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. ==Bibliography==