This book remembers that larger-than-life character in the musical world, Felix Aprahamian, critic on The Sunday Times for half a lifetime, record reviewer and familiar voice on the BBC both on Radio 3 and the World Service. Lewis Foreman met Felix Aprahamian in the mid-1960s and first visited and interviewed him at Methuen Park in 1969 in connection with ongoing research into the life and music of Arnold Bax and John Ireland which were eventually published in 1983 and 2011. Later both the editorauthors of this volume consulted Felix extensively when they were writing their book London, a Musical Gazetteer (2005). Felix was a legendary but remarkably approachable character, whom we first encountered at early meetings of the Delius Society, and later at concerts and operas.

It is clear that Felix valued live performance above almost everything. He would often be seen leaving a concert or opera early, after having listened to whatever special item he had come to hear, so that he could slip into another concert somewhere else. One might encounter him thus at the Wigmore Hall (his preference for discreet arrival and departure was the back row on the left-hand side). One remembers once meeting him leaving a concert at the interval and him remarking – ‘Oh, I think I have time to pick up the last act of the ENO's Bohème.’ He had no thought to pay to get into any of these; he was so well known and such a power in the land that he could just breeze in if there was an empty seat, and who knows, he might cover the event in the press somewhere.

In this volume we would like to present our tribute to Felix largely in his own, very eloquent, words. Felix's career as a critic and musical commentator spanned more than seventy years and he is an important documentary source on both the British music and the French music of the mid-twentieth century. We have researched in Felix's extensive surviving archives. He kept a detailed narrative diary only for a very few years in the mid-1930s, and here Susan has transcribed the manuscript for 1933–5 complete, for the first time.