerts and operas.

It is clear that Felix valued live performance above almost everything. He would often be seen leaving a concert or opera early, after having listened to whatever special item he had come to hear, so that he could slip into another concert somewhere else. One might encounter him thus at the Wigmore Hall (his preference for discreet arrival and departure was the back row on the left-hand side). One remembers once meeting him leaving a concert at the interval and him remarking – ‘Oh, I think I have time to pick up the last act of the ENO's Bohème.’ He had no thought to pay to get into any of these; he was so well known and such a power in the land that he could just breeze in if there was an empty seat, and who knows, he might cover the event in the press somewhere.

In this volume we would like to present our tribute to Felix largely in his own, very eloquent, words. Felix's career as a critic and musical commentator spanned more than seventy years and he is an important documentary source on both the British music and the French music of the mid-twentieth century. We have researched in Felix's extensive surviving archives. He kept a detailed narrative diary only for a very few years in the mid-1930s, and here Susan has transcribed the manuscript for 1933–5 complete, for the first time.

First it was simply the by-line itself. Next to Rafael Kubelik, no name sounded more glamorous, exotic or full of Eastern promise to a lateteenage London schoolboy than Felix Aprahamian, whom, as second string to the great Ernest Newman on The Sunday Times, I read avidly every week. Newman was very much living on his reputation in the early 1950s, occasionally reviewing new opera productions and important concerts, but more often returning to the broader issues of music, frequently ending his articles with the phrase (unthinkable today) ‘I will return to this theme next week’. No wonder that E. C. Bentley accurately summed him up with the clerihew ‘Said Ernest Newman/ Next week Schumann,/ But when it came/ It was Wagner again.’ I recall this in order to give some idea of how refreshing it was to find Newman's able lieutenant writing about a raft of the week's performances (a surprising number of which I often found I had attended), in a way that engaged one's attention and aroused admiration for the writer's ability to convey multum in parvo. Actually, the Aprahamian writings that I most strongly recall during that time – the very early days of LP – were his record reviews. I well remember resisting the urgings of the young man behind the counter at the EMG record shop – a certain Edward Perry (later the founder of Hyperion Records) – to buy the first ever LP of Brahms's Symphony No. 3 because ‘Felix Aprahamian in The Sunday Times says the string tone is too wiry’. ‘Nonsense’, said Ted, ‘and I’ll tell him so next time he comes in’. I was extremely impressed that he actually knew this, to me, glamorous figure. Constant Lambert used to claim that, along with Modest Mussorgsky, he had the most inappropriate Christian name of any musician. Exactly the opposite applies in this instance: Mr Aprahamian was Felix by name and Felix by nature.

I was eventually able to put a face to the name in 1957 when, as an Oxford student and conductor of the college orchestra (leader Dudley Moore!), I went to United Music Publishers, next to the British Museum, to ask to see a score of Fauré's Masques et Bergamasques, of which no miniature score existed at the time. ‘Oh, you had better go next door to discuss this with Mr. Aprahamian’, I was told.

1933, 1934, 1935 and Surviving Fragments from 1937 and 1944

Various names and places are often referred to in the journals by initials. These are identified when they first appear, but for convenience the most frequently used are listed here.

1933

18 January 1933 For some time past I have been tinkering with the idea of keeping a musical diary. This idea has been encouraged by the thought that it is in a way my duty to record in as much detail as possible the glimpses it has been my good fortune to be allowed of lives of many people high up in the musical world today. The need for keeping such a record was brought home very strongly to me at the first Study Circle gathering of the London Contemporary Music Centre. Our chief guest was Dr Egon Wellesz of Vienna who had come to receive the Mus.D. that Oxford had bestowed upon him. I remember him as a charming man with the air of a true scholar. He had brought with him the manuscript score of a large scale choral work1 which he was dedicating to the University of Oxford. He played us portions at the time – it struck me as a work which was powerfully moving in the quiet a capella passages – the counterpoint always strong and dignified. But I cannot continue like this and it would take a volume to put down all my impressions like that since last May. I must content myself with beginning it last night – and see how long I can continue this ‘good work’ for.

I arrived at St James’ Square in company with Ernest [Chapman] a little earlier than usual. We went straight up to the studio where we found Mrs [Robert] Mayer, a Miss Shaw, and a rather dark fellow in evening dress.

Lynnwood Farnam

An American organ-builder wanted to test and try out a few English organs to investigate a certain balance of dynamics throughout the range. He would play a middle C and then go down the scale and see whether the sound got softer or louder, and this was a man called J. B. Jamison, who was with the Estey Organ Company, and then he went to Aeolian-Skinner and then I believe he finished up with Austin’s. I’ve been delighted to see a book by him, Organ Design and Appraisal, in which there is a paragraph which reminisces about the time he was in London and Lynnwood Farnam was there too.

I went round with Jamison and his London guide, Gilbert Benham – a man who wrote articles for The Organ – and took photographs of organ consoles. Fortuitously, Lynnwood Farnam and pupils of his, Robert Cato and Alexander McCurdy, happened to be in London at the same time. They wanted to do an organ crawl, so they came along, and it was my immense privilege to hear Lynnwood Farnam play that year's repertory on about half a dozen of the best London organs at the time. Now first of all who he was, what he was, I knew nothing – but for the first time I found a man who played the pieces by heart and adapted each organ he encountered marvellously to the requirements of the piece.

When you’re used to even eminent recitalists, to go along with them and do organ practice instead of just registering and orchestrating it, this was a new thing to me. It is true that G. D. Cunningham was a marvellous player and a memory player, a romantic player and also a man of fine taste. Yet as a town hall organist at Birmingham, Cunningham had to play rehearsals and do the Oberon Overture, the odd Wagner transcription. Lynnwood Farnam was in a different league altogether. He played organ music – transcriptions minimal.

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FROM the beginning the BBC operated a civil-service-style records and filing system, which particularly in the early decades maintained a rigorous permanent record of activities. Furthermore, decisions and arrangements across the BBC were based on the circulation of paper minutes, which were extensively annotated by participants in any particular project, leaving a vivid paper-trail of how things were done and what those involved really thought. To examine these archives we need to refer to the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, where there are files on Cyril Scott as a composer, and contracts for him as a contributor, both as pianist and (very occasional) speaker.

While Cyril Scott was widely respected in his lifetime, not only as a composer but also as a pianist, that regard was based on an enduring established reputation, particularly for his light music and especially piano pieces, rather than constant performances of his latest and more elaborate compositions. His chamber music and songs tended to be heard more than his more ambitious orchestral works.

Championed by Sir Henry Wood, Scott was heard on various occasions during the first thirty years of the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts, and he enjoyed a number of performances in the early days after the BBC took over in 1927. The Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts (which moved to the Royal Albert Hall after the Queen's Hall was bombed in 1941) are a good measure of the BBC's interest. Between 1927 and 1954 Scott enjoyed nine orchestral billings (though only eight actually took place, because of a wartime cancellation) and seven solo songs with piano. Scott's last orchestral performance at the Proms was in 1954, since when nothing by him has been heard at these concerts. For the record, this is Scott's representation from 1927: