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. His 36-year career as a schoolmaster overlapped with his career as a music critic and author of books on Elizabethan drama, and opera and concert singers.

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. He contributed to a range of musical journals, including Gramophone and The Musical Times, and wrote articles for the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Life and career Early years Steane was born in Coventry, the son of William John Steane and his wife, Winifred. While there, he became a member of the Coventry Cathedral choir. When the cathedral was destroyed by bombing in 1940, Steane moved to the neighbouring Holy Trinity Church. 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. The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) wrote, "He has turned an acute and sensitive mind upon Christopher Marlowe and both the author and ourselves should be thankful to him." For the same publisher, Steane edited and introduced Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday in an edition published in 1965, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, in 1967.

Steane's literary interests were not confined to the Elizabethans; in 1966 he wrote a volume on Tennyson for a new series, "Literature in Perspective", to which his fellow contributors included Margaret Drabble, Norman Sherry and Fred Inglis; the TLS thought Steane's book "brilliant, informative and admirably written", and much the best of the four. In 1969 he edited, and wrote the introduction to, the Penguin edition of Marlowe's plays. In 1972 he published his last contribution to English literary scholarship, an edition of Thomas Nashe's, The Unfortunate Traveller and other works. 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." In 1999, the magazine published in book form a collection of these articles from the previous 25 years. 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". Music & Letters called it "a book for the connoisseur". American Record Guide called Steane's erudition "formidable" and the book "essential". His literary expertise was employed in a piece about the poets whose music Britten chose to set. Other articles drew on his long and wide experience of opera and song, from Puccini to Hugo Wolf. He also contributed many reviews and articles to Opera (from 1981), Opera Now (from 1989), and Classic Record Collector. He wrote the articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Roy Henderson and Nellie Melba. Steane's Voices, Singers and Critics was published in 1992, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: A Career on Record (with Alan Sanders) in 1995, and his three-volume Singers of the Century appeared between 1996 and 2000.

Steane retired from Merchant Taylor's in 1988. In 2008 he was honoured by the Worshipful Company of Musicians, on the occasion of his 80th birthday. He died at the age of 82. 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.