Michael Kennedy, who has died aged 88, was not one of the editors in my life. But as the Daily Telegraph’s long-established northern editor in Manchester he was an old friend and the only genuinely musical editor I have ever met.
How, amid his official duties, he found time to write so much, and so well, about music, I shall never know. But his books on Elgar, Britten, and Richard Strauss, whom he revered above Mahler - about whom he also wrote a book - remain very readable, as do his biographies of Sir John Barbirolli and Sir Adrian Boult, though his masterpiece was his study of the music of Vaughan Williams.
His Oxford Dictionary of Music is still the best single-volume reference book of its kind - though Paul Griffiths’s Penguin dictionary is more illuminating and refreshingly opinionated if not always so accurate - and his sympathetic views on Richard Strauss’s Germanism remain interesting though inevitably controversial.
As a newspaper editor he had an eye for talent, finding two freelances in Glasgow, Kenneth Walton and Michael Tumelty, who went on to hold major posts on The Scotsman and The Herald.
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