One person who made use of a great variety of media in his discussion of music was Leonard Bernstein. Your first book, The Infinite Variety of Music, is a collection of his writings and lectures.

Bernstein was a genius – not only at making music but at embodying it, and playing this role of the media spokesman. Which is so crucial in our culture, for better or worse. So much depends on the media and on the power of celebrities. It was extraordinarily helpful in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties for this figure to emerge who had a certain glamour, a certain wit, and who moved easily between classical music and other forms of culture, and added to the landscape of popular culture. He was very widely loved, despite some of his personal eccentricities and limitations, and he simply got people excited by music.

Over the course of the 20th century, classical music became progressively more defined as an elite form – as something that was at a distance from the mainstream, from everyday life, even from emotion. It became seen as highly esoteric and intellectualised. None of that is true. There’s always been a great diversity and audience for classical music – wealthy people, poor people, people in the middle – and everyone who loves this music identifies with it, first and foremost, on an emotional level. The intellectual level comes after. But in the presentation of classical music, something went awry. Bernstein put a temporary stop to that, or at least slowed down the progress of that stereotype.

When I was very young, I loved the fact that Bernstein’s language was so vivid. I was already sold on the music. As far back as I can remember my parents had the records and were playing them, and I took to them immediately. It was really the only music that I cared about, early on. Bernstein allowed me to have a conversation – only with myself at first – about the music. Words are so important in coming to terms with this purely non-verbal form of communication, and I was able to talk about it with the few friends I had of my generation who also cared about classical music. As I got older, these essays by Bernstein became the foundation of how I think and talk about music. It’s always something I’m trying to emulate in my work, however faintly.

Do you think some writers are afraid to write personally about classical music and its emotional impact?

I think so. Looking back over classical music criticism, especially over the past 50, 60 years, this reserve – this certain kind of evasiveness – seems to have become pretty common. Back in the 19th century, when you read Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner and others writing about music, their language was highly colourful, highly emotional. Now people are almost afraid of exposing themselves emotionally when they talk about music.

Certainly in my own work I’ve tried to react against that. I’m not a particularly confessional writer, and I don’t really talk about my own experiences that much, but in the essay that opens [Listen To This] I consciously made an effort to bring my own history as a listener into the discussion. It doesn’t come naturally to me, maybe because I’m as much part of this classical mentality as anyone else. But you don’t need to just write a searing diary of your daily life as a critic – you can make the emotional dimension clear in many other ways.

The social relevance of this music, and its cultural history, is also hugely important. That was what my first book was about. My great aim was to show how much music mattered in 20th century history and how deeply these composers were entangled in the events of their time – sometimes in a rather disturbing and frightening way, but nonetheless in a way that showed how the music mattered. Classical music is not in some distant fortress, high above the plains of society, but really is right down there in the middle of society.

That ties in well with your second choice, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, and the ideas that he develops about classical music and Wagner in particular.

I have a huge preoccupation with Wagner right now. My third book, a very big, long-term project, is going to be called Wagnerism. It will not be a book about Wagner per se, but an account of his vast cultural impact from the latter part of his life to today in all the arts. I’m not actually going to talk about his impact on music, which is a book or many books in itself.

Nietzsche as a young man was completely besotted with Wagner, and had to fight his way out of this obsession – not only with the music but the man, because they had quite an intense personal relationship. In the latter part of the 19th century, this reaction of Nietzsche against Wagner points to a new strand of thinking, which became modernism in a lot of ways. It’s the case with many other major figures of the later 19th and early 20th century. Very often, you see an early infatuation with Wagner, followed by a reaction against him or a modification of the passion. You see it in Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and many others.