The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Many of you may think that classical music has already vanished from our streets. The days when a modest-sized city like Europadisc’s home patch in Nottingham could boast no fewer than three specialist classical shops are long gone. In central London, where the likes of Caruso & Co, Farringdon Records, Direction Dean Street and Orchesography plied their trade, even the tenacious Harold Moores in Great Marlborough finally shut up shop in early 2017. Mounting rents, business rates and online competition have been sounding the death knell for independent music retailers for years now, and the nose-dive that music education has taken since the Covid-19 outbreak has further intensified an already desperate situation.

Last week I was in London for the first night of the revival of Deborah Warner’s hard-hitting (and extremely topical) production of Britten’s Peter Grimes: a stunning achievement by all concerned, not least tenor Allan Clayton in the title role and Jakub Hrůša at the helm of the Covent Garden orchestra. As is customary on my London trips, I popped along to Cecil Court, one of the small pedestrian-only streets that run between St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, and the site of some of the capital’s best little antiquarian shops. To my horror, the redoubtable Travis & Emery, specialists in music and books about music for the last 65 years, was not only closed for the day but also announcing its imminent move (to an online presence only, it seems), effectively ending more than six decades of trading in the heart of London.

Just a stone’s throw away from the London Coliseum, and within easy walking distance of Covent Garden, Travis & Emery – for many years run by the formidable Valerie Emery, a former Bletchley Park codebreaker and widow of the Bach specialist Walter Emery – has been a treasured haven for musicians, music lovers and students amid the bustle of the West End. I’ve been a customer there on and off since my student days, more than four decades ago (!), and have lost track of the number of books and scores I’ve bought there, ranging from books on music theory and analysis, and life-and-works studies, to vocal scores of rare operas and programme booklets featuring legendary performers.

Among my most recent purchases were the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of Opera (long coveted!) and ‘back-up’ copies of biographies of Dvořák and Smetana. The disappearance of Travis & Emery from their central London base is not completely surprising: in a world where not just music literacy but also the market for writings about music is shrinking, and with rents as high as they surely are, it’s a miracle that they’ve lasted as long as they have. Take a look at the shops now attached to any opera house these days – even the ‘elite’ premises of Covent Garden and Glyndebourne – and, where once you’d find a generous array of specialist books on operatic subjects, not to mention libretti, today in their stead there’s a tenuously-related selection of merchandise, everything from pocket umbrellas and throws to soft toys, but almost nothing that is likely to enhance your appreciation of the works being performed.

Perhaps it is assumed that we have all we need to appreciate music and related arts via YouTube, streaming and AI. Yet the loss not just of music literacy but a wider audience for intelligent writings about music is certainly a cause for deep concern, and one that is likely to lead to the further closure of any specialist shops abroad. Even the revered Doblinger’s on Dorotheergasse in Vienna has been battling threats of closure, while its attached antiquarian music shop has already folded. Nothing, of course, is forever, but we do seem to be living through a kind of 'extinction era' as far as classical music provision via traditional shops is concerned.

I hope that Travis & Emery can find a way forward, and wish them will for the future. But it’s a sad day for those who relished the thrill of the chance purchase, the unlooked-for item that suddenly leapt out at one. It was just such a casual find that led me to snap up, on one of my more recent visits, a particularly beautiful facsimile of William Byrd’s great keyboard anthology My Ladye Nevells Booke. Other chance finds over the years include The Letters of Arturo Toscanini (ed. Harvey Sachs) with their mixture of private passions, professional insight and political commitment; the Diaries of Alma Mahler-Werfel (ed. Antony Beaumont), unmissable for their evocation of turn-of-the-century Vienna; and the Notebooks and Conversations of Sviatoslav Richter (ed. Bruno Monsaingeon), often deliciously indiscreet, and required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of this enigmatic genius.