Of all composer anniversary celebrations, Beethoven, on the surface, might be felt one of the least necessary. What new advocacy does some of the most famous music ever created need? So sniff some. The cover we’ve commissioned probably offers a hint that I don’t share that view. The greater the art, the greater the joy to be found in exploring, and re-exploring it throughout life. If it continues to inspire the most profound artists to heights and depths of insight and introspection, then it can, and should, do likewise for us too. So how to respond to Beethoven year? Might you make a personal pledge? To perhaps listen anew to the far-from-easy-listening late quartets? To compare sonatas from two pianists united by a score but separated by a century of recording technology and personal experience? Or perhaps I could ask you to harness Beethoven’s fame to encourage someone to try classical music who may never have done so before (safe in the knowledge that Gramophone readers will direct them to some remarkable recordings)?

While I would usually continue my introduction to a new year in such upbeat tone, over the course of writing this issue the music world lost two people who, in their different fields, were central to many people’s musical lives, and about whom I’d like to reflect. What struck me about the tributes to both Mariss Jansons and Sir Stephen Cleobury were how they conveyed the loss of conductors of both extraordinary musicianship, but also humility and humanity.

As Michael McManus put it in Gramophone’s final interview with Jansons, the conductor had played a key role in ‘ushering out the demagogues and taskmasters of yore, replacing them with a democratic, even republican, spirit on the podium’. Cleobury, meanwhile, who died just two months after retiring as Music Director of King’s College, Cambridge, felt even more so the antithesis of that description of conductors of the past. Of course the nature of a choirmaster is to be standing not in front of thousands, but in between two ranks of choristers, before an audience who aren’t even facing in your direction, and aren’t actually an audience at all but fellow worshippers. For all the fame of King’s, its primary purpose is to sing the liturgy – beautifully, profoundly, but attracting neither attention nor even applause – a task which, for 37 years, it fulfilled daily under Cleobury.

But to return to Jansons, I rather think something similar is true of the finest orchestral conductors too (aside from the absence of applause). Star maestros may be box-office draws, but music isn’t a spectator sport; our heroes are those who enable music to speak to us most directly. The hushed intensity that can follow a Mahler symphony, say, is also a communal experience, in which all of us – maestro, musicians, members of the audience – are enriched by, and humbled before, the music.

Cleobury and Jansons both seemed to be embodiments of the artist who truly places the music before themselves. That, of course, is usually – even necessarily – the case with all great musicians. But how important it is to pay tribute to men such as these who have served as devoted beacons of this belief.

martin.cullingford@markallengroup.com

This article appeared in the January issue of Gramophone - subscribe today