Music

With an abundance of albums out on multiple labels, we have as complete a portrait of the Toscanini protégé Guido Cantelli as we are ever likely to.Frost glazed the ground, and mist hung in the air, as a brand-new Douglas DC-6B took off from Orly Airport near Paris early on Nov. 24, 1956. The plane was headed for Shannon, Ireland, and then New York.It would arrive at neither.About 15 seconds after it left the ground, the plane dipped slightly below its path, clipped an unlit house, and plunged into the village of Paray-Vieille-Poste. The authorities never found the cause of the crash; all but one of the 35 people aboard died.Among them was Guido Cantelli, 36, a “comet of a conductor,” as one critic called him, and the protégé of Arturo Toscanini. In just eight years, Cantelli had shot from obscurity to a career whose brightness still blinds today. Frequently a guest of the New York Philharmonic, which he was on his way to conduct, he had been announced as the music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan a week before the crash.Brahms’s Symphony No. 3: Poco AllegrettoPhilharmonia Orchestra, 1955 (Warner)Perhaps it is the manner of Cantelli’s death, the waste of it, that explains some of the fervency of interest that has come to surround him. It is hard to think of many conductors whose careers can be examined in similarly pinpoint — if admittedly macabre — detail, to get closer to what could have been.After all, not only are all of Cantelli’s studio recordings for EMI, chiefly with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, to be found in a 10-disc Warner box, but his meteoric progress can also be tracked from week to week, as an extraordinary proportion of his radio broadcasts with the Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony and other groups have been restored and released on labels including Testament, Music & Arts and Pristine. We now have as complete a portrait of Cantelli as we probably ever will.And what a portrait. Forget the what-ifs that smoked from those Parisian flames. Forget the mystery of how the history of music in the United States might have been rewritten if Cantelli, and not Leonard Bernstein, had succeeded Dimitri Mitropoulos at the Philharmonic, as Mitropoulos had apparently wished. Forget, too, the lament that Cantelli barely had time to mature, as if the efforts of a younger musician are necessarily of inferior worth.Emerging as if fully formed in the works of Schumann and Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, Cantelli was arguably the greatest conductor who never quite was — as the New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote in 1953, one who “understands the notes and wraps his heart around every one of them.”Earnest, tense and introverted, Cantelli was not the copycat he often stood accused of being, as if the mark of Toscanini was disqualifying in a century in which his mentor’s influence was vast. Even if he wielded a tension of rhythm, a ferocity of line and a strictness of discipline that were familiar, those traits were tempered with an elegance of expression, a taste in color and a mania for details that he tortured himself and his musicians to perfect. He treated all music as song, and he sang it with the care he thought it deserved.Schumann’s Symphony No. 4: LangsamPhilharmonia Orchestra, 1953 (Warner)Singing itself played only a minor role in Cantelli’s training. Born in Novara, Italy, on April 27, 1920, he was the second son of a military bandmaster who stood him on a table to conduct a band when he was 5.Cantelli learned the piano as well as the trumpet, horn and several percussion instruments as a boy, and he was quickly taken to study with the organist of the Basilica di San Gaudenzio. He sang in the choir and first directed it at age 8; wrote a Mass at 10; and started substituting at the organ when he was 14, even playing themes from “Tristan und Isolde” during services.He could often be seen in the gallery of the Teatro Coccia, reading scores by torchlight; other evenings were spent tuning a radio he had saved for with his allowance, or with his records, those of Toscanini foremost among them. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1939 and completed a seven-year composition course in three, but he was no composer. Shortly after graduating, in 1943, he made his debut leading “La Traviata” at the Coccia, a theater Toscanini had opened in 1888.Cantelli with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1955.via The New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives After German troops occupied Novara that September, Cantelli was sent to a concentration camp on the Baltic coast, and was worked so close to death that he ended up weighing just 80 pounds. The way the story was later told, to promote him as an antifascist just as courageous as Toscanini had supposedly been, he refused to collaborate with the Nazis and eventually became a hero of the Partisans, one supposedly hours from being shot when the Allies liberated Milan.Not quite, according to Cantelli’s biographer, Laurence Lewis, who describes him as basically apolitical. The Germans probably deported him, a weak conscript, to a labor camp because he declined to fight, if he was ever given the choice, and after a few months they drafted him to serve the rump Italian Social Republic of Mussolini. En route back, he escaped from a hospital and returned to Novara, where he forged documents for the Partisans while working at a bank. He married his sweetheart, Iris, the day Mussolini was shot.After the war, Cantelli found food scarce and opportunities scarcer. He debuted with La Scala’s orchestra outdoors in July 1945, but didn’t return until May 21, 1948. Coincidentally, Toscanini was in the theater that night, and was confronted with a vision of his youth. Within days, the world’s most famous conductor was in the Cantellis’ tiny Milan apartment, playing his latest record and inviting Cantelli to spend a few weeks conducting the NBC Symphony.Cantelli, then 28, arrived in New York at the end of December, and he was swept into a world filled with musical eminences and fawning socialites. Toscanini declared him an honorary son. Four concerts followed in January and February, each of them broadcast, each a sensation. There was a remarkably passionate account of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony alongside elegant Haydn one week; a stingingly potent Tchaikovsky “Romeo and Juliet” with Casella the next; and a heated Bartok Concerto for Orchestra another.Haydn’s Symphony No. 93: Presto ma non troppoNBC Symphony Orchestra, 1949 (Pristine)“We sense in Mr. Cantelli a musician with a destiny before him,” Downes wrote after the last program, of music by Ravel and Franck. Toscanini took Cantelli to see the Rockettes to celebrate before his voyage home; he would return each winter, adding long stints with the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony that outlasted his appearances with the NBC, which folded in 1954.Throughout Cantelli’s career in the United States, there were criticisms of his repertoire, which ran from Frescobaldi and Monteverdi to Barber and Dallapiccola but turned out to be repetitive from season to season. There were also more fundamental complaints that he was too much the precisionist. “Other men mature from uncontrolled passion to control,” Downes wrote after his debut with the Philharmonic, in January 1952. “Mr. Cantelli’s way may be to graduate from control to release.”That control was hard-earned. Cantelli didn’t read around a composer’s life, or consciously filter music through his own aesthetics; he just read scores, and without the memory of a Toscanini or a Mitropoulos he learned them, painstakingly, through their melodies. It was not unusual, he said in 1955, for him to pace a room singing an obscure bassoon line during the six hours a day he studied.From left, Dimitri Mitropoulos, John Corigliano Sr. and Cantelli around 1950.via The New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives He fixated on how to release notes as well as attack them, on how to give a line an end as well as a beginning, on how to attain a balance that let parts sing through. But if his fastidious lyricism endowed his Mozart and his Rossini with grace as well as drive, his ability to twist a score taut also gave his Mendelssohn, and even his Debussy, immense cumulative force.Cantelli’s perfectionism found its ultimate expression in his fanatical sessions in London with the Philharmonia. Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte,” to take one example, took him 20 tense takes to get its six minutes of music right, during which he stormed offstage, the harpist Renata Scheffel-Stein cried and the horn player Dennis Brain feared his lip would crack.Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte”Philharmonia Orchestra, 1952 (Warner)Now remastered and available on Warner, many of the resultant recordings remain impressive: Cantelli’s heavenly way with Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” his serious-minded brilliance in Dukas’s “L’Apprenti Sorcier,” his justly famous Schumann Fourth, his consuming Debussy “La Mer,” dark as the depths.In some accounts, though, he prefers suavity over the sweat-drenching volatility he could incite live. His Brahms First captivates in the studio, but it blazes with the Boston Symphony, from 1954, on Pristine. His Philharmonia Beethoven Seventh dances happily, but the same symphony stuns on a Music & Arts release from a 1953 performance that, an astonished Downes wrote, seemed to invoke the composer’s “spirit brooding gigantic over the universe.”It’s plenty enough to raise the question of why Cantelli did not take a major post until his crisply rendered “Così Fan Tutte” at La Scala in 1956 forced that house to make him an offer he could not refuse. Appearing as a guest with a handful of prestigious, quite different ensembles offered him “more in the way of interest, execution, and variety of expression than he could obtain from any single orchestra,” one profile paraphrased him as saying.The Philharmonic counterfactual is too far from the truth even to ask. At the time of his death, Cantelli had planned to devote most his time to La Scala, his cherished Philharmonia aside; his bond with the New York players had already broken.His sole recording with the Philharmonic, a Vivaldi “Four Seasons,” is his worst studio effort, and the exertion he had to put into overcoming the orchestra’s intransigence once led him to collapse in the Carnegie Hall wings. Despite outstanding performances — vigorous yet finessed — in the spring of 1956, Cantelli had been so furious at the players’ antics then that he begged the Philharmonic’s management to relieve him of his contractual obligations that November. They refused.Strauss’s “Don Juan”New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 1956 (Pristine)And then he was gone.In New York, where the ailing Toscanini was not told of his heir’s death, Mitropoulos led Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung” in his memory with the Philharmonic, a performance that — unlike Cantelli’s own rapturous accounts — seems to dissolve in grief.In Milan, La Scala’s orchestra played Handel’s “Largo,” the last piece he had led, from the pit as his hearse paused outside the theater. Its former music director, Victor de Sabata, offered to conduct; the players preferred that Cantelli do so himself, one last time. More

Some ensembles have decided not to perform Tchaikovsky’s overture, written as commemoration of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s army.With its earsplitting rounds of cannon fire and triumphal spirit, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” has been a staple of Fourth of July festivities across the United States for decades, serving as a rousing prelude to glittering displays of fireworks.But this year many ensembles, concerned about the overture’s history as a celebration of the Russian military — Tchaikovsky wrote it to commemorate the rout of Napoleon’s army from Russia in the winter of 1812 — are reconsidering the work because of the war in Ukraine.Some groups have decided to skip it, arguing that its bellicose themes would be offensive during wartime. Others, eager to show solidarity with Ukraine, have added renditions of the Ukrainian national anthem to their programs to counter the overture’s exaltation of czarist Russia. Still others are reworking it, in one case by adding calls for peace.For the first time since 1978, the storied Cleveland Orchestra is omitting the work from its Fourth of July concerts, which feature the Blossom Festival Band. “Given the way Russia is behaving right now and the propaganda that is out there, to go and play music that celebrates their victory I just think would be upsetting for a lot of people,” said André Gremillet, the president and chief executive of the orchestra. “Everyone would hear that reference, complete with the cannons, to the current war involving Russia. It would be insensitive to people in general, and certainly to the Ukrainian population in particular.”The reconsideration of the “1812 Overture” is the latest example of the difficult questions facing cultural institutions since the war began.Arts groups have come under pressure from audiences, board members and activists to cut ties with Russian artists, especially those who have expressed support for President Vladimir V. Putin. Some have also faced calls to scrap works by Russian composers, including revered figures like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Mussorgsky.Many groups have resisted, arguing that removing Russian works would amount to censorship. But there have been exceptions. The Polish National Opera in March dropped a production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” one of the greatest Russian operas, to express “solidarity with the people of Ukraine.” The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra in Wales and the Chubu Philharmonic Orchestra in Japan have all recently abandoned plans to perform the “1812 Overture,” citing the war.The overture, which runs about 15 minutes, is unabashedly patriotic, featuring Russian folk songs and a volley of cannon fire set to the former Russian national anthem, “God Save the Czar.” Some renditions include vocal lines from a Russian Orthodox text, “God Preserve Thy People.”While Tchaikovsky was not particularly fond of his overture when it debuted in Moscow in 1882, it has since become one of classical music’s best known pieces.Since the 1970s, when the Boston Pops began playing it before crowds of hundreds of thousands along the banks of the Charles River, the overture has become a popular part of Fourth of July celebrations across the United States. It is performed each year by hundreds of ensembles in big cities and small towns; local governments often supply howitzers for the overture’s stirring conclusion.Interpretations of the piece have changed over time, said Emily Richmond Pollock, an associate professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While it was first used to celebrate the Russian empire, it later became synonymous with American democracy. Now, in some circles, it symbolizes authoritarianism in modern Russia.“It has been used for different purposes throughout history,” Pollock said. “In 2022, with ambivalence about Russian power, it has come to mean something different. And it could mean something different again in the future.”In recent weeks, more than a dozen ensembles in Connecticut, Indiana, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and Wyoming and elsewhere have decided to forgo the piece because of concerns about backlash from Ukrainians and others opposed to the war. Some have replaced the piece with works by Americans, including the film composer John Williams, and standards like Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “America the Beautiful.”The Hartford Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut, which has played the overture since 1995, felt that “celebrating a Russian military victory is just too sensitive a topic right now” and removed the piece from its program, said Steve Collins, the ensemble’s president and chief executive.“The risk of offending and running afoul of our Ukrainian American friends — the very people we want to support — far outweighed any benefit to playing this piece,” he said. “It just wasn’t that important, in our final analysis, to perform this piece this summer.”The Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming decided to skip the work in part because it did not want to alienate Ukrainians, including those affiliated with the festival.“We did not think it was appropriate to program a work that featured sounds of cannons accompanying ‘God Save the Czar,’ given what is happening in Ukraine,” said Emma Kail, the festival’s executive director. “We thought we’d build a new tradition and keep it all American this year.”Other ensembles, including the Boston Pops and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, which typically perform the overture before large audiences on live television spectacles, are planning to proceed with the piece this year.“We play this to celebrate independence and freedom and people who are willing to sacrifice a lot to make that happen,” said Keith Lockhart, the conductor of the Boston Pops, which will also perform the Ukrainian national anthem.Lockhart said that in a time of war, the overture could serve as a reminder of the perils of aggression. In 1812, he noted, Russia was fending off an invasion from a more powerful country, much like Ukraine is today.“In that fight, the Russians were the Ukrainians of 2022,” he said. “It’s not just as simplistic as ‘Russia, bad.’ It is the attempt of authoritarian powers to dominate other powers that is bad.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

The group’s funk, disco and pop songs have been sampled over 1,800 times, but haven’t collected the same accolades as many contemporaries. A new boxed set takes a look back.“Do something,” the producer Gene Redd instructed the drummer George Brown and the bassist Robert “Kool” Bell during an early recording session in New York. “Say something! Sing something.”That prompt in the late ’60s was what Kool & the Gang — a jazz group with a crack horn section that evolved into funk, then transitioned to disco — needed to get moving. “Right off the top of the heads,” Brown, 73, said of group’s early years, when it was making instrumental tracks influenced by both James Moody and James Brown. “We’d just start, and bingo, there it is: ‘Raw Hamburger’ and ‘Chocolate Buttermilk,’” he added, referring to two memorable tracks. “It just flowed. And we’re just grooving.”Over nearly six decades, Kool & the Gang have released 25 albums and toured worldwide, playing Live Aid in 1985 and Glastonbury in 2011. Their 12 Top 10 singles are funk, disco and pop classics, underpinning movies including “Pulp Fiction” and “Legally Blonde”: “Jungle Boogie,” “Ladies Night,” “Hollywood Swinging,” the undeniable 1980 party anthem “Celebration.” They are foundational for hip-hop and have been sampled over 1,800 times, according to the website WhoSampled, including memorable turns on Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique” and Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind.” (Questlove played a three-hour-plus set of songs featuring the group’s samples during a 2020 livestream.)Yet Kool & the Gang haven’t collected the same accolades as many of their contemporaries. They haven’t even reached the ballot for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Why?“We’re asking the same question,” said Bell, 71, in a separate interview. The bassist and singer left the Imperial Lords street gang and joined the first version of the group in Jersey City, N.J., in 1964.A new boxed set out this week, “The Albums Vol. 1: 1970-1978,” makes an argument for the band’s influence — 199 tracks over 13 CDs, celebrating a transitional period, one that would push the group to the edge of megastardom. (Part 2, covering the ’80s, is due in the fall.)Bell was video chatting from Orlando, Fla., wearing a leopard-print dress shirt, with a bass, a Kool & the Gang-branded guitar and framed gold and platinum records behind him. He’s an animated storyteller, delighting in remembering the band’s early days in Youngstown, Ohio, when he and his brother Ronald Khalis Bell, often credited under his Muslim name, Khalis Bayyan, pounded on empty paint cans to make rhythms.Their father, Bobby, was a boxer who hung out with the jazzmen Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk; Monk later became Robert’s godfather. Robert tried boxing, but only lasted a year. When the family moved to Jersey City, he fell in with local gangs.Music eventually pulled him out: The group sparked when Ronald visited the home of a high-school classmate, Robert “Spike” Mickens, who could flawlessly play the jazz classic “Desafinado.” Soon the Bell brothers were hanging around Mickens’s house, and Kool picked up a guitar, learning the one-note bass part in Herbie Mann’s “Comin’ Home Baby.” His instinctive style, with help from his more accomplished brother, became the group’s rhythmic foundation.“Didn’t take no lessons. Nothing like that,” Bell said. “Just listening.”Through most of the band’s early period, Kool & the Gang had no bona fide singer, and for a while, it didn’t matter. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThey formed the Jazz Birds, then the Jazziacs, then Kool and the Flames, after Bell’s street nickname, modified from a friend called Cool. In 1969, wanting to avoid trouble from James Brown and His Famous Flames, they renamed themselves Kool & the Gang.The group found a manager and began playing gigs, learning Brown and Motown hits, backing minor R&B stars in their swings through town. “So now you have the jazz and the funk coming together,” Bell said. The band’s live, mostly instrumental 1970 debut “Kool and the Gang” reflected this combination.Kool & the Gang were prolific, and their sound evolved over a long period. Michael Neidus — global commercial manager for the British record label Demon Music Group, which licensed the Kool & the Gang catalog from their longtime label, Universal Music, for the boxed sets — decided to separate the group’s more grooving ’70s phase, when the band frequently worked with the producer Redd, from the smash-hit era that begins with “Ladies Night” in 1979 and “Celebration” in 1980.“It’s too much in one go,” he said. “There are two distinct periods of the band’s success.”Even in the band’s first decade, it was clear that other musicians were paying close attention to their sound. In Indianapolis in the early ’70s, Funk Inc. was studying early Kool & the Gang albums. Funk Inc. interpolated “Kools Back Again” into its own “Kool Is Back,” which was memorably sampled many times.“They pitched a good pocket,” said Steve Weakley, Funk Inc.’s guitarist, in an interview. “They had single-note lines in the melodies.”“Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs in pop, appearing on numerous best-of playlists for weddings and sporting events.Frederic REGLAIN/GettyThrough most of the band’s early period, Kool & the Gang had no bona fide singer, and for a while, it didn’t matter. When a record executive requested they make their own version of Manu Dibango’s hit “Soul Makossa,” Kool & the Gang came up with “Jungle Boogie,” “Funky Stuff” and “Hollywood Swinging” during a one-day marathon rehearsal session in New York for their “Wild and Peaceful” album.“These guys could make hit records with no singers,” said Pete Rock, the D.J. and producer whose Jamaican family in the Bronx owned all the Kool & the Gang singles and albums. “Funky as hell — that’s the only way to describe that rhythm section.”Rock said once the pioneering hip-hop D.J. Kool Herc of the Bronx popularized the isolation of breakbeats grabbed from other artists’ records, Kool & the Gang became essential: “Everybody was on a James Brown kick in hip-hop, but certain producers listened to other music by other groups.”By the late ’70s, Kool & the Gang had survived long enough to realize they could be even bigger if they found their elusive frontman. Dick Griffey, a concert promoter, was the first to suggest the idea, and the group hired James “JT” Taylor.A small detail at the end of “Ladies Night” turned out to be crucial — Meekaaeel Muhammad, a member of the group’s songwriting team, fleshed out the chorus with a countermelodic “Come on, let’s celebrate.” It pointed to the band’s next hit: “Celebration,” based on an idea from Ronald Khalis Bell. “The track had that kind of down-home feeling, almost like you’re somewhere in Alabama, with grandma sitting on the porch with some lemonade. A rocking-chair vibe,” Bell said. “One of the guys came up with that ‘yahoo!’”“Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs in pop, on best-of playlists for weddings and sporting events — it was even played on the International Space Station. The track kicked off a commercially rich period in the ’80s (“Get Down On It,” “Cherish,” “Fresh”), but after so many years of funky polyrhythms, disco and pop got “a little boring, if you know what I mean,” Brown said. “You eventually get into it, but it wasn’t like playing jazz or funk. Those two genres, you can stretch out.”The hits mostly dried up by 1989, and the group continued to make albums and tour internationally throughout the ’90s and 2000s, replacing original members with younger artists. In 2011, David Lee Roth saw Kool & the Gang perform at Glastonbury and invited the band to open for Van Halen on its tour the following year. The group’s tracks have streamed 2.8 billion times worldwide to date, according to the tracking service Luminate.But the last few years have been difficult. Ronald Khalis Bell and the saxophonist Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, died; Robert Bell lost his wife and another brother. When the pandemic hit, the group’s remaining members had to cut off their touring schedule. Discussing this period, Bell’s smile drooped, and he turned contemplative. “A lot of memories,” he said. “But we continue to move on.”Brown said a new album is scheduled for October, and the band is on the road once again.Perhaps it will eventually reach the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, too. Bell smiled wryly. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Maybe next year.” More

Richard Taruskin, who died on Friday, is remembered by his former editor at The New York Times and elsewhere.His keeper, not his editor, I used to call myself in affectionate jest — and with enormous pride and respect.He was a force of nature. He was larger than life. He was one of a kind. Choose your cliché.Richard Taruskin, a music historian of towering intellect and erudition who delighted in stirring up good trouble, died on Friday at 77. Physically, he was a bear of a man, and his manner, though typically warm and upbeat, could occasionally seem gruff and untamed. He suffered fools not at all. He rode herd on the musicological and critical communities, sending unsolicited — indeed, dreaded — postcards to colleagues with capsule critiques, noting errors or inanities, often scathingly.Yet he was a joy to work with. His writing was brilliant, profound, stylish and witty, scarcely in need of editing, except for length. He never tired of trying to fit, say, a 2,500-word peg into a 1,500-word hole. That was not so much a problem at Opus, the small, free-form record magazine where I started working with him, in the mid-1980s. But it became a serious issue a few years later, at our next stop, the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, with its hard-and-fast space limitations. Richard’s sparkling prose was not something you — or he — ever wanted to cut wholesale.But even this proved unproblematic. We would tighten a piece sentence by sentence, word by word, and Richard welcomed suggestions. He eventually took the process as a challenge, a puzzle that we would solve together.His was the most nimble and retentive mind I’ve ever worked with closely over time. It was almost scary to hear him quote from memory a paragraph of something he had read a decade or two before virtually verbatim. And he seemed to have read everything.It came as a particular jolt recently to hear that what Richard was dying of was cancer of the esophagus. With suddenly renewed force, I recalled the circumstances of our early work together, at Opus. That started while he was writing his first oversized book, “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” which in 1996 ultimately weighed in at two volumes and 1,757 pages. Richard would work on Stravinsky for three or four weeks, then take a week off between chapters and write for Opus. In one of those breaks, he might produce six or seven 500-word CD reviews, a 1,000-word think piece, two 2,500-word essays and a 4,000- or 5,000-word blowout. They arrived in a fat manila envelope, which, when opened, reeked of cigar smoke. (Cigars are said to be a risk factor for esophageal cancer.)Cigars, it happens, were something of an odd leitmotif in Richard’s biography. The story was told — vividly, by Peter Kang in Columbia College Today in 2005 — that Richard, as a young pup at Columbia University in 1961, saw a distinguished-looking man enter the music library with a lighted cigar and informed him that smoking was not permitted there. “When the man left,” Kang wrote, “the library staff quickly told Taruskin that the smoker he had just admonished was world-renowned musicologist and professor Paul Henry Lang.”And therein lies another, larger tale. Richard went on to earn his Ph.D. at Columbia under Lang’s tutelage, writing about Russian opera in the 1860s, a topic that led to several of his many books of essays. Nor was it lost on Richard that Lang’s magnum opus, “Music in Western Civilization,” from 1941, remained in wide use as a textbook at Columbia and elsewhere. Emulating his mentor with an eye toward producing a textbook, Richard embarked on a magnum opus of his own in 1991.That work grew and grew and grew, as Richard reveled in the opportunity to say his “two cents’ worth about everything.” Finally published in six volumes by Oxford University Press in 2005 as “The Oxford History of Western Music,” it is an endlessly informative, often opinionated page-turner — all 4,272 pages of it.Well, no, perhaps not all. The sixth volume of “The Ox,” as the tomes have come to be known, consists of a chronology, a bibliography and a 146-page small-type index: sheer tedium to deal with. Clearly, “The Ox” would not be the svelte textbook Richard may have envisioned — though he went on to compress it, in collaboration with the music historian Christopher H. Gibbs, to produce a “college edition,” at a mere 1,212 pages.After his time with Lang, Richard fell under the wing of Joseph Kerman, “the second-most- famous musicologist of those days,” as he called him, who was overseeing the start-up of a new journal, 19th-Century Music, which became what Richard called his “scholarly home” for a time. In 1987, he joined Kerman as a fellow professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained (emeritus since 2014) until his death.In addition to academic pursuits, Richard began to write more popularly for the short-lived Opus, The New Republic and The Times, developing a reputation as America’s public musicologist, a role he gloried in. On receiving the Kyoto Prize in Japan in 2017 for his contributions to the arts and philosophy, he said of his Times work, “I found it congenial to write about music in relation to what are always the primary concerns of any newspaper, that is, social and political issues.” He also loved having “access to the largest audience a writer on classical music in America could ever dream of having.”The international acclaim that Richard achieved was all merited and wonderful, but for me it does not eclipse some of my favorite memories of him, as a youngish performer in New York. Whenever I hear the viola da gamba solos in the Bach Passions played politely and limply, as they so often are, I yearn to hear Richard, whose gamba playing had the same grit and guts and flair as his writing.Fortunately, he lives on in my mind’s ear. More

Steeped in romantic history, smaller “country house operas” such as Grange Park Opera, west of London, offer a leisurely pace and less overhead.When the British TV host Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited a 350-acre estate in 2014 from his 99-year-old great-aunt, he was stunned by the inheritance tax bill he was facing, not to mention the upkeep of a crumbling 50-room house once briefly owned by Henry VIII.His solution: Set up a registered charity, or trust, to turn it all into an arts center, including a summer opera festival looking for a new home. Like an intervention by the gods in a Wagner opera, the tax bill was slashed, a 700-seat theater was built in about 11 months and the well-heeled came to frolic at West Horsley Place, which had been largely frolic-free for decades.The success of Grange Park Opera (its current season runs through July 17), about 23 miles west of London, is an example of a symbiotic relationship between old English country estates that benefit from becoming a British charity and a thirst for highbrow arts and socializing away from the bustle of the capital in the summertime.A recent performance of “La Gioconda” at Grange Park Opera. Marc BrennerIt is one of several so-called country house operas around Britain. Others include Garsington (in a temporary structure on the Getty estate) and The Grange Festival (in a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion, which was Grange Park Opera’s first home, starting in 1998). There is also Glyndebourne, which in 1934 began daylong outings to an opera in the country, complete with champagne while strolling the grounds, picnics on lawns or tucked away in garden corners, and lavish meals in dining rooms sheltered from the elements.“If you go to the opera in London, you have to scramble for a drink at the interval or gulp down something to eat in 20 minutes,” said Wasfi Kani, the founder and chief executive of Grange Park Opera. “But instead of just a few hours in an evening, you can make it a half day, have a walk in the country and enjoy your dinner at a leisurely pace.”That pace — and an unofficial dress code of tuxedos and evening gowns — also harks back to the opera of old. To some, the country house operas are not only steeped in the romantic history of upper-crust England, but, ironically, may also provide a glimpse of how opera may survive.“Houses like Grange Park are somewhat the future of opera because they are smaller and have less overhead, which is appropriate for dwindling audiences,” said the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, who returns to the festival this summer in “La Gioconda” after opening the opera house in 2017 with “Tosca.” “They built all of it in less than a year, and right up to the last minute. We were doing ‘Tosca,’ and the soprano was singing ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ to the sound of drilling.”Christina and Bamber Gascoigne in 2017. The couple turned West Horsley Place, a centuries-old English estate, into the current home of Grange Park Opera.Grange Park OperaThe company, which usually stages four operas or musicals each summer, has an annual operating budget of around 4 million pounds, about $4.9 million, and a full-time staff of about 12 (with 300 to 400 part-time workers during the summer). Like most other country house operas, it is funded entirely by ticket sales and donations, receiving no government money.Mr. Gascoigne, the original host of the popular TV show “University Challenge,” died in February at 87. But his vision to make West Horsley Place a trust — similar to a U.S. nonprofit organization — is intact, and the opera company, a separate charity, has a 99-year lease on the estate.The core of the 50-room mansion dates from the 15th century, and Mr. Gascoigne’s great-aunt, Mary Innes-Ker, the Duchess of Roxburghe, was its last resident (her ashes are buried beneath the orchestra pit). She lived alone for years in an almost Miss Havisham-like existence where few visitors went beyond the front rooms. When she died in 2014, the home and grounds were in disrepair.“Every time there was a new drip, she thought: Get a new bucket,” Mr. Gascoigne was quoted as saying in 2018.Ms. Kani had been looking for a new home for Grange Park Opera, since its previous home was quite far for its core London audience. She read about Mr. Gascoigne and the house and debt he was being saddled with. It seemed like a moment to seize.A picnic on the grounds of West Horsley Place.Richard LewisohnTurning the property into an arts center with an opera house seemed like a fine idea to Mr. Gascoigne and his wife, Christina. Many of the home’s furnishings and artworks — along with silver, crystal, servants’ outfits and even a long-lost pencil and chalk drawing that thrilled Sotheby’s experts — were auctioned to offset the remaining tax bill and pay for repairs on the house. Mr. Gascoigne gave up about £20 million in assets to create the trust.“Grange Park Opera approached Bamber and me at the perfect time,” said Ms. Gascoigne, who was married to Mr. Gascoigne for 57 years. “What was a potential financial burden became almost a community service for Bamber in his final years.”And his legacy plays out in a five-year-old opera house and the meandering gardens, honoring opera’s leisurely origins when the European elite had little more to do on a given day than listen to opera and fuss with their formal wear.“I’ve always said that a third of them come because it’s an amazing place, a third of them come to see the opera and a third of them to say they’ve been there,” Ms. Kani said. More

Opera houses in London and Boston have taken a critical look at “Madama Butterfly” to correct its clichés, caricatures and anachronisms.LONDON — Draped in a crisp white kimono and a translucent veil, Madama Butterfly kneels beside an American officer as they wed in a religious ceremony. The priest celebrates their nuptials while guests dressed in traditional Japanese robes look on.At first glance, there’s nothing conspicuously different about the Royal Opera House’s revival of its 2002 production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Yet it’s the result of a year of consultations with academics, practitioners and professionals to strip away any hint of cliché or caricature.Concretely, this has meant removing “the extremely white makeup” that the performers previously wore. By the early 20th century, the period in which “Madama Butterfly” is set, “nobody was wearing white makeup on the street,” said Sonoko Kamimura, an expert in Japanese movement and design who was hired by the Royal Opera to update the production.Ms. Kamimura worked to get rid of other anachronistic elements, such as wigs, samurai-style coiffures and costumes.“I really like this opera, because the music is beautiful. But then I would also say it is stereotypical,” she said, adding that the Royal Opera House had found a way around the issue. “Rather than cancel the show,” she said, the house had organized “a dialogue” around it that she was “really glad to be a part of.”Some opera companies have opted to shelve or cancel “Madama Butterfly” because of its increasingly problematic portrayals, particularly to audiences of Asian heritage.Tristram Kenton / ROHSince its world premiere in 1904 at La Scala in Milan, “Madama Butterfly” has been a staple of theaters around the world. First performed at Covent Garden in 1905, it’s the ninth most programmed work at the Royal Opera House, having been performed more than 400 times.Its portrayal of a lovelorn 15-year-old geisha, who is impregnated and abandoned by an American lieutenant, has become increasingly problematic in the 21st century, particularly to audiences of Asian heritage. Institutions such as the Royal Opera House and Boston Lyric Opera are working hard to bring it up-to-date, in every sense of the word.“We’re all very conscious these days that opera and race have had a complicated relationship and history,” said Oliver Mears, the director of opera at the Royal Opera House. “There is always a risk, when a Western opera house is portraying a different culture, that it can make missteps, and that the level of authenticity is not quite as high as it could be.”Mr. Mears said that there was “certainly a huge amount of nervousness on the part of fellow opera companies in mounting this opera at all in the current moment,” and that many were canceling or shelving their “Madama Butterfly” productions “because it feels like it’s too dangerous to go there.”“We think that’s a huge shame, because ‘Madama Butterfly’ is a masterpiece,” he said. “We would much rather be in dialogue with these pieces rather than canceling them.”A similar revision has been taking place across the Atlantic at Boston Lyric Opera. The consultations there, known as the Butterfly Process, will lead to a production of the opera in the fall of 2023 on the Lyric stage.The Lyric was initially set to perform “Madama Butterfly” in the fall of 2020, but the pandemic delayed it for a year. In that time, “there were incidents of heightened racism and violence toward Asian communities across the country,” Bradley Vernatter, acting general and artistic director of the Lyric, said in an email. After conversations with artists and staff members, the production was postponed further, because it was “critical to re-examine the modern context before presenting the work,” Mr. Vernatter said.Licia Albanese made her Metropolitan Opera debut on February 1940 as Madama Butterfly. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, performances of that opera were banned in the U.S. until 1946, when World War II ended.AlamyHe noted that operas weren’t “static museum pieces,” and that shifts in society and politics affected audience reactions to operas. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, “Madama Butterfly” was performed almost every season between 1907 and 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the work stayed off the Met stage until 1946.Mr. Vernatter explained that Puccini had never set foot in Japan when he saw David Belasco’s one-act play “Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan” and decided to write an operatic version. To research Japanese music, he attended a touring Kabuki show in Milan and asked the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy to sing him Japanese folk songs. Because of Puccini’s unfamiliarity with the culture, “the Japanese characters in his opera come off as caricatures,” Mr. Vernatter said.Revising operas to reflect contemporary times can have its own pitfalls. In the fall of 2019, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto put on an updated performance of another Puccini opera, “Turandot,” about a Chinese princess who murders her suitors.One of the three main characters — whose names in the original libretto are Ping, Pang and Pong — was played by a Taiwanese American tenor whose daughter Katherine Hu later wrote an opinion article in The New York Times. To tone down the caricature, the director renamed the characters Jim, Bob and Bill.“But the characters continued to play into stereotypes of effeminate Asian men as they pranced around onstage, giggling at one another,” Ms. Hu wrote in the article. “Alterations like these have become part of a broader trend as opera clumsily reckons with its racist and sexist past.”“To survive, opera has to confront the depth of its racism and sexism point-blank, treating classic operas as historical artifacts instead of dynamic cultural productions,” she wrote. “Opera directors should approach the production of these classics as museum curators and professors — educating audiences about historical context and making stereotypes visible.”Both the Royal Opera House and Boston Lyric Opera chiefs said that was exactly what they wanted to do.“The goal here is for everyone to participate in an art form that hasn’t traditionally been inclusive, and to strengthen our communities and audiences through the music and stories we present,” Mr. Vernatter said. “I believe we can do it by engaging with and listening to people of many backgrounds and life experiences, and incorporating that into our work.” More

The Albanian soprano has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Her latest role is Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” at the Royal Opera.Nedda, the leading female character of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” must die rather than consummate true love. The soprano Ermonela Jaho, who makes her debut in the role at London’s Royal Opera House this month, has discovered that the character is more complex than she first thought.“She is strong enough to fight until death for her freedom,” Ms. Jaho said in a phone interview. “She never loses the light inside of her.”The Albanian soprano, 48, has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with the depth and authenticity of her performances, especially in the realism of “verismo” works by Verdi and Puccini. Her portrayal of the character Violetta in “La Traviata” is a signature role which brought her into the international spotlight after she jumped in on short notice at the Royal Opera House in 2008. (She will return to the Verdi work at the Metropolitan Opera in January). The London stage also brought her role debut as Suor Angelica in Puccini’s “Il Trittico,” which she will sing at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu in December.Ms. Jaho was chosen to appear in the documentary “Fuoco Sacro,” now playing on the French-German television station Arte. Next April, she will return to the Royal Opera to sing the role of Liù in Puccini’s “Turandot,” which she recorded for the Warner Classics label under the baton of Antonio Pappano.And at the Royal Opera from Tuesday through July 20, audiences will have the chance to experience her in Damiano Michieletto’s double bill of “Pagliacci” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” first seen in 2015.Mr. Pappano, the Royal Opera’s longtime music director, pointed to a winning combination of empathy and strength in Ms. Jaho’s performances. “She is sensitive to every curve of every phrase and every situation the character finds herself in — also in heartbreaking situations,” he said in a phone interview. “But she’s also got this steely resolve, which she has to have in ‘Suor Angelica’ and, in particular, ‘Madame Butterfly.’”Ms. Jaho, who grew up in Albania, trained at academies in Mantua and Rome. Above, she performs the role of Suor Angelica in Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Bill Cooper/ROH“She is capable,” he said, “with her voice and with her acting — which is so detailed and so nuanced — to make you cry. She’s very generous when she’s out there. She’s not saving for anything.”In “Pagliacci,” the soprano role demands tremendous flexibility and range. The story focuses on a theater troupe in 19th-century Calabria. The work creates a metadramatic tightrope when Nedda’s husband, Canio, takes vengeance for her infidelity both in a comedy onstage and with a villager.“This is absolutely essential verismo,” said the conductor. “Sometimes the part is almost spoken, and then it becomes thrusting and dramatic.”Ms. Jaho sees a challenge in conveying her character’s complexity within the two-act drama. “You have to play all these cards, all these emotions, and be read from the public in little time,” she said.The soprano began assimilating Italian culture at 17, when she was chosen by the soprano Katia Ricciarelli to study at her academy in Mantua, Italy. Ms. Jaho went on to enroll at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where she studied with Valerio Paperi. She was also coached on the side by the bass Paolo Montarsolo.“I wanted to prove to everyone that even if I come from Albania, I can speak your language, I can sing your music,” said Ms. Jaho, who now lives in New York.Having grown up in a country that was behind the Iron Curtain, the soprano struggled in Italy with both culture shock and the distance from her family. She also had to work odd jobs, babysitting and taking care of older people. “But always I had in mind that if the dream is big, maybe the sacrifices and difficulties will be big as well,” she said.She inherited a gift for mindfulness from her father, who was a military officer and professor of philosophy: “Sometimes you feel hopeless, because life is not always beautiful. He told me that nothing is impossible. And you have to work hard.”Ms. Jaho considers it destiny that she went on to star in “La Traviata” after falling in love with that opera in her hometown of Tirana, the Albanian capital, at 14. It was her first experience with live opera, and she swore to her older brother that she would sing the character before she died.To date, she has sung the role of Violetta 301 times. She said that the role had become “richer with life experience” and that it remained “like a dream for my voice.”“Somehow, it pushes me to stay in shape,” she said.Last fall, she added the title character of Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” to her repertoire, with performances at the Vienna State Opera. She also sings French-language works such as Massenet’s “Thaïs.” But she does not aim to play roles for which she does not have a natural affinity.“It’s not because I don’t like challenges,” she said. “But sometimes you need to know which kind of battles you want to win.”Since 2012, she has given master classes to students both in her home country of Albania and in cities including London, Paris and Sydney, Australia. “The young generation today wants to take it so easy,” she observed. “They think it’s enough to put your face on social media — which we need as well — but only with a certain balance.”She emphasized that the Covid era had underscored the vulnerability of the profession: “We discovered that we are nothing — the opera houses were closed. It really has to be love from your guts.”Ms. Jaho expresses a childlike delight with Mr. Michieletto’s staging, which for her captures “all the details and flavors” of southern Italy. “You forget that you are the artist who’s singing the character,” she said. “You become the character because everything around you helps with that.”The director also weaves together the two short operas by having characters from “Pagliacci” appear onstage during “Cavalleria Rusticana” and vice versa. “Everything makes sense,” she said. “Their hate, their love. You don’t understand the difference in the end, even though they are different composers.”And much as Leoncavallo’s opera reveals the fluid boundaries between art and life, Ms. Jaho says she believes that a singer must be “real onstage” in order to serve the music. “If you don’t cry, love and smile as yourself,” she said, “you cannot give to the public.” More

Author, critic, teacher and public intellectual, he was an unabashed flamethrower who challenged conventional thinking about classical music.Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, said.An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”Mr. Taruskin was the author of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University PressHis words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”In a contentious 2001 Times essay, Mr. Taruskin defended the Boston Symphony’s cancellation of a performance of excerpts from John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” after Sept. 11 that year, arguing that the opera romanticized terrorism and included antisemitic caricatures. Even in advocating for what some criticized as censorship, he underscored a central component of his worldview: that music was not neutral, and that the concert hall could not be separated from society.“Art is not blameless,” he wrote. “Art can inflict harm.” (His writings, too, could inflict harm; Adams retorted that the column was “an ugly personal attack, and an appeal to the worst kind of neoconservatism.”)Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”Mr. Taruskin had a no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat, once comparing a fellow scholar’s advocacy for a Renaissance philosopher to Henry Kissinger’s defense of repression at Tiananmen Square. He faced accusations of constructing simplistic straw men, and lacking empathy for his historical subjects. Following a 1991 broadside by Mr. Taruskin contending that Sergei Prokofiev had composed Stalinist propaganda, one biographer complained of his “sneering antipathy.” Mr. Taruskin’s response? “I am sorry I did not flatter Prokofiev enough to please his admirers on his birthday, but he is dead. My concern is with the living.”But his feuds were often productive: They changed the conversation in the academy and the concert hall alike. Such hefty arguments, Mr. Taruskin believed, might help rescue classical music from its increasingly marginal status in American society.“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”Richard Filler Taruskin was born on April 2, 1945, in New York City, in Queens, to Benjamin and Beatrice (Filler) Taruskin. The household of his youth was liberal, Jewish, feistily intellectual and musical: His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother was a former piano teacher. He took up the cello at age 11 and, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), voraciously consumed books on music history at the New York Public Library.At Columbia University, Mr. Taruskin studied music along with Russian, partly to reconnect with a branch of relatives in Moscow. He stayed for his Ph.D., with the music historian Paul Henry Lang as his mentor, as he researched early music and 19th-century Russian opera. He also began playing the viola da gamba in the New York freelance scene and, while subsequently teaching at Columbia, led the choral group Cappella Nova, which gave acclaimed performances of Renaissance repertoire. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1986.Mr. Taruskin conducting the choral group Cappella Nova in 1983. The group, which he led, was acclaimed for its performances of Renaissance repertoire.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIn the 1970s, musicology was still largely focused on reviving obscure motets and analyzing Central European masterworks. Mr. Taruskin participated in the “New Musicology” movement, a generation of scholars that shook up the discipline by drawing on postmodern approaches, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies.“Richard had a very keen sense of the political stakes of music history,” said the scholar Susan McClary, a pioneer of New Musicology, in an interview. “He also was an extraordinary musician. And so he was not going to sacrifice the music itself for context; these always went together for him.”While researching Russian composers for his doctorate — at a time when scholars largely dismissed them as peripheral figures — Mr. Taruskin realized how 19th-century politics had insidiously shaped the classical canon. It was no coincidence, he forcefully argued, that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were so well-regarded: Their popularity and acclaim represented the aftereffects of a long-unacknowledged, and deeply rooted, German nationalist ideology. His monographs on Russian opera and Musorgsky redefined the study of music in Eastern Europe, chipping away at longstanding myths.In 1984, Mr. Taruskin began writing for the short-lived Opus Magazine at the invitation of its editor, James R. Oestreich. After Mr. Oestreich moved to The New York Times, Mr. Taruskin contributed long-form essays to the paper’s Arts & Leisure section that poked at composers who were often treated as demigods; the section’s mailbag soon filled with irate readers. (He had no qualms about sending letters of his own, mailing curt postcards to prominent music critics to lambast their errors or logical fallacies.) His writings for The Times and The New Republic were later collected in the books “On Russian Music” and “The Danger of Music.”Mr. Taruskin attending an international conference in his honor at Princeton University in 2012. He was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, and his presentations were blockbuster events. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesTeaching a Stravinsky seminar at Columbia inspired the two-volume “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” a seminal 1996 study that upended the cosmopolitan image that the composer and his acolytes had long cultivated. Mr. Taruskin drew attention to traditional Slavic melodies that Stravinsky had embedded within “The Rite of Spring,” and how the composer himself had deliberately obscured the folk roots of his revolutionary ballet.The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces. In more than 4,000 pages, he wove intricate analyses alongside rich contextualization, revealing musical history as a fraught terrain of argumentation, politics, and power.Critiques of the “Ox” abounded — that it betrayed its author’s personal grudges, that it unfairly treated modernists like Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. But it remains a central, seemingly unsurpassable text. “This is the last time anyone’s going to tell this story,” Dr. McClary said. “And it was told in a way that was just as good as it ever possibly could have been.” (Her own criticism of the Ox is perhaps the most enduring: Mr. Taruskin’s survey almost entirely ignores Black musical traditions.)Garbed in a purple blazer, Mr. Taruskin was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, where his presentations were blockbuster events. In recent years he refrained from giving papers in favor of attending talks by his many former pupils.He married Cathy Roebuck, a computer programmer at Berkeley, in 1984 and lived in El Cerrito, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Paul Roebuck Taruskin; his daughter, Tessa Roebuck Taruskin; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Among Mr. Taruskin’s numerous awards was Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, which he received in 2017. His most recent book was the 2020 compilation “Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices.” When he died, he was working to complete a book of essays that would serve as an intellectual biography.Despite his highhanded persona, Mr. Taruskin had a soft side known to colleagues and students. For years he sparred with the music theorist Pieter van den Toorn over the meaning of Stravinsky’s music — Mr. Taruskin arguing that it could not be separated from the politics of the 20th century, Mr. van den Toorn seeing such concerns as extrinsic to the scores.Nevertheless, Mr. Taruskin dedicated one of his books to Mr. van den Toorn. The inscription: “Public adversary, private pal.” More