Eric Blom

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric Walter Blom was born in Bern, Switzerland on the 20th of August 1888, and he died on the 11th of April 1959, but in between he shaped how the English-speaking world understood music for most of the twentieth century. His father carried Danish and British blood; his mother was Swiss. He grew up educated in German-speaking Switzerland before moving to England, and he never took a formal music degree. He taught himself. That detail matters, because Blom spent his career building monuments of musical scholarship at a time when the field was dominated by conservatory insiders. How does a self-taught Swiss-born writer end up editing the definitive English-language music dictionary of his era? And what happens when the most authoritative music reference work of its time is shaped by a man with very strong opinions of his own?

• 2. From Proms to Fleet Street

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  Blom's first foothold in music journalism came through Rosa Newmarch, whom he assisted in writing program notes for Sir Henry J. Wood's Prom Concerts. Those notes were noticed for their abundance of accurate information, which tells you something about the standard Blom set early. From 1923 to 1931 he served as the London music correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, covering concerts from the capital and filing copy north. He then moved to the Birmingham Post, where he worked from 1931 to 1946, succeeding A. J. Sheldon in the role. By 1949 he was back in London, writing as music critic for The Observer. He retired from that post's chief critic role in 1953 but kept contributing weekly pieces right up to his death. That span, from the Proms to a national Sunday paper, gave Blom an unusually wide and sustained platform from which to form and express his views. It also made him, by the time the great dictionary project arrived, one of the most experienced music writers in Britain.

• 3. Building Grove V

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  Blom's predecessor H. C. Colles had kept Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians at five volumes for the third edition in 1927, then at six for the fourth in 1940. Blom took over for the fifth edition and drove it to nine volumes, published in 1954. That expansion alone signals the scale of ambition he brought to the job. He personally wrote hundreds of entries inside those nine volumes, including the article on Arthur Sullivan, and he translated contributions from foreign writers himself, drawing on his fluency in German, Danish, Italian, and French. He had also been editor of Music & Letters from 1937, a role he paused in 1950 because the Grove work consumed him, and resumed in 1954 only because the journal's proprietor and then-editor Richard Capell died. A Supplementary Volume followed in 1961, after Blom had died; he had done most of the work on it, and his introduction and acknowledgments were preserved inside it, with Denis Stevens credited as associate editor alongside him. Grove V was reprinted in 1966, 1968, 1970, 1973, and 1975, remaining the standard edition until the New Grove appeared in 1980.

• 4. Strong Opinions on Record

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  Blom could be almost gushing about his favourites, most particularly Mozart and Mozart's operas. He was equally direct about composers he rated lower. On Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes he wrote that it was "so impressive and original that only the most absurd prejudice will keep it out of the great foreign opera houses." On the Sibelius Violin Concerto, he argued that the solo part "is closely interwoven with the symphonic tissue, and is therefore neglected by the average virtuoso" - a minority view given that the concerto is among the most frequently performed and recorded in the repertoire. His remarks on Rachmaninoff proved the most notorious. He wrote that Rachmaninoff did not have the individuality of Taneyev or Medtner, that he was technically gifted but severely limited, his music monotonous in texture, and that the popular success of some of his works in his own lifetime was not likely to last. New York critic Harold C. Schonberg, in his Lives of the Great Composers, called that assessment "one of the most outrageously snobbish and even stupid statements ever to be found in a work that is supposed to be an objective reference." Schonberg's own counterattack was, in his words, "equally outspoken" and not "immune to snobbery of his own."

• 5. Mozart, Murder, and Other Work

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  In his capacity as musical adviser to the Dent publishing firm, Blom edited the Master Musicians series and contributed the volume on Mozart to it in 1935. He was also responsible for discovering a number of young authors and giving them their first opportunities to write music biography. His first standalone lexicographical work was Everyman's Dictionary of Music, published by J. M. Dent in 1946; it went through several editions and was revised in 1988 by D. Cummings under the title The New Everyman Dictionary of Music. He assisted Gervase Hughes on The Music of Arthur Sullivan, translated documents for Otto Erich Deutsch's Mozart: A Documentary Biography published in 1965, and in 1956, for the Mozart bicentenary, published some of Mozart's letters in Emily Anderson's translation. On a very different register, in 1941 Blom wrote a detective novel, Death on the Down Beat, under the pseudonym Sebastian Farr. The plot turns on the shooting of a conductor during a performance of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. The book was republished in 2022 under the British Library Crime Classics imprint.

• 6. The Funeral Mistake

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  Once back in London at the end of the 1940s, Blom lived at 10 Alma Terrace in Allen Street, Kensington. He had married Marjory Spencer in 1923; she died in 1952. Their son, Michael Blom, designed many of Massey Ferguson's best-selling post-war tractors. Their daughter, Celia, married the author Paul Jennings and illustrated some of his books. Frank Howes, chief music critic of The Times, wrote Blom's biography, which appeared in the Supplementary Volume of Grove V in 1961. Blom had made one final, specific request for his own funeral: that the organist play J. S. Bach's final chorale prelude, Vor Deinen Thron tret' ich zu Dir, which translates as "I step before Thy throne, O Lord." The instruction was misunderstood. "Bach chorale" was all the organist received, and what was played instead was the Barcarolle from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. The man who had spent decades measuring the precision of musical knowledge went out to one of the most incongruous mix-ups imaginable. His Grove V stayed in print for more than two decades after his death, and the translation of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail that he rendered as The Elopement from the Harem is among the lesser-known works still carrying his name.