Kolodin, Irving
KOLODIN, IRVING
KOLODIN, IRVING (1908–1988), U.S. music critic. Born in New York City, Kolodin was raised in Newark, New Jersey, where he began to study music at an early age. From 1927 to 1931 he attended the Institute of Musical Art in New York. Beginning his career as assistant music critic to W.J. Henderson at the New York Sun, he eventually became the newspaper's chief critic, leaving there in 1950. He was also a critic of recordings and published a number of books of record reviews: A Guide to Recorded Music (1941), Mozart on Records (1942), The Saturday Review Home Book of Recorded Music and Sound Reproduction (1952; revised 1956), and Orchestral Music (1955). In 1970 he chose the classical music that was included in the first official White House music library. He taught criticism at the Juilliard School from 1968 to 1986.
Kolodin was well known as a historian of the New York Metropolitan Opera, publishing The Metropolitan Opera: 1883–1935 (1936); a second edition, The Story of the Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1950, appeared in 1953 and was again updated in 1966.
Among his other works are The Interior Beethoven (1975), The Opera Omnibus (1976), and In Quest of Music (1980).