Maynard Solomon, Provocative Biographer of Composers, Dies at 90 (original) (raw)

Music|Maynard Solomon, Provocative Biographer of Composers, Dies at 90

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/arts/music/maynard-solomon-dead.html

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Mr. Solomon probed the psyches of Mozart and Beethoven in critically acclaimed works; he was also a co-founder of an adventurous Vanguard record label.

Maynard Solomon founded Vanguard records with his brother and went on to write weighty biographies of Beethoven and Mozart.Credit...Jerry Bauer/University of California Press

Published Oct. 8, 2020Updated Oct. 11, 2020

Maynard Solomon, a musicologist and record producer best known for his influential, lucidly written biographies of Beethoven and Mozart, as well as a hotly debated scholarly article on Schubert’s sexuality, died on Sept. 28 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 90.

The cause was Lewy body dementia, his family said.

Reviewing Mr. Solomon’s 1988 book, “Beethoven Essays,” the New York Times music critic Donal Henahan described Mr. Solomon, who was also a co-founder of the influential record label Vanguard, as “one of the most persuasive voices on behalf of the perilous intellectual voyage known as psychobiography — or, less kindly, ‘psychobabblography.’” But in investigating the mysteries of creative energy, he wrote, Mr. Solomon “builds even his most speculative essays on musicological foundations, not moonbeams.”

Mr. Solomon’s compelling 1977 biography of Beethoven, later revised and reissued, offered fresh, meticulously researched accounts of his life and perceptive yet mostly nontechnical discussions of his compositions.

Going further, Mr. Solomon boldly framed the narrative with psychological speculations on the composer’s life, including the young Beethoven’s fraught relationship with his bullying, alcoholic father and his fantasies of having been born illegitimate and of having royal blood.

Mr. Solomon was especially astute about Beethoven’s arduous, ultimately successful attempt later in life to wrest legal guardianship of his young nephew, Karl, from his widowed sister-in-law, a woman Beethoven thought immoral. Beethoven’s “obsessive entanglement with them,” Mr. Solomon wrote, “forcibly wrenched his emotional energies from their attachment to the outer world and focused them upon the still unresolved issues of his family constellation.”

For some readers, Mr. Solomon went too far in his books and numerous articles. He put the “stubborn, moody, withdrawn Ludwig on a psychoanalytic couch,” a review of the Beethoven biography in Kirkus said.

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