SCHONBERG, Harold C(harles) 1915-2003 (Newgate Callendar)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born November 29, 1915, in New York, NY; died July 26, 2003, in New York, NY. Editor, critic, and author. Schonberg was a nationally renowned, Pulitzer Prizewinning music and literary critic who wrote for the New York Times for three decades. He was a graduate of Brooklyn College, where he earned his A.B. in 1937, and of New York University, where he received his master's degree in 1938. Schonberg's love of music began at a very young age; he was just four years old when he began to learn to play the piano and soon discovered that he could easily remember entire pieces after hearing them only once. Athe age of twelve he was mesmerized by his first trip to the Metropolitan Opera, where he watched a performance of Richard Wagner's Meistersinger. He later declared that it was on that day that he decided to pursue a career as a music critic, a plan that first saw reality when he was an undergraduate student writing reviews for the Musical Advance. After completing his master's degree, he became assistant editor of American Music Lover (later renamed American Record Guide). With the onset of World War II, Schonberg enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he was a decoder and later a parachutist. He returned to civilian life in 1946 to become a contributing editor to Musical Digest and assistant music critic for the New York Sun; he was also a contributing editor and columnist for Musical Courier from 1948 to 1952. Schonberg joined the New York Times staff in 1950 as a music and record critic, becoming senior music critic from 1960 until his retirement in 1980. As a music critic, he lent his prodigious knowledge of the musical world to his articles, though he modestly maintained that music criticism should always be considered a matter of the writer's (hopefully educated) opinion and not the authoritative, final word on a piece of music or a performance. Schonberg's spare, to-the-point style was clear, informative, and unembellished when writing reviews, but more leisurely when writing longer pieces on a particular area of music for the newspapers Sunday column. For his excellence in criticism, he was awarded the 1971 Pulitzer Prize. In addition to music, Schonberg was very knowledgeable about chess, and he reported on the famous Boris Spassky vs. Bobby Fisher match in 1972 and the Garry Kasparov vs. Anatoly Karpov match in 1984. He also wrote many literary reviews for the New York Times under the pen name Newgate Callendar. Schonberg completed eleven books during his career, including The Great Pianists (1963; revised edition, 1987), The Great Conductors (1967), Grandmasters of Chess (1973; revised edition, 1981), and The Virtuosi: Classical Music's Great Performers from Paganini to Pavarotti (1988). After his retirement from the New York Times, he continued to contribute reviews to the newspaper, as well as to such publications as American Record Guide and Classical Record Reviewer.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Ward, Martha E., and others, editors, Authors of Books for Young People, third edition, Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ), 1990.

Writers Directory, 18th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2003, p. B9.

New York Times, July 28, 2003, p. A18.

Times (London, England), August 4, 2003.

Washington Post, July 28, 2003, p. B5.