Fame is a quixotic beast. It is an entirely mysterious process how and why some become household names while others often far more deserving vanish from the selective memory-banks of history. Few people now know who Edward J. Dent was, which is probably the way he would have liked it, since throughout his incredibly productive life he never sought celebrity however much he might have deserved it. After the Second World War, having seen through one of his lifelong ambitions, formal government support for the establishment of national opera, ballet and theatre as well as what became the Arts Council, Dent refused a knighthood from the Attlee government. It was a typical gesture, modest and perverse in equal measure; he knew his own worth. Briefly: Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Professor of Music 1926–41, Dent helped to found and to run what became English National Opera, the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), the International Society for Musical Research (ISMR), and was in on the establishment of the Arts Council. He helped found Musica Britannica; his editions of early opera, his translations of about fifty-six operas into English, his productions of The Magic Flute (1911) and The Fairy Queen (1914/20), beside his work on the earliest productions of the Marlowe Dramatic Society or Handel operas, rescued early works from obscurity. He researched and wrote the first biographies of Alessandro Scarlatti and Ferruccio Busoni, wrote seminal books on Mozart, on opera and theatre, besides hundreds of articles on musical and non-musical subjects. A founder member of the first gay rights organisation, the British Society for the Study of Sexual Psychology (BSSSP) in 1913, Dent was also a member of the British Academy; President of the Musical Association, the Philharmonic Society, the Purcell Society and the Liszt Society; a member of the Church Music Society; he helped to found the Drama League and the British Music Society; he was on the League of Nations music committee; and more.

But Dent's real genius was as a facilitator, providing the mind and energy underpinning some of the major cultural undertakings of the past century, while working behind the scenes or through his writings suited his subversive and mischievous spirit.

Dent wrote this unusually reflective letter to Lawrence after his trip to Italy in April 1935. He was desperately tired, and the ‘new period’ in his life was throwing up challenges which undermined his usual self-confidence, replacing it with fears both vague and specific. Travelling abroad was not the escape or liberation it had been, and his other life was being forced back into the shadows. ‘I am always getting calls [in Berlin and Prague] from total strangers, and when I ask their names they reply “Sie kennen mich nicht”, which I find embarrassing, and always fear they are blackmailers.’ Such approaches, whether actually from blackmailers or (more likely) refugees, now upset him badly, confusing as they did the personal with the more distant threat. For the next year, up to the 1936 joint festival and congress at Barcelona, Dent was constantly battered by political forces, especially those government- backed internal ones in the ISCM and ISMR, mustered against him personally and against everything he stood for. The political storms blowing were anti-Semitic, homophobic and populist, the methods undermining, so Dent's depression at this point is entirely understandable, from both professional and personal standpoints.

1907–1908

Dent's obituary of Rupert Brooke, quoted above, is also a memorial to everything his generation had brought to Cambridge, wrecked by the Great War in which Brooke and so many of his contemporaries were killed. At the time, Dent needed the painful exercise of writing it to remind himself of the ideals which had so captivated him on his return from Germany that October 1907, and which fuelled his own ideas of turning scholarship into performance right up to the war and beyond.

It took him a while to recognise that ‘new spirit’; he returned to Cambridge far too preoccupied with his own projects to see what others around him were doing. First, he felt duty bound to help and encourage friends and proteges, expanding their horizons, while loyalty, even to the most difficult, awkward friends like O’Neil Phillips, was fundamental. Dent always worked to bring together the eclectic strands of his own complex experience, so quickly made sure that celebrities like Busoni and excellent unknowns like Certani and Phillips came to Cambridge.

Possibly because of his prevarication over the previous three years, by the time Dent came back to Cambridge as its new Professor of Music, it was on his own clearly defined terms. He needed the financial stability and had negotiated a decent stipend, but his own independence was always Dent's primary personal concern, the freedom to do things in his own way, his public life facilitating the private side. The short university terms marked some useful boundaries, and Dent was determined to devote term-times to his professorial duties. The actual election that October was a foregone conclusion, the result of long, careful negotiations. Vaughan Williams, the only other serious candidate, flatly refused to stand, and Dent had made it clear to Hugh Allen as the unofficial chairman of Electors that he would only accept a unanimous decision. They knew what they were getting.

‘The period between Wood's death and my election was very trying’, he wrote to Lawrence from Berlin:

He had no illusions: ‘I am distinctly amused to note what a lot of my congratulations seem to be moved principally by a sense of relief at the deliverance from horror’, he wrote to JB.

1931–1933

The year 1931 marked the high point of Dent's optimism and enthusiasm, with the birth of Sadler's Wells, his election as President of the ISMR – the only person to have been President of both the ISMR and the ISCM – and as Chair of the Philharmonic Society standing committee, and the first ISCM festival to be held in England. In Cambridge, beside nurturing new generations of musicians at the university, he had been co-opted onto the Cambridgeshire committee to produce an important report on the teaching of music in schools. By the end of the year the Busoni biography was nearly drafted, mostly because any relaxation he managed to seize over the past five years had been centred around his Busoni work, in the Dolomites with Carlo and in Berlin. The only committee Dent gave up was the League of Nations music (‘I am not sorry; it was a great waste of time, and on the whole, a bore’), his internationalism and teaching now focused elsewhere.

1931 was also a year of ‘intrigues’, around the ISCM Festival in London and Oxford, the conflicting but purposeful interests of the BBC and the Philharmonic Society, Sadler's Wells and other operatic ventures, and quite separately, to get JB elected Professor of Spanish at Oxford: ‘I am doing what I can about Oxford … which included letters and background talks between Sheppard and Stewart from Cambridge talking it up with Dawkins at Oxford’. Behind all the intrigues lay Dent's continuing vision for the institutions developing in his care, outward-looking and inclusive.

1910–1911

With the big decision to produce The Magic Flute, opera became the focus and unifying element of Dent's life, this amateur Cambridge production only the first skirmish in his lifelong battle for opera in Britain. Producing an opera to his exacting standards would be a statement of defiance to the musical establishment, and in choosing Mozart's last opera, Dent was being even more radical in his approach. He knew that for an ambitious scholar to take what appeared to be such a massive diversion from his scholarly pursuits might appear academic suicide, especially when he ought to have been working on his doctorate. Colleagues like Edward Naylor were highly critical of the whole enterprise. But Dent was deliberately taking a course very different from the usual routes, and far more important in the long run than another Hellas would have been. In his teaching, increasingly in his writing, and now through performance and production, Dent was finding a working vehicle for his high standards of scholarship.

In 1910 ‘most of Mozart's operas were almost completely unknown in this country’; Mozart was somewhat in the shadow of late nineteenth-century opera, while The Magic Flute was generally held in low esteem. Although The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni were well established in the repertory – usually in heavily compromised versions – Mozart's other operas were largely ignored. Dent wanted to give Mozart and The Magic Flute a leg up into the twentieth century. ‘Idomeneo had never been performed here at all; Die Entführung had been revived by Sir Thomas Beecham for a few performances in 1910’, Cosi fan tutte had one performance in English in 1890, La clemenza di Tito abandoned after 1840 as being hopelessly old-fashioned.

Berlin may have seemed to some of Dent’s colleagues an odd choice for his musical sabbatical; Dent himself was uncertain about it at first. Going to Berlin meant facing up to the next impossible life task he had set himself, composing something good enough to submit for a Mus D or finding some other way forward, like the growing demand for his writings, but the next steps still eluded him.

He delayed his arrival for two months, stopping at Fano for a fortnight’s holiday at ‘this haven of rest’ after the hectic but unsatisfactory years of Cambridge music, bathing and his usual wandering, as the mood took him, playing the piano in the local cafes, going to a bizarre local production of Gorky’s The Lower Depths in Italian, even turning down a plea from Hermann Kretzschmar to give a Scarlatti paper to the prestigious IMG conference in Basel. In this idle vein, over the next month Dent’s only work was a stop at Urbino on the way to Rome to inspect the Palazzo Albani library, ‘three fine rooms full’ of scores and libretti ‘of about 1700–1730, including many of D.S.’ For most of September he was loosely based in Rome, where Emilio had found him lodgings at 6 Viaolo Cartari, his only music the military bands in the Piazzo Colonna playing Massenet’s Érinnyes, which Dent found ‘dull … Massenet’s furies all seemed to wear pink tights’. All these open-air concerts gave Dent the idea for an article on the subject. On 29 September he went on to Florence, where he found Cust in ‘a great state of excitement, as after a series of troubles (all related in detail) he has got engaged to an American widow’, while his young man Harry Burton was leaving to set up in partnership as a photographer. ‘I dined with Cust: Burton was out so I had many confidences outpoured & much scandal: also much talk about Edward Carpenter wch interested me deeply.’

1895–1896

Dent’s walk through the Gatehouse at King’s College that October, 1895 was not simply a rite of passage, more the first such step in a lifetime of travels that afforded escape and the fresh, foreign ideas that stimulated his boundless curiosity. ‘Life only really begins at university’: Dent often quoted Bismarck’s view, remembering the tall, gangly younger self who had entered King’s with such purpose and sense of liberation. The purpose was not the one for which he had been awarded his Classics scholarship of 80 pounds per annum, but music; the liberation was from his loving family, who – especially his mother – continued to disapprove of his stated career choice. But Dent was separated from Ribston by more than the 150 miles (240 km); the family nickname ‘Joe’ was quickly ditched, and his Eton ‘speaking bags’ sold to Sydney Waterlow. King’s was his first real taste of adult freedom; with his King’s scholarship even more than his Eton scholarship Dent could enjoy some sense of independence, though until his majority most of the bills would still be sent to his mother. ‘Madame’, as he referred to her, found such loose ends vexing, and for years Dent would be on the receiving end of her constant disapprobation:

I know that in my old age I become more and ‘possessed’ by the devil – I call him Tityvillus, as I suspect he is that famous musical character of the English Middle Ages … who makes me see everything in a ridiculous light.

Old age is not for the faint-hearted.

Dent's seventieth birthday on 16 July 1946 was celebrated by a garden party at the Hirsch family home in west Cambridge, with friends and colleagues who were also ‘tacitly expressing to him their gratitude for his inestimable service in helping to secure the Paul Hirsch Music Library for the nation’. Dent had written an article in The Times, ‘Need for a central music library: Value of the Hirsch collection’,

stirring up public interest in the case. One of the world's great music collections was now in the British Museum, the cornerstone of a national music library, bought with a ‘special grant’ from the Treasury and a grant from the Pilgrim Trust of 120,000 pounds. ‘At the end of the war, it was far from easy to raise such a very large sum of money, and the successful conclusion of the delicate negotiations was due in no small measure to Dent's powerful advocacy, both in public and behind the scenes.’ The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Dent's old Cambridge friend Hugh Dalton. Although offered a knighthood by the Attlee government, Dent turned it down, never mentioning it in his letters.

Cambridge finally rewarded Dent with an honorary doctorate in 1947, but far more important to him, Music was at last on the Tripos, with a solid curriculum in place. Visiting Cambridge was now unalloyed pleasure; each time Dent could see all around him just what he had been working to achieve there, with the Marlowe Society more active than ever, the Greek Play revived, and eventually the Cambridge University Opera Society thriving beside the CUMS and the CUMC. And his part was appreciated:

1939–1943

For the first year of war, Dent was forcibly laid up in Cambridge, which in many ways suited him, a rare opportunity for undisturbed writing and research. But he had to be reminded to keep still. His ulcer had caught up with him again in November 1939, when on a trip down to London, he suddenly haemorrhaged badly: ‘must have bled nearly to death; I certainly felt that I had got nothing left but a sense of humour!’ After a hasty operation he recuperated at New Quebec Street, looked after by one of his German refugees, the dancer Heinz Lander, also a trained nurse, then returning to Cambridge to convalesce at the Evelyn Nursing Home. In spite of a night nurse who liked to give her captive audience ghoulish tales of previous patients, he gradually recovered, by January feeling well enough to move back into Panton Street, his ulcer reduced to a ‘tiny spot’, and extreme caution advised to obviate future flare-ups. For years this was to be another life pattern: haemorrhage, treatment, convalescence, then an excessive burst of activity which set it all off again.

Once again, war had changed everything. On his return from the USA that September, Dent had been ‘horrified’ to find London silent, in darkness, the theatres closed. ‘I suppose it is good for the population to get accustomed to air-raid conditions a good long time before they begin.’ At Panton Street he found that two ‘females’, schoolteachers from St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, had been billeted; some four thousand evacuees were now in the town and needing places to live. Exhausted, his stomach already giving him pain again, he needed his house to himself. But Hills, ‘in one of her moods’, made it very clear that she liked the two schoolteachers, who helped her around the house and were good company. He gave in: ‘I was given a very good dinner to-night, probably as a sop to Cerberus.’ Cambridge had responded to war quickly and efficiently.

The Ribston Pippin is an old variety of apple, originating at Ribston Hall in the North Riding of Yorkshire, probably from French seeds sent to Sir Henry Goodricke (1642–1705), who admired French architecture as well as French apples. Having enjoyed a remarkably successful career as soldier and diplomat in volatile times, when he succeeded to the baronetcy in 1670 Sir Henry built himself a grand house in a French style, which still sits high on a bend in the River Nidd, rather less of it than appears in the Kipp engraving of c.1707, and lacking its original fortified garden wall, but a handsome and elegant establishment nevertheless. By then Ribston, earlier ‘Ripestane’, already had a long and colourful past. It once marked the river crossing point of the Great North Road, and in the twelfth century those great protectors of important byways, the Knights Templar, established a place of refuge and respite there, of which only the austerely beautiful chapel remains, now attached to the house itself. It is the coldest as well as the oldest part of the house, and young Edward Dent often bitterly complained of its penetrating cold when forced to work in the room next to it. A lifelong aversion to damp and to institutionalised religion probably began at home.

Ribston was never home to the aristocracy; rather, throughout its long history it fostered under its various roofs a succession of landed gentry, the upwardly mobile middle classes who formed the bedrock of establishment England: bishops, diplomats, politicians, merchants, soldiers, less creative than acute and certainly strongminded. The Dent family are only the most recent of these to take over house and estate, arriving there in 1834, just before Victoria came to the throne, and quietly, unobtrusively, they began take a hand in county affairs.

It was Dent's solid ‘late Victorian’ background, as he described it, which gave him both the built-in confidence of his class and the foundations for a lifelong rebellion against it. He used it, wore its protective mantle unconsciously and spent his life undermining its certainties.

1922–1923

The history of the founding of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) / Internationale Gesellschaft fur neue Musik (IGNM) has been well documented, but its sudden burst into life in August 1922 was neither spontaneous nor entirely calculated; rather an opportunity recognised and seized to give contemporary music a forum and an internationalist outlook. Previous fragmented efforts included the various festivals which had captured Dent's attention that summer, the high point being the festival of contemporary chamber music at Salzburg from 7 to 10 August, organised by the Schoenberg circles in Vienna, largely the brain-child of composer Rudolf Reti, who had enlisted Dent's friend Egon Wellesz in a Vienna coffee-house the winter before. Reti was an idealist, an enthusiast, who wanted a ‘celebration’ (Feier) of contemporary music rather than simply another festival. His idea was to expand the Schoenberg circle by inviting like-minded contemporary musicians – ‘composers, interpreters, critics, etc.’ – from all lands, even the USA, in an internationalist spirit, a contrast to the current strong nationalist tendencies Dent had been documenting. His gushing enthusiasm and verbosity were later unkindly compared by Dent to ‘a dribbling tap’, but he carried the tricky project through. Having no money, and with inflation in Austria nearly as bad as in Germany, they persuaded Viennese bookseller-cum-concert agent Hugo Heller and Emil Hertzka of Universal Edition to underwrite the event, very much in their business interests as the main publishers of contemporary music. Younger composers in Vienna had felt stifled; music was dominated by the conservative critics Joseph Marx and Julius Korngold – the latter, as Dent remarked, ‘would recognize no modern composer except his own son’, a Dentish exaggeration, but close. The Schoenberg private contemporary concerts – Privataufführungen – had been set up in direct response to such local obstructions, but now the composers involved wanted to expand the remit of these.