While serving in the navy in the second world war, the music critic, journalist and author Michael Kennedy, who has died aged 88, wrote a letter “in a fit of homesickness” to Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music had moved him. That was to initiate a lasting friendship. In his will, Vaughan Williams stipulated that his personal life should be documented by his widow Ursula, while Kennedy should write about his music. The two books complemented each other, as intended. Kennedy’s The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1964) was not a detailed critical appraisal – only the symphonies and a handful of other major works are discussed – but it provided a magnificently comprehensive catalogue of information about the entire oeuvre, clarifying and correcting chronologies and setting the works in a biographical context.
The Vaughan Williams book was typical of writing irradiated by the kindness and empathic understanding that he demonstrated on a personal level. Next came his Portrait of Elgar (1968), equally meticulously researched and eloquently written. As one of the earliest modern studies of the composer, Kennedy’s book was a seminal contribution to an understanding of the complex psychology of Elgar: a provincial, Catholic outsider who masked his deep insecurities by the construction of a country squire’s image, complete with tweeds and bushy moustache.
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