The answer would seem to be Neville Cardus. The name will almost certainly not be familiar to readers from other countries (unless they play cricket), and because Cardus died in 1975 I imagine that a large proportion of others will not have heard of his either. He was an interesting man, and my attention was caught today, when I was listening to the car radio waiting for my weekly yoga class to start, to hear a reflection on his work.
The main point of this tribute was to assess his contribution as a music critic, which came as a surprise to me because I only knew about his reputation as a writer on cricket. Cardus was a journalist who worked for the Manchester Guardian (the ancestor of the current British paper The Guardian.) He was initially the paper’s cricket correspondent, and built up a reputation for the quality of his writing. On the side (as it were) he also had a passion for music, and when the paper’s music critic died suddenly in 1927 Cardus was drafted in temporarily to fill the gap. So popular were his contributions in this new role that he retained both posts until 1940, when he returned only to sports journalism.
The person discussing Cardus on the radio this morning had great praise for his ability to write as a critic–well-informed, lucid and with an ability to draw the readers’ interest through his writing instead of deterring them with a parade of technical expertise. Above all, he was able to convey the fact that he enjoyed music, and saw his job as a critic principally as the duty to communicate that enjoyment to others.
Regular readers of this blog will no doubt see where this is going, possibly remembering the several occasions on which I have made less than friendly comments about art critics. There is a very important point to be made here, however, and that is to draw attention to the requirement that any art critic should do what Cardus did for both music (and even more so for cricket), and give expression to his or her own pleasure in the experience.