J. B. Steane

John Barry Steane (12 April 1928 – 17 March 2011) was an English music critic, musicologist, literary scholar and teacher, with a particular interest in singing and the human voice.

Among Steane's works are critical studies of Christopher Marlowe and Alfred Tennyson, and a series of books on music, concentrating on singing and singers.

After leaving school and before going up to the University of Cambridge, he undertook his national service, where among those he met was Sergeant Edward Greenfield, who became a lifelong friend and later a colleague of Steane in music criticism.

[2] An obituarist wrote in 2011 that Steane influenced many aspects of the school's life, including not only English, but also sport, music and drama, and "the breadth of his intellect and the warmth of his personality made him an inspirational guide for generations of students".

An obituary in The Times, noting that choral music, and particularly the music of the Anglican liturgy, remained one of his greatest loves,[8] observes, "his beautifully observed and straightforwardly expressed views about the art of singing brought him to the attention of the EMI record producer Walter Legge, who suggested to the editors of Gramophone magazine that he would be a useful adornment to its panel of contributors.

The reviewer praised his ability to characterise a singer with phrases of "poetic refinement", though not eschewing humour, quoting his description of Nellie Melba changing in the course of one song "from Juliet at the ball to a knees-up-mother-Brown pearly-queen".

[10] In The Musical Times, Harold Rosenthal vigorously dissented from some of Steane's opinions, but he too praised his gift for the "apt choice of a word or phrase to sum up a singer's art or voice".

The online combined edition of Grove at May 2011 listed 359 articles by him, mostly about singers, but with some about other subjects such as the conductor Tullio Serafin and the pianist Graham Johnson.

His final contribution to Gramophone, an appreciation of a vintage recording of The Barber of Seville with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, was published posthumously in May 2011.