Martin Bernheimer, a classical music critic noted for witty, withering writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.
The cause was sarcoma, his wife, the theater critic Linda Winer, said.
“Historically,” Mr. Bernheimer wrote in the Financial Times in 2008, “the best critics have guarded standards, stimulated debate and, in the complex process, reinforced the importance of art in society. They have been tastemakers, taskmasters and possibly ticket-sellers. Some have even written well.”
Mr. Bernheimer certainly did. Few classical music critics in the United States since Virgil Thomson possessed his way with words, or his eagerness to wield them without mercy.
Luciano Pavarotti? “The overhype tenor of the century.”
Lorin Maazel? “He knows how to capitalize on his limitations.”
An opera by Nico Muhly? “Eine kleine pretty-music.”
Mr. Bernheimer mostly lent what one colleague called his “special, feisty, demanding, informed and unyielding voice” to The Los Angeles Times, which he joined as chief critic and music editor in 1965. He stayed until 1996. The Pulitzer jury cited his writing on a “wide variety of subjects and targets.”
Opera was Mr. Bernheimer’s first love, but his main quarry was the Los Angeles Philharmonic, an orchestra he watched grow from a respectable ensemble into one with claims to top-echelon status. Zubin Mehta was on the podium when Mr. Bernheimer arrived at the paper.
“Although Mehta never had difficulty pleasing the casual concertgoer,” Mr. Bernheimer wrote in 1978, upon Mr. Mehta’s departure for the New York Philharmonic, “he did not always make a minority of hard-core aficionados ecstatic. They recognized his penchant for the superficial effect, his willingness to cheapen a subtle impulse, his tendency to exaggerate, his weakness (or is it strength?) for bombast and disinclination for subtle introspection.”
Even a decade earlier, Mr. Bernheimer’s reviews had drawn the ire of Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the philanthropist whose name graced the orchestra’s hall at the time. When she pressured her son, Otis Chandler, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times, to fire his critic, Mr. Chandler refused, and took out an advertisement in his own paper, declaring that the critic “faces the music, even when it hurts.”
By 1977, eight years after the arrival of Ernest Fleischmann as the orchestra’s executive director, The New York Times reported that “a first-class old-fashioned war” between the critic and the executive had broken out. Mr. Fleischmann accused Mr. Bernheimer of “curmudgeonly, slick, superficial outpourings” that had a “demoralizing, depressing effect” on musicians. Mr. Bernheimer retorted that a critic ought not be a “cheering section.” Twelve years later, he called Mr. Fleischmann “the Tyrant of the Philharmonic.”
Mr. Bernheimer’s reputation tended to hide the praise he voiced when he felt it was deserved. “We won’t have Zubin Mehta to kick around any more,” he lamented in 1978; “in spite of everything, we will miss him.”
Even Mr. Fleischmann found that bombs sometimes came wrapped in ribbons. “He is aggressive, demanding, autocratic, egocentric and, under the right circumstances, very good at his job,” Mr. Bernheimer allowed in 1989.
Charles Champlin, a fellow critic at The Times, wrote in a 1982 appreciation that despite his reputation, “caring is in fact at the heart of Bernheimer’s reviewing,” for his “love of music is one of the most passionate romances of our time.”
Martin Bernheimer was born on Sept. 28, 1936, into a Jewish family in Munich. His mother, Louise (Nassauer) Bernheimer, was an artist; his father, Paul, was a partner at Haus Bernheimer, a prominent antiques business in Munich. After the family business was damaged on Kristallnacht, when synagogues and Jewish businesses, homes and schools were attacked, Paul and his brothers were sent to Dachau, but they later managed to go free.
As war broke out in Europe, Mr. Bernheimer and his parents left for the United States and settled in Norton, Mass., within driving distance of Boston. There he saw his first opera, “Carmen.” “In retrospect, it was probably a pretty lackluster performance,” he told Brown Alumni Magazine in an interview in 2012, “but I was struck by the fusion of drama and music.”
Naturalized in 1946, Mr. Bernheimer graduated from Brown University in 1958 with an honors degree in music before further studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich and at New York University, where he earned an M.A. in 1961. By then he was already on the staff of The New York Herald Tribune.
After spells at The New York Post, The Musical Courier and Saturday Review, Mr. Bernheimer joined The Los Angeles Times. He won the prestigious Ascap Deems Taylor Award for writing about music twice, in 1974 and 1978, and served successively on the faculties of the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, and other nearby colleges. He appeared regularly on the Metropolitan Opera’s national radio broadcasts.
Mr. Bernheimer married Ms. Winer in 1992. His first marriage, to Lucinda Pearson in 1961, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four children from his first marriage, Mark, Erika and Marina Bernheimer and Nora Caruso; and four grandchildren.
Later in life, Mr. Bernheimer became a mentor for several young critics. Simon Chin, who has written for The Washington Post, said in an email that Mr. Bernheimer “was the most unfailingly generous, supportive and insightful mentor I could have asked for.”
While Mr. Bernheimer had been fortunate to make his mark while newspapers were strong and classical music had greater popular cachet, he came to lament the decline of criticism more broadly.
“With newspapers round the U.S. shrinking at best, disappearing at worst,” he wrote in the Financial Times in 2010, “critics have become an endangered species.” (Dodos, he specified elsewhere.) But if expertise like his was at risk, he insisted, there should be no retreat into fandom.
“Critics, antagonists claim, should be objective,” Mr. Bernheimer wrote in 2008. “No way.”
Source: Read Full Article