In Thursday’s (12/17) Independent (London), Adrian Hamilton writes that opera critic Rodney Milnes died on December 5 in Cheltenham, England, of cancer. “Witty, sometimes wicked and ever wise, Rodney Milnes, or Rodney Milnes Blumer to give him his full name, was the critic who made opera writing as entertaining as the performance…. As opera critic for The Spectator, editor of Opera magazine and finally critic for The Times, he sought to make the art form not only endlessly entertaining but also profoundly humane. Born in 1936 in Stafford, the son of a surgeon, he … studied history at Christ Church [at Oxford].… He started writing opera reviews under the pen name of Rodney Milnes for Queen magazine, then the trendy chronicler of swinging London … before becoming opera critic for The Spectator for two decades from 1970 to 1990…. He revised Leslie Orrey’s Opera, A Concise History for Thames and Hudson, helped Amanda Holden with her tome, The Penguin Opera Guide, for Viking and undertook radio and lectures, including a Radio 3 series on producing Verdi and another revealing one on male friendship in opera. He also translated a number of works for the ENO, most notably … Dvorák’s Rusalka.”
Posted December 18, 2015
