Norman Lebrecht
July 03, 2022
In contrast to Will Robin’s incredible obituary in Friday’s New York Times, giving a colorless halo to the controversial musicologist Taruskin, Tim Page in the Washington Post finds fault with his arrogance, egotism and a host of mistakes. Taruskin had many admirers. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross called him “the most important living writer on classical music, both in academia and journalism” in a recent interview with musicologist William Robin…
Tim Page quotes composer John Adams: “He made a specialty of character assassination,” Adams told Britain’s Independent newspaper in 2002. “It’s good copy. It’s kind of like watching those shoddy “true crime” shows on TV: there always has to be a body count at the end, whether the target is Prokofiev, the Shostakovich scholars, or anyone else he chooses to humiliate.
As for Taruskin’s prejudices and willful myopia. Tim adds: “His history (of music), for example, does not mention Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Duke Ellington, Ruth Crawford Seeger or Stephen Sondheim. The name of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, voted the world’s most popular composer in a New York Philharmonic radio poll and the subject of a huge revival in the last two decades of the 20th century, appears five times in 4,560 pages, and then only in passing.” …
Read the full obit here.
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