This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani tweeted the other day asking, how many handshakes to Hitler? Most respondents touched Adolf at three or four removes. I managed it in one contact.

John Denison, his name was. A 20-ish horn player in the London orchestras, he was sent by Sir Thomas Beecham to Bayreuth in 1934 to buy Wagner tubas for a Covent Garden Ring cycle. John located the pub where the brass players drank.

After a couple of steins, he was urged to play Rheingold with them the following night. “Hang on, I haven’t got a black suit,” said John. “In the pit no one can see us,” laughed the musicians. “We wear vests and shorts.”

All went noisily down the Rhine until, as the curtain fell, two men in black uniform ordered John to come with them. Round the auditorium, they walked up and up a flight of stairs.

The SS knocked at a door and stood back, arm-heiling. Adolf Hitler rose from his seat inside, extending his hand. “They told me an Engländer played in our orchestra tonight,” he beamed. John, who had heard about the Night of the Long Knives, left as quickly as he could.

Why am I sharing this? Because John is a hero of mine. He played five more years for Beecham before joining the Infantry. After an outstanding war, he joined John Maynard Keynes’s Arts Council as director of music, charged with revitalising the former “land without music”. It wasn’t that hard, he’d tell me, a few hundred pounds here and there.

“I’d get a call from David Webster at the Royal Opera House, asking if I could pop by after dinner. He’d say, ‘John, we’re running out of money. I don’t think I can pay the wages next week.’ Next morning, I’d send round a thousand-pound cheque. That’s how it was done: no forms to fill, no fuss.”

In an age when providers of funds were on the same side as makers of art, informality got things done. Webster, a former department store manager, built a world-class company from amateur beginnings (“He always repaid my cheque,” said John).

John Denison took charge of the troubled Royal Festival Hall alongside its two smaller side-halls. By the time he retired, London’s South Bank was the world’s largest arts complex. John, in his 90s when I knew him, took a modest satisfaction in his career of creatio ab nihilo.

Compare and contrast today’s calamities. Arts Council England is hitched to a “Let’s Create” policy which promises that by 2030 “England will be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued”. The South Bank is now open only four days a week. The east of England has been denuded of orchestral concerts, and London sees less opera than any European capital.

It’s not just in Britain that the arts climate has changed. Culture has been politically devalued. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis last month scrapped all state arts subsidies. Donald Trump pledges, if elected, to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts.

San Francisco has seen a famed conductor quit for lack of funds. Mark Swed, the doyen of US music critics, writes of “an inescapable feeling of doom, of disquieting calm before the storm”.

France, overspending on this summer’s Olympics, will be the next to cut back on arts. Germany has gone soft. Munich, which needs a concert hall where cellos can hear the oboes (and vice versa), has been told it must wait until 2036. Cologne has been without its opera house since 2012.

Bayreuth this summer is laying off a third of its chorus to meet wage bills. Europe’s resurgent right shows no interest in cultural heritage. On the left, climate and Hamas agitators are driving sponsors away.

Academia is shrinking. Oxford Brookes University shut down its music department. Two in five English schools enter no children for music exams. Pupils have fewer lessons. Many (I have witnessed) connect to an automated program to get their homework right. Arts are being drained of human contact, inspiration and ingenuity.

So what’s to be done? The situation is not easily remediable. So much damage has been inflicted that it will take more than a new government and a bonfire of policy documents to put things right. We need to start by reminding people of the difference a dose of art can make to the less fortunate in society.

All it takes is to see the light that shines in eyes when musicians visit hospitals and care homes. Online singing, led by opera companies, is accelerating post-Covid recovery. Opera in prisons puts ex-offenders in touch with emotional truths. Deaf children, brought on stage by Simon Rattle, “hear” vibrations in a symphony in just the same way as Beethoven who composed it.

Music makes its case not by spouting diversity and equality mantras, but by reaching out to every citizen from cradle to grave. That’s what John Denison taught me, and that’s what we risk losing in this present revisionist storm.

The importance of art is not measured in clicks, or data, or letting people use their phones to film in a symphonic concert. It is about making art universally available and affordable in real time — simple, really. The alternative is too appalling to contemplate.

If we let rabble-rousers denigrate and decolonise the summits of Western civilisation that elevate and unite us, then we will be left with a 1984 mob mentality that nullifies anyone who refuses to parrot the right slogans.

That nightmare scenario feels terrifyingly close at hand — so close, it is no more than a handshake away from the next Adolf Hitler.