The author, critic and broadcaster Patrick O’Connor was a triumphant proof of the unimportance of a formal education or a steady job. Sturdily independent in his tastes and attitudes, he allowed nothing to stand in the way of an overwhelming passion for the world of spectacle and entertainment. His encyclopaedic knowledge of opera, music hall, cabaret, cinema and art song was acquired with the help of a restless curiosity, a singular retentiveness as a listener and a perpetual readiness to be surprised. Lacking the arrogance and egoism typical of so many experts, he delighted in sharing his wisdom and enthusiasm with others.

O’Connor’s love of the performing arts was nurtured by childhood cinema visits and matinees at London’s last remaining music halls. Leaving school as soon as he could, he began by working for his father, Armand O’Connor, a publisher of medical journals. The family house in Richmond eventually became his own, its garden a tangle of half-wild climbing roses, its walls festooned with an eclectic selection of posters and paintings. These included a youthful portrait that recalled a description of him by his friend Isobel Strachey. With his blue eyes, fair hair and pale skin, she observed, he looked like the heroine of a Victorian novel. “Don’t you mean hero?” asked somebody. “Heroine,” Isobel insisted, “he has that kind of innocence.”

In 1981 the far from innocent world of journalism found a place for him at Harper’s & Queen, where he worked for five years as part of the editorial team headed by Ann Barr and Willie Landels. The magazine was then at its liveliest and O’Connor relished its calculatedly offbeat stylishness and the vigorous originality of its contributors, many of whom either were, or soon became, his friends. Such eccentricity unsettled the magazine’s paymasters and an in-house coup eventually doomed the self-styled “world’s most intelligent glossy” to becoming an unremarkable clone of Tatler and Vogue.

Now unemployed, O’Connor found himself increasingly in demand as a writer and lecturer on opera, song and music theatre. In 1988 he accepted an offer from the New York Metropolitan Opera to become editor of Opera News. His affection for the city had deepened during a supremely happy stay there some years earlier, but the atmosphere on his return proved decidedly hostile. Several of the Opera News staff resented his appointment, a green-card application was frustrated by officials who discovered that his father had once been sympathetic to communism, while O’Connor himself ultimately lost heart in the job. He would nevertheless continue to visit New York and to cherish his American friends.

If he had a city of the heart it was surely Paris, whose 19th and 20th-century worlds of operetta, music hall and cabaret had enthralled him since childhood. This enduring cultural romance resulted in a life of the singing actress Yvonne Printemps, published in 1978, followed ten years later by an outstanding biography of the dancer and chanteuse Josephine Baker, whose signature number J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris he could sincerely echo. Similarly successful was The Amazing Blonde Woman, a study of Marlene Dietrich and her stylistic impact.

O’Connor was not a practical musician — the piano in Richmond was more noteworthy for its name, “the Osbert”, than for the sound it made — but his ear for the quality, nuance and distinction of a singing voice was unrivalled. Thus he became an essential member, in 1992, of an editorial team assembled to produce the New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Already a wellregarded reviewer for Gramophone and Opera magazines, he was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3, whether on its CD Review programme or else as presenter of a memorable series on the annals of British music hall. The tones in which he delivered his verdict on a performance or evoked the background to a singer’s career contrived to be both seductive and categorical.

His vocal range was part of O’Connor’s charm. Friends relished his explosive fou rire in telling a story against himself, those wondrously dismissive sighs with which he voiced his scepticism or dissent, and that snarling rage with which he could consign a particular performance to eternal damnation.

At such events he saw his presence as being that of a participant rather than merely a passive spectator. A friend arriving early to gather a party for a cinema evening was surprised to find O’Connor at the bar, glass in hand. “I’m a performer,” he explained. “I have to be here before the green light goes on.”

That process was made easier when in 2007 he moved from Richmond to a flat in Theobalds Road, Holborn, a sequence of rooms up a corkscrew staircase above a café, with a fine London roofscape at the top. Soon afterwards he made contact with a long-lost nephew, Tim Fleming, and the pair formed an immediate bond. O’Connor’s happiness in this discovery was obvious to his friends, that formidable array of kindred spirits in whose lives and achievements, as in those of their children, he took such pleasure. In the patient cultivation of such friendships he appeared at his most creative, a figure who in recompense, like Shakespeare’s Orlando, was “of all sorts enchantingly beloved”.

Patrick O’Connor, author, critic and broadcaster, was born on September 8, 1949. He died of a heart attack on February 16, 2010, aged 60