Harold Charles Schonberg (
November 29, 1915 -
July 26, 2003) was an American
music critic and
journalist, most notably for
The New York Times. He was the first music critic to win the
Pulitzer Prize for criticism (
1971). He also wrote a number of books on musical subjects, and one on chess.
Born in
New York City, Schonberg grew up there, graduated from
Brooklyn College in 1937, and did graduate studies at
New York University. In
1939 he became a record critic for
American Music Lover magazine (later renamed the
American Record Guide).
Schonberg joined
The New York Times in 1950. He rose to the post of senior music critic of the Times a decade later. In this capacity he published daily reviews and longer features on
operas and
classical music on Sundays. He also worked effectively behind the scenes to increase music coverage in the Times and develop its first-rate music staff. Upon his retirement as senior music critic in 1980 he became cultural correspondent for the Times.
Schonberg was an extremely influential music writer. Aside from his contributions to music journalism, he published 13 books, most of them on music, including
The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present (1963) -- pianists were a speciality of Schonberg -- and
The Lives of the Great Composers (1970; revised 1981, 1997) which traced the lives of major composers from
Monteverdi through to modern times.
Schonberg was highly critical of
Leonard Bernstein during the composer-conductor's eleven year tenure (1958-1969) as principal conductor of the
New York Philharmonic. (These were the years that Bernstein's name became a household word because of his appearances on
CBS in the
Young People's Concerts.) He obliquely accused Bernstein of showing off by using exaggerated gestures on the podium, and more directly, of conducting a piece in a way that made its structure overly obvious to audiences, and, by inference, to music critics, who supposedly already knew all about the particular piece being conducted.
One of his most famous criticisms of Bernstein was written after the notorious
6 April 1962 performance before which Bernstein announced that he disagreed with pianist
Glenn Gould's interpretation of
Piano Concerto No. 1 (Brahms), but was going to conduct it anyway because he found it fascinating. Schonberg chided Bernstein in print, suggesting that he should have either backed out of the concert or imposed his own will on Gould, and called him "the Peter Pan of music". (In his book
The Great Conductors, published in 1967, Schonberg, in his chapter on Bernstein, quotes the remark, but disingenuously does not admit that he was the critic who had made it.) It was commonly said that Schonberg was carrying an ongoing feud with Bernstein.
After Bernstein's regular tenure at the New York Philharmonic ended, however, Schonberg seemed to mellow in his attitude toward him and actually began to praise his conducting, stating in his book
The Glorious Ones that "with age, came less of a need to prove something", and that "there were moments of glory in his conceptions".
A devoted and skilled
chess player, he covered the championship match between
Boris Spassky and
Bobby Fischer in
Reykjavík, Iceland in 1972. Schonberg's sole book not on music was on the
Grandmasters of Chess. He also reviewed mysteries and thrillers for The New York Times under the pseudonym Newgate Callendar.
In
1987, he announced that he was assisting
Vladimir Horowitz in the preparation of his memoirs - a project that fell through, reportedly because of what was described as Horowitz's "selective memory" and issues over Horowitz's sexuality.
Harold Schonberg wrote on music with brilliance, insight, and a uniquely personal perspective. He was seldom neutral. Whether a reader agreed or disagreed with what he wrote, the reader usually found it interesting and stimulating. Schonberg died in New York City on
26 July, 2003, at the age of 87. In his obituary notice in The New York Times the next day,
Allan Kozinn wrote that "as a music critic Harold Schonberg set the standard for critical evaluation and journalistic thoroughness".
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