[This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by
texas-paule@t-online.de]
----------------------------------------------------------
Harold C. Schonberg, 87, Dies; Won Pulitzer Prize as Music Critic for The
Times
July 27, 2003
By ALLAN KOZINN
Harold C. Schonberg, the ubiquitous and authoritative chief music
critic of The New York Times from 1960 to 1980, whose reviews and essays
influenced and chronicled vast changes in the world of opera and classical
music, died yesterday at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 87 and
lived in Manhattan.
Writing daily reviews and more contemplative Sunday pieces, Mr.
Schonberg set the standard for critical evaluation and journalistic
thoroughness. He wrote his reviews in a crisp, often staccato style that
gave his evaluations unequivocal clarity and directness, attributes that
earned him a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1971, the first for a music
critic.
However significant his opinions and endorsements, he viewed his
role simply and directly. "I write for myself - not necessarily for readers,
not for musicians," he said in
a 1967 interview with Editor and Publisher. "I'd be dead if I tried to
please a particular audience. Criticism is only informed opinion. I write a
piece that is a personal reaction based, hopefully, on a lot of years of
study, background, scholarship and whatever intuition I have. It's not a
critic's job to be right or wrong; it's his job to express an opinion in
readable English."
Mr. Schonberg thrived on the pressures of a daily newspaper
schedule. After a concert he would go to the offices of The Times to write,
often leaving his wife or a friend waiting outside in his car with the
guarantee that he would write his review and return within 45 minutes.
Often, he made a game of racing his colleagues, coming into the office after
they had started their reviews, casually checking his mail and smoking a
cigarette and then starting and finishing his own notice while they were
still at work. Rarely did his copy contain a typo or crossed-over thought.
He couched his reviews in a taut style that contrasted sharply with
the more leisurely Sunday columns in which he discussed broader musical
topics, often provocatively. In one 1979 column, for example, he included
the results of a private test in which he hoped to determine if it was
possible to distinguish between male and female pianists. Mr. Schonberg had
prepared a tape with two performances each (one by a man, one by a woman) of
several works and had asked acquaintances to guess the sex of the player.
The results, he wrote, were inconclusive, but the column, and a 1980
follow-up, drew an enormous number of letters and inspired classical radio
disc jockeys across the country to present tests of their own.
He also regularly addressed issues raised by readers, usually
beginning such columns with a quotation from a reader's letter about
anything from changes in concert programming, to whether halls should turn
their lights down during Lieder recitals, to whether critics should follow
scores during performances. In his responses, he would mix historical
perspective and clear reasoning with undisguised personal opinion.
"An experienced score reader does not have his nose buried
perpetually in the score," he wrote about his habit of taking scores to
concerts. "He turns pages more or less automatically, knowing exactly where
the musician is going to be at any given point. He may not even look at the
pages. But when something a bit unusual happens, there is the score to
verify the point."
"Dare I also say," Mr. Schonberg added, "that some musicians can be
so dull that following the score is an antidote against going to sleep?
There are also scores and scores. Does a conductor use a corrupt version of
a Haydn symphony or is he educated enough to encompass the latest findings?
What Bruckner edition is he using?"
But music was not the only subject on which Mr. Schonberg wrote with
authority. A devoted and skilled chess player, he covered the Boris
Spassky-Bobby Fischer championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland, during the
summer of 1972. After Mr. Fischer defeated Mr. Spassky, Lothar Schmidt, a
German grandmaster and a referee at the match, said that Mr. Schonberg's
coverage was the most thorough of any journalist present. He also covered
the championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov in 1984,
and he reviewed mysteries and thrillers for The New York Times Book Review
from 1972 to 1995 under the pseudonym Newgate Callendar.
Mr. Schonberg's concert reviews were cogently argued and informed by
both practical musicianship - he was a capable pianist - and a passion for
the intensely emotional music and interpretive style of the Romantic era and
its extensions into the 20th century. His particular specialty was the
piano. Few writers have approached his expertise in the instrument, its
players and its literature. There was no question that his favorite pianist
was Josef Hofmann, about whom he periodically found an opportunity to wax
rhapsodic.
"Those who heard his piano playing can never forget the man's
aristocracy, flowing line, sensuous sound, brilliant technique and, above
all, feeling of spontaneity," he wrote in 1976 on the centenary of the
pianist's birth. "Hofmann, somehow, made every other pianist sound thick."
But if Hofmann was his benchmark, Mr. Schonberg wrote
enthusiastically about pianists at nearly every point on the interpretive
spectrum. He was especially fascinated by Russian pianists, partly because
they tended to perform with dazzling power and technique, and partly because
the isolation in which they worked for so many years before performing in
the West had helped preserve a distinctive national style.
He championed the work of Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, Lazar
Berman and, in the late 1980's, the young Yevgeny Kissin. Among American
pianists, he favored those who worked in the grand Romantic style, like Earl
Wild, Jorge Bolet and Raymond Lowenthal. But he was also partial to gentler
colorists like Guiomar Novaes and more Apollonian pianists like Artur
Rubinstein and Rudolf Serkin.
As fashions in both early and modern music veered toward what Mr.
Schonberg regarded as a coldly rational approach, he continued to insist
that musicians find a way to touch a listener's heart. Yet he was also
critical of what he perceived as the interpretive excesses of musicians like
Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould. His criticism of music he disliked could
be harsh, and in a valedictory essay published at the time of his retirement
as senior critic, he explained himself unrepentantly.
"I thought the serial-dominated music after the war was a hideously
misbegotten creature sired by Caliban out of Hecate, and I had no hesitation
in saying so," he wrote. "Nor has it been proved that I was all wrong.
Certain it is that the decades of serialism did nothing but alienate the
public, creating a chasm between composer and audience."
Mr. Schonberg chronicled a time of great change in the music world.
When he began, the musical season lasted about seven months, with little but
Tanglewood and a handful of European festivals to cover during the summer.
By the time he retired as senior critic, the season was year-round, and
series like the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York and the Spoleto Festival
U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., and symphony and opera programs across the
country, virtually ended the distinction between the season and the summer.
At the same time, Mr. Schonberg covered the record world as it made
the transition from 78 r.p.m. discs to LP's, and after his retirement, in
his position as cultural correspondent for The Times, he reviewed compact
discs as well. He was not always impressed with technological change.
Visitors to his Riverside Drive apartment in recent years were likely to be
treated to an afternoon of classic performances on 78's - which he kept in
pristine condition - and a demonstration of how CD transfers of the same
recordings often failed to capture the warmth and depth of the originals.
Mr. Schonberg was married to Rosalyn Krokover, a dance critic for
the Musical Courier, from 1942 until her death in 1973. In 1975 he married
Helene Cornell, who died two months ago. He is survived by his sister, Edith
Filosa, of Manhattan.
Harold Charles Schonberg was born in Washington Heights on Nov. 29,
1915, and began studying the piano when he was 4 years old. One of his
teachers - and the one whom he
regularly cited as an important influence - was an aunt, Alice Frisca, who
had studied with Leopold Godowsky and briefly pursued a professional
performing career. Mr. Schonberg discovered early on that he had a superb
musical memory that allowed him to remember pieces in great detail after a
single hearing. By his own account, music was the stuff of his boyhood
daydreams: when his teachers reprimanded him for not paying attention in
class, it was because he was replaying his family's collection of records in
his head.
Mr. Schonberg regarded his first trip to the Metropolitan Opera,
four days before his 12th birthday, as one of the crucial events of his
childhood. The opera was Wagner's "Meistersinger," and in March 1966, a
month before the Met closed its last season at its old house at Broadway and
39th Street before moving to Lincoln Center, Mr. Schonberg devoted a Sunday
column to his recollections of that evening 39 years earlier.
Characteristically avoiding the first person, even in so personal a memoir,
he described the column as "a story of a boy and his first visit to the
Metropolitan Opera."
"So big! So beautiful! So much what his dreams had told him it would
be!" he wrote. "He vaguely remembers other impressions. But the thing as
fresh in his mind today as it was on Nov. 25, 1927, was the sound of that
first C major chord when Artur Bodanzky brought down his baton.
"The chord rose to the dress circle, and he felt as though he could
reach out, touch it, caress it. He had been to concerts before, but somehow,
in this vast dark auditorium, there was a different feeling to the texture
and even the organization of this chord. It sounded warm and cozy. It
covered him like a blanket."
Mr. Schonberg later wrote that he set his sights on a career as a
music critic that night. His first reviews were published in the Musical
Advance in 1936, when he was still an undergraduate at Brooklyn College. He
completed his bachelor's degree in 1937 and enrolled at the New York
University graduate school, where he studied with the composer Marion Bauer
and wrote a master's thesis on the musical and literary significance of
Elizabethan songbooks. He also studied drawing at the Art Students League,
and illustrated some of his early music articles with caricatures of
performers and composers. In 1939, he became an associate editor and record
critic for the American Music Lover, a monthly magazine that evolved into
the American Record Guide.
During World War II, Mr. Schonberg was a first lieutenant in the
United States Army Airborne Signal Corps. He had hoped to enlist as a pilot,
but was declared pastel-blind (he could distinguish colors but not shadings
and subtleties) and was sent to London, where he was a code breaker and
later a parachutist. He remained in the Army until 1946.
After his return to New York, Mr. Schonberg became a music critic
for The New York Sun, and became so fascinated with the workings of a daily
newspaper that after two years as a critic he volunteered to also do legwork
for the city desk, covering City Hall or the Bronx Zoo by day and concerts
by night. He also contributed reviews to the Musical Courier, Musical Digest
and Gramophone during the 1940's and 1950's.
Mr. Schonberg joined the staff of The New York Times in 1950 and
became record editor in 1955. Five years later, when Howard Taubman
succeeded Brooks Atkinson as The Times's senior theater critic, Mr.
Schonberg became senior music critic.
One of his immediate and lasting innovations was establishing a code
of conduct in which friendships with performers and composers were
prohibited. "I saw too much of that at the Herald-Tribune," he wrote, "where
most of the critics were composers and some of them jockeyed shamelessly to
get their music played." In the 1967 interview with Editor and Publisher, he
said: "I refuse to believe that if a critic is friendly with a musician he
can be impartial. If word gets around you are a friend of a musician, your
opinion becomes suspect."
Mr. Schonberg kept his distance, which in one case was probably just
as well. Michele Molese, who sang leading roles with the New York City Opera
for nearly two decades, took offense when Mr. Schonberg wrote in The Times
about some of his squeezed high notes. On Nov. 1, 1974, Mr. Molese struck
back. He took a powerful high C in "Un Ballo in Maschera," and after the
applause died down, said to the audience, "That pinched high C is for Mr.
Schonberg."
Mr. Schonberg estimated that he wrote 1.3 million words during his
two decades as senior critic. Some of his favorite columns were collected
into a book, <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="251026;90856;90857">"Facing the Music,"</object.title> in 1981. Also
among Mr. Schonberg's 13 books are several that remain standard reference
volumes. These include "The Great Pianists" (1963); "The Great Conductors"
(1967); "The Lives of the Great Composers" (1970, revised 1997); "The
Glorious Ones," a study of virtuoso soloists (1985); and "Horowitz: His Life
and Music" (1992).
After his retirement as senior critic in 1980, Mr. Schonberg
remained a cultural correspondent for The New York Times until 1985, and
continued contributing record reviews and occasional interview pieces
thereafter.
During his career, Mr. Schonberg vigorously defended his opinions
when musicians, readers or other critics disagreed, and he sometimes said
that he enjoyed the arguments, "so long as what I've written makes you
think." At the same time, he always insisted that a critic's opinion,
however forcefully held or fully supported by research, inevitably had a
subjective element.
"Some critics profess to work according to a set of immutable
esthetic and technical laws," he wrote in The Times on July 6, 1980. "They
are only fooling themselves. There are no immutable laws. There is only the
critic himself: his background, his taste and intuition, his
ideals, his literary ability. If style is the man, so is criticism, and his
criticism always ends up a reflection of what he is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/obituaries/27SCHO.html?ex=1060300744&ei=1&
en=5999f659bb933ac4
---------------------------------
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Paul Moor
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
Wilhelmsaue 132
D-10715 Berlin
Telefon (4930) 8639-5784
Telefax (4930) 8639-5785
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 27 2003 - 04:29:35 PDT