Understanding All Music

In 1903 a young Edward Dent (1876–1957) was summoned to the cultural fortress at I Tatti, above Florence, and, fragile tea-cup in his shaking hands, was politely, relentlessly grilled on his ideals by art critic Bernard Berenson. Terrified, but determined not to compromise, Dent found himself stammering that he wanted to ‘understand all music’. ‘Even the bad music?’ his host pressed. ‘But what about Taste?’ Dent stuck to his guns; it was one of the defining moments of his life, first for recognizing the difference between taste and understanding, and second, for taking a deliberate stand against the opinion of a monumental figure like Berenson. The episode remained with him, and at a time when some critics wielded enormous power through diktat, Dent brought another dimension to the critic's role, that of understanding. The scholar, he came to believe, is best placed to explain the mostly opaque processes of composition, whether Mozart's or cutting-edge contemporary; and besides being one of the foremost scholars of his time, Dent was also a gifted writer.

Pinning him down is another matter entirely. Dent applied his scholarship in a number of inimitable, unconventional ways; in his day, few future Professors of Music stage-managed their own production of The Magic Flute or did hack-work for a living. But Dent was a maverick, ‘a highly idiosyncratic character … in many ways a bundle of contradictions’.