Richard Morrison

How shocking was it for a critic to compare The Beatles to Mahler?

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The outpouring of admiration for The Beatles on page 44 of this issue prompted me to scour the archives of The Times for possibly the most famous (or infamous) newspaper article written about the Fab Four. Published in late December 1963, when 'Beatlemania' was at its zenith, the article was written by William Mann, then The Times's chief music critic.

Bill was far from being a stuffy old fogey. To be invited to lunch at his house was to be plied with all sorts of temptations: culinary, alcoholic and chemical. But he was undoubtedly a formidable authority on musical matters. So, when he declared, in his opening sentence, that 'John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the talented young musicians from Liverpool' were 'the outstanding English composers of 1963', a shock-wave must have swept across breakfast tables around the country.

Remember that in 1963 the likes of Britten, Tippett and Walton were in their prime. And Mann wasn't finished with his provocations. Praising The Beatles' songs for their 'pandiatonic clusters', 'flat submediant key switches' and 'Aeolian cadences', he went on to make comparisons with technical devices used by a romantic genius (Mahler) and a modernist maverick (Peter Maxwell Davies).