Early life Harold Charles Schonberg was born in
Washington Heights, Manhattan in New York City, New York on 29 November 1915. His parents were David and Minnie (née Kirsch) Schonberg, and he had a brother (Stanley) and a sister (Edith). His aunt
Alice Frisca was a former concert pianist and had studied with
Leopold Godowsky. He started piano lessons with Frisca at four years old, and "discovered early on that he had a superb musical memory that allowed him to remember pieces in great detail after a single hearing". Schonberg cited the first performance he saw at the
Metropolitan Opera around age 12 as particularly formative. He recalled the performance, of
Richard Wagner's
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 39 years later in a piece characteristically written in the third person: The boy remembers being awed by the auditorium. So big! So beautiful! So much what his dreams had told him it would be! 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. Schonberg received a
Bachelor of Arts at
Brooklyn College (1937), during which he published his first music criticism in the
Musical Advance journal. He then studied as a graduate student at
New York University, receiving a
Master of Arts in 1938 while studying under the composer
Marion Bauer. His dissertation was
Elizabethan Song Books: A Study of Their Musical and Literary Significance. He recalled: "The English department did not know how to deal with the musical elements of the thesis, and the music department did not know how to deal with the literary side. An A plus was virtually assured in advance." In his early life, Schonberg was also interested in the visual arts, studying drawing at the
Art Students League of New York and sometimes illustrating his music criticism with
caricatures of the musicians they featured. In 1939, Schonberg received his first post as a music critic: he was associate editor and critic at the
American Music Lover. During World War II, 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 broke his leg on a training jump before D-Day and could not participate in the
Normandy landings; every member of his platoon who jumped into France was ultimately killed. He remained in the Army until 1946.
At The New York Times Schonberg joined
The New York Times in 1950. He rose to the post of senior music critic for 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 also wrote articles for ''
Harper's and High Fidelity'' magazine, among others. Explaining his critical style, Schonberg said I write for myself—not necessarily for readers, not for musicians. 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.
Samuel Lipman wrote "He also has a common touch, speaking familiarly and often using homely colloquial expressions (concerning
Beethoven’s victory in improvisation over the virtuoso pianist
Steibelt, to cite a telling example, he writes that the immortal composer 'played him under the table')." Piano music was a specialty of Schonberg. Lipman writes "Pianists and composers for the piano are undoubtedly the closest to his heart. About them he writes with the attitude of a
baseball nut who knows all the statistics." His favorite pianist was
Josef Hofmann: "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." 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, revised 1987) and
The Lives of the Great Composers (1970; revised 1981, 1997) which traced the lives of major composers from
Monteverdi to modern times.
Kirkus wrote of Schonberg's sketches: "the majority are uncommonly revealing -- even to the mention of
Bach's miserliness in a not infrequent interjection of humor." He sometimes wrote in the form of imagined conversations with an alter ego, in the "Dear Ossip" reviews. One of Schonberg's best remembered criticisms of Bernstein was written after
the 6 April 1962, performance before which Bernstein announced that he disagreed with pianist
Glenn Gould's interpretation of
Brahms'
Piano Concerto No. 1 but was going to conduct it anyway because he found it fascinating. Schonberg chided Bernstein in print, suggesting that he should have either refrained from publicizing his disagreement, backed out of the concert, or imposed his own will on Gould. 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."
Other interests A self-described "
chess player, kibitzer and on-again, off-again chess correspondent for
The New York Times", and the 1984
championship match between
Garry Kasparov and
Anatoly Karpov in
Moscow. For the former game,
Lothar Schmid praised Schonberg's coverage as the most thorough of any journalist. He covered the game's giants, from
François-André Danican Philidor to Fischer, in
Grandmasters of Chess. He wrote that he had "lost to some of the game's greatest players." He also reviewed mysteries and thrillers for
The New York Times under the pseudonym
Newgate Callender from 1972 to 1995. Schonberg was an avid
golfer, though a poor one by his own estimation. He co-authored
How To Play Double Bogey Golf (1975) with
Hollis Alpert, founder of the
National Society of Film Critics, and fellow author Ira Mothner. Schonberg, Mothner and Alpert frequently played golf together.
Later life and death In 1985, Schonberg was critic-in-residence at
McMaster University in
Hamilton, Canada. In 1987, it was announced that Schonberg was assisting
Vladimir Horowitz in the preparation of the pianist's memoirs. Although the project was never completed, Schonberg's biography
Horowitz: His Life and Music was published in 1992. Also in 1987, he served on the jury of the
Paloma O'Shea Santander International Piano Competition. Late in life, he judged a young artist's competition in
Rochester, New York, that gave first prize to the 12-year-old violinist
Joshua Bell. Schonberg died in New York City on 26 July 2003, at the age of 87, of an unspecified cause. In his obituary notice in
The New York Times the next day,
Allan Kozinn wrote that Schonberg "set the standard for critical evaluation and journalistic thoroughness." ==Legacy==