Michael Keith Tanner (15 April 1935 – 3 April 2024) was a British philosopher and opera critic. A life fellow of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, he was a lecturer at Cambridge for 36 years,^[1] until his retirement in 1997.^[2] He wrote a weekly opera column in The Spectator from 1996 to 2014, and continued to write for the publication until 2022.^[1] He authored books on Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Richard Wagner, and edited Shaun Whiteside's translations of works by Nietzsche and Wilhelm Furtwängler.

The 2003 Routledge collection Art and Morality, edited by Jose Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner, was published in honour of Tanner.^[3][4]

Tanner died on 3 April 2024, at the age of 88.^[5]

Author

• Tanner, Michael (1994). Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Tanner, Michael (1996). Wagner. New York: HarperCollins.
• Tanner, Michael (1999). Schopenhauer. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Tanner, Michael (2000). Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Tanner, Michael (2010). The Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner. London: Faber and Faber.

Editor

• Furtwängler, Wilhelm (1989). Notebooks, 1924-54, translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited by Michael Tanner. London: Quartet Books.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich (1993). The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited by Michael Tanner. London: Penguin.

• "Michael Tanner, Cambridge philosopher, ardent Wagnerian and Spectator opera critic – obituary". Daily Telegraph. 6 April 2024. Retrieved 6 April 2024.

• Michael Tanner at The Spectator
• Michael Tanner discography at Discogs