The one-time Grove’s editor was a champion of the music of Monteverdi. “Stevens felt a mission to demonstrate the validity and accessibility of musicology as a discipline, often deploying what one former colleague called a ‘wry and penetrating sense of humour’. He gave it full rein in an essay on the performance of the Monteverdi Vespers, complaining of ‘the cabalistic obscurantism that now surrounds it, fostered by misinformed musicians and pseudo-musicologists’. He had absolutely no time for a misguided veneration of the past.”