Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82

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      He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.Bob Neuwirth, who had credentials as a painter, recording artist, songwriter and filmmaker, but who also had an impact as a member of Bob Dylan’s inner circle and as a conduit for two of Janis Joplin’s best-known songs, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.His partner, Paula Batson, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Neuwirth had a modest, eclectic string of albums to his credit, including his debut, simply titled “Bob Neuwirth,” in 1974, as well as a 1994 collaboration with John Cale called “Last Day on Earth” and a 2000 collaboration with the Cuban composer and pianist José María Vitier, “Havana Midnight.” But he was perhaps better known for the roles he played in the careers of others, beginning with Mr. Dylan.Mr. Neuwirth said that he first encountered Mr. Dylan at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Connecticut in 1961. Mr. Dylan was still largely unknown but, Mr. Neuwirth said years later, the singer caught his eye “because he was the only other guy with a harmonica holder around his neck.”The two hit it off, and Mr. Neuwirth became a central figure in the circle that coalesced around Mr. Dylan as his fame grew. When Mr. Dylan held court at the Kettle of Fish bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Mr. Neuwirth was there. When Mr. Dylan toured England in 1965, Mr. Neuwirth went along. A decade later, when Mr. Dylan embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Mr. Dylan’s contemporaries and biographers have described Mr. Neuwirth’s role in various ways.“Neuwirth was the eye of the storm, the center, the catalyst, the instigator,” Eric Von Schmidt, another folk singer active at the time, once said. “Wherever something important was happening, he was there, or he was on his way to it, or rumored to have been nearby enough to have had an effect on whatever it was that was in the works.”From left, Bob Dylan, Mick Ronson and Mr. Neuwirth performing in Toronto in 1975 as part of Mr. Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, for which Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Frank Lennon/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesIt has often been suggested that as Mr. Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak, from Mr. Neuwirth.“The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,” Bob Spitz wrote in “Dylan: A Biography” (1989). “So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.”Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame.“Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,” he wrote, “a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.”Mr. Dylan, in his book “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth.“Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth,” he wrote. “He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.”Ms. Joplin, too, benefited from Mr. Neuwirth’s influence. Holly George-Warren, whose books include “Janis: Her Life and Music” (2019), said that Mr. Neuwirth and Ms. Joplin met in 1963 and became fast friends.Mr. Neuwirth performing in Brooklyn in 1999. Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images“In 1969, he taught her Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ after he heard Gordon Lightfoot play the then-unknown song at manager Albert Grossman’s office,” Ms. George-Warren said by email. “He quickly learned it and took it to Janis at the Chelsea Hotel.”Her recording of the song hit No. 1 in 1971, but Ms. Joplin was not around to enjoy the success; she had died of a drug overdose the previous year.Mr. Neuwirth was also involved in “Mercedes Benz,” another well-known Joplin song that, like “Bobby McGee,” appeared on her 1971 album, “Pearl.” He was at a bar with her before a show she was doing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., in August 1970 when Ms. Joplin began riffing on a ditty that the poet Michael McClure would sing at gatherings with friends. Mr. Neuwirth began writing the lyrics the two of them came up with on a napkin.She sang the song at the show that night, and she later recorded it a cappella. She, Mr. McClure and Mr. Neuwirth are jointly credited as the writers of the song, which on the album is less than two minutes long.Ms. George-Warren said that this anecdote was revelatory: Mr. Neuwirth nudged along the careers of artists he admired, including Patti Smith, in whatever ways came to mind.“Though Bob was renowned for his acerbic wit — from his days as aide-de-camp to Dylan and Janis — when I met him 25 years ago, he epitomized kindness, mentorship and curiosity,” she said. “That is the unsung story of Bob Neuwirth.”Robert John Neuwirth was born on June 20, 1939, in Akron, Ohio. His father, also named Robert, was an engineer, and his mother, Clara Irene (Fischer) Neuwirth, was a design engineer.He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and dabbled in painting over the decades; in 2011 the Track 16 gallery in Santa Monica presented “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth, 1964-2009.”After two years at art school, he spent time in Paris before returning to the Boston area, where he began performing in coffee houses, singing and playing banjo and guitar.He appeared in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary, “Dont Look Back,” as well as in “Eat the Document” (1972), a documentary of a later tour that was shot by Mr. Pennebaker and later edited by Mr. Dylan, who is credited as the director, and Mr. Dylan’s “Renaldo & Clara” (1978), most of which was filmed during the Rolling Thunder tour. He also appeared in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” the 2019 Martin Scorsese film.Mr. Neuwirth was a producer of “Down From the Mountain” (2000), a documentary, directed in part by Mr. Pennebaker, about a concert featuring the musical artists heard in the Coen Brothers’ movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”“It’s all about the same to me,” he said, “whether it’s writing a song or making a painting or doing a film. It’s all just storytelling.”Mr. Neuwirth, who lived in Santa Monica, is survived by Ms. Batson.Mr. Neuwirth could be self-deprecating about his own musical efforts. He called his collaboration with Mr. Vitier, the Cuban pianist, “Cubilly music.” But his music was often serious. The Cale collaboration was a sort of song cycle that, as Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times when the two performed selections in concert in 1990, “added up to a shrug of the shoulders in the face of impending doom.”“Instead of breast-beating or simply wisecracking,” Mr. Pareles wrote of the work, “it found an emotional territory somewhere between fatalism and denial — still uneasy but not quite resigned.” More

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      Alexander Toradze, Idiosyncratic Pianist, Dies at 69

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      A defector to the U.S., he was admired for his prowess in the Russian repertory, but his individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire.”Alexander Toradze, a Georgian American pianist and Soviet defector whose idiosyncratic and bravura performances of Russian composers were either loved or hated, died on May 11 at his home in South Bend, Ind. He was 69.The cause was heart failure, his health having been deteriorating since 2019, his manager, Ettore F. Volontieri, said.Mr. Toradze was also stricken with heart failure, as it was later diagnosed, on April 23 during a performance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. Though he had to be helped onstage at the start because of weakness, he completed the concert and was hospitalized afterward, Mr. Volontieri said.Mr. Toradze specialized in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers. His concerts this spring were to include a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic, scheduled for May 14.Mr. Toradze, whom friends and colleagues called Lexo, won the silver medal at the 1977 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, though members of the jury were divided, with some finding his playing disturbingly percussive.The critic Peter G. Davis, however, was among his fans: He wrote in The New York Times two years later that “his playing had the best sort of éclat and brilliance in that it stemmed directly from the character of the music rather than from a desire to show off.”“His tone,” he added, “was glittering but never clattery; the poise and precision of his interpretation had elegance as well as tremendous visceral excitement.”In a 1984 review, Donal Henahan of The Times wrote of Mr. Toradze’s playing, “It is the distinctive Russian style of an older generation, still alive in this era of stamped-out international virtuosos.”Mr. Toradze defected to the United States in 1983, presenting himself at the American Embassy in Madrid for asylum during a tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. According to the critic and author Joseph Horowitz, a close friend and artistic adviser to Mr. Toradze, it was a dramatic defection that involved highway chases in Spain and an attempted kidnapping by the K.G.B. in a restaurant.Mr. Toradze in 2001. His idiosyncratic performances tended to divide critics, with some loving his style and others finding it disturbing.Chris Lee for The New York TimesThree months later, Mr. Toradze embarked on an American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During his career he performed with major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others.In 1991, he was appointed to a newly endowed professorship in piano at Indiana University South Bend, where he created the Toradze Piano Studio, inspired by the intense, all-encompassing training of Soviet music schools. His studio consisted of former and current students, who presented mostly Russian repertory in marathon concerts in the United States and Europe.His students also played soccer, and the Toradze Studio team won the university championship three years in a row. “Soccer is not very good for the hands,” Mr. Toradze told The Times in 2002, “but it’s great for the brain.”A gregarious host, he enjoyed giving late-night dinners and boisterous parties for his students, many of whom he recruited from Russia and Georgia. He retired from the university in 2017.While he was widely admired, Mr. Toradze’s individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in an appreciation published after Mr. Toradze’s death. “Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught.”The Times critic Bernard Holland, reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1988, wrote that Mr. Toradze’s “customary extravagance would have ill fit this music’s classical restraint, so his tactic was to seek the other extreme.” The results, he said, “alternated between the weird and the inaudible.”Mr. Toradze acknowledged such responses. “I always anticipate outraged attacks,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1992.Alexander Davidovich Toradze was born on May 30, 1952, in Tbilisi, Georgia, to the composer David Toradze and the actress Liana Asatiani. He attended the Special Music School for Gifted Children in Tbilisi and the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1978.While he was a student in Moscow, Mr. Toradze listened to illicit broadcasts of the Voice of America program “Jazz Hour.” To him, he said, jazz represented artistic freedom. When performing in Portland, Ore., during a Soviet-sponsored tour in 1978, he learned that Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were to perform twice the next day. Much to the irritation of his manager, he decided to skip a rehearsal in Miami to attend the concerts. Ms. Fitzgerald invited him onstage, where he told her that she was a “goddess for people in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Toradze’s small catalog of recordings includes a 1998 disc of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, and Shostakovich piano concertos, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.Mr. Toradze, a practicing Orthodox Christian, advised young artists to get in the habit of praying before performances. Speaking about Liszt’s variations on a theme of Bach, he told The Times in 1986: “Bach’s cantata describes worrying, complaining, doubting and crying. Many of these feelings were part of my life. But the piece moves steadily and heavily toward a fantastic final chorale in major, with the words, ‘What God does is well done.’ That is my credo.”His marriage to the pianist Susan Blake ended in divorce in 2002. He is survived by his sons, David and Alex; a sister, Nino Toradze; and his longtime partner, the pianist Siwon Kim.After defecting to the United States, Mr. Toradze lamented the imposition of strict union rules regarding rehearsal times that could prevent an orchestra from practicing to the end of a concerto, even if the musicians were just a few bars short. But he appreciated the high-quality instruments on offer.“In Russia, I would play many times on pianos with broken strings or broken keys,” he told the radio host Bruce Duffie in 2002.But, he added, “there are times when the piano is not well, or you are not well, but you go on anyway.” More

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      Rosmarie Trapp of the ‘Sound of Music’ Family Dies at 93

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      She was the last surviving daughter of the baron and the would-be nun depicted in the stage musical and 1965 film.Rosmarie Trapp, a member of the singing family made famous by the stage musical and film “The Sound of Music” and the last surviving daughter of Baron Georg Johannes von Trapp, the family patriarch, died on May 13 at a nursing home in Morrisville, Vt. She was 93.The Trapp Family Lodge, the family business in Stowe, Vt., announced her death on Tuesday.Ms. Trapp (who dropped the “von” from her name years ago) was the daughter of Georg and Maria Augusta (Kutschera) von Trapp, the would-be nun who became a governess with the family and ultimately married the baron.Rosmarie is not depicted in “The Sound of Music,” which focused on the seven children Georg von Trapp had with his first wife, although she was in fact almost 10 when the family fled Austria in 1938 after that country came under Nazi rule. Among the many liberties “The Sound of Music” took with the family’s story was the timeline — Georg and Maria actually married in 1927, not a decade later.In any case, Rosmarie did travel and perform with the Trapp Family Singers for years and was a presence at the lodge in Stowe, where she would hold singalongs for the guests. She acknowledged, though, that it took her some time to embrace the fame that the musical thrust upon her after it debuted on Broadway in 1959, beginning a three-year run, and then was adapted into a 1965 movie, which won the best picture Oscar.“I used to think I was a museum,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997, when she was evangelizing on behalf of the Community of the Crucified One, a Pennsylvania-based church, “but I can’t escape it.”“Now I’m using it as a tool,” she added. “I’m not a victim of it anymore.”Some of the children of Baron Georg von Trapp singing during a Mass in his honor in 1997 in Stowe, Vt., where the family runs a lodge. From left, Maria von Trapp, Eleonore Campbell, Werner von Trapp, Rosmarie Trapp and Agathe von TrappAssociated PressRosmarie Barbara von Trapp was born on Feb. 8, 1929, in Aigen, a village outside Salzburg, Austria. The family began singing publicly in the 1930s in Europe, but the baron had no interest in cooperating with Hitler once the Nazis took control, and so the family left Austria, taking a train to Italy. (The “Sound of Music” depiction of the departure was fictionalized.)The family gave its first New York concert, at Town Hall, in December 1938 and soon settled in the United States, first in Pennsylvania, then in Vermont.“We chose America because it was the furthest away from Hitler,” Ms. Trapp told The Palm Beach Post of Florida in 2007, when she spoke to students from the musical theater program and Holocaust studies classes at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens.The family singing group continued to perform into the 1950s. Late in the decade, Ms. Trapp and other family members went to New Guinea to do missionary work for several years. Ms. Trapp’s father died in 1947, and her mother died in 1987.Ms. Trapp’s brother, Johannes von Trapp, is the last living member of the original family singers and her only immediate survivor.The Trapp Family Singers repertory, of course, included none of the songs later composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for “The Sound of Music,” but when Ms. Trapp gave talks like the one at the Florida high school, she would gladly take requests for a number or two from the musical. What did she think of the film?“It was a nice movie,” she told The Post in 2007. “But it wasn’t like my life.” More

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      Maggie Peterson, a Memorable ‘Andy Griffith Show’ Guest, Dies at 81

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      As Charlene Darling, a member of the musical Darling family, she appeared in five episodes, beginning with one in which her character became smitten with Mr. Griffith’s.Maggie Peterson, an actress who in a recurring role on the hit sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” memorably developed an infatuation with Mr. Griffith’s character, Sheriff Andy Taylor, died on Sunday. She was 81.Her death was announced in a post on her Facebook page. The post did not say where she died, but her family said last month that she had been moved from her home in Las Vegas to a nursing facility in Colorado. The family also said that her health took a turn for the worse when her husband, the jazz musician Gus Mancuso, died of Alzheimer’s disease in December at 88.Ms. Peterson was seen on “The Odd Couple,” “Green Acres” and other television shows from 1964 to 1987. But she was probably best known for playing Charlene Darling, a member of the musical Darling family, in several episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show.” (Her brothers were played by the members of the Dillards, a prominent bluegrass band; their father was played by the veteran character actor Denver Pyle.)Charlene and the other Darlings first appeared in the 1963 episode “The Darlings Are Coming,” in which the family visited Mayberry, the fictional North Carolina town where the show was set, and waited for her fiancé to arrive. Sheriff Taylor lets the family spend a night in the courthouse, and Charlene becomes smitten with the sheriff — an infatuation that ends abruptly when her fiancé arrives.Ms. Peterson was a successful singer before she became an actress.via IMDbThe Darlings returned to Mayberry four more times. In one episode, Charlene and her husband are looking for a young boy for their new baby girl to become engaged to. They pick Sheriff Taylor’s son, Opie, played by Ron Howard, but are eventually tricked into changing their minds.Ms. Peterson played a different character in a later episode of the show and two other characters in episodes of the “Andy Griffith Show” spinoffs “Mayberry R.F.D.” and “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” She also appeared in movies with Mr. Griffith and another “Andy Griffith Show” cast member, Don Knotts.She returned to the role of Charlene one last time in the 1986 TV movie “Return to Mayberry.”Margaret Ann Peterson was born on Jan. 10, 1941, in Greeley, Colo., to Arthur and Tressa Peterson. She was a successful singer before she became an actress, with a family vocal group called the Ja-Da Quartet (later known as Margaret Ann & the Ja-Da Quartet), which recorded an album for Warner Bros. Records in 1959, and the Ernie Mariani Trio.After her acting career ended, she worked for the Nevada Film Commission and, usually billed as Maggie Mancuso, was a location manager on “Casino” (1995) and other movies.Information on survivors was not immediately available.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      Lil Keed, Up-and-Coming Atlanta Rapper, Dies at 24

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      The musician, a protégé of Young Thug, died on Friday in Los Angeles, his label said.Lil Keed, a budding, melodic rapper from Atlanta with a delicate voice that he often stretched into a helium-high, Auto-Tuned falsetto, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 24.His death was confirmed on Saturday by a representative of his record label, 300 Entertainment, who did not specify a cause. Keed had been scheduled to perform at a music festival in Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday night.Born Raqhid Jevon Render on March 16, 1998, he hailed from the neighborhood known as Cleveland Avenue, for its main thoroughfare, where southwest Atlanta meets the suburb of East Point in Fulton County. He chronicled his turbulent upbringing there, surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence, in the three-part mixtape series “Trapped on Cleveland.” Its final installment was released in 2020.“I dig deep into my story and let everybody see what I went through, how I came up, and give them an insight on my life,” he said in an interview with Complex at the time.Lil Keed signed to 300 and Young Stoner Life Records, or YSL, in 2018, under the tutelage of his mentor, the melodic rapper Young Thug. Earlier this week, Young Thug and 27 others, including numerous rappers from the label, were charged in a major RICO indictment handed up by a grand jury in Fulton County. The indictment portrays YSL as a criminal street gang responsible for murders, robberies, drug dealing and more.Keed, who was not charged, responded in a graphic posted to social media that read: “YSL is a family, YSL is a label, YSL is a way of life, YSL is a lifestyle, YSL is not a gang.”In 2020, he was named to XXL magazine’s annual Freshman Class issue, a prominent launchpad for rappers, appearing on the cover alongside acts like Jack Harlow and Fivio Foreign. The year before, his breakout single, “Nameless,” a raunchy number with a singsong stickiness that became a regional radio hit and a streaming success, was certified gold.Keed, who released seven full-length projects in two years, worked widely with artists from his city and beyond, including Lil Yachty, Gunna, Future, Lil Uzi Vert and Roddy Ricch.His brother and frequent collaborator, the rapper Lil Gotit, reacted to his death Friday night on Instagram. “I did all my cries,” he wrote. “I know what u want me to do and that’s go hard for Mama Daddy Our Brothers.”Keed is also survived by his daughter, Naychur, and his girlfriend, known as Quana Bandz. “What am I supposed to tell Naychur?” she posted. “What am I gone tell our new baby?”Confident and winning, with a wide smile and an open-minded eagerness, Keed was frank about his ambition to grow beyond the often grim Southern street rap tales that first got him noticed. “I wanna be a megastar,” he said to XXL. “I don’t wanna be no superstar. I wanna be a megastar.”Through his unlikely friendship with the advertising executive and motivational guru Gary Vaynerchuk, whom Keed name-dropped in song, he nearly appeared in a 2019 Super Bowl commercial for Planters with Mr. Peanut and Alex Rodriguez. However, the role fell through. At a studio summit later that year, Mr. Vaynerchuk encouraged Keed to expand his presence on TikTok to reach new audiences.“I’mma do this,” Keed said, energized by the advice. “And I’ll be like, he told me.”His new music was starting to reflect that, Keed said. “Back then, I was talking about stuff like typical rappers: shooting, killing,” he told Complex of his beginnings, “because that’s what everybody wanted to hear.”He continued: “I was just talking about the stuff that happened in the streets and stuff around me. Now that I done grew from all that and I done moved myself out of that situation, I’m letting folks know why I was so trapped on Cleveland, as far as me going to the hood every day and all the shootouts. I just had to move myself out of the situation to better myself and my family.” More

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      Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Master of the Santoor, Dies at 84

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      He single-handedly elevated a 100-string instrument little known outside Kashmir into a prominent component of Hindustani classical music.Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, an Indian musician and composer who was the foremost exponent of the santoor, a 100-string instrument similar to the hammered dulcimer, died on Tuesday at his home in Mumbai. He was 84.Indian news reports said the cause was cardiac arrest.Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Mr. Sharma became the first musician to propel the santoor onto the world stage, at concerts and recitals in India and elsewhere.Before Mr. Sharma started playing the santoor, it was little known outside Kashmir. Even there it was used only to play Sufiana Mausiqi, a genre of Kashmiri classical music with Persian, Central Asian and Indian roots.The santoor, a trapezoidal wooden instrument whose strings stretch over 25 wooden bridges, is played with slim wooden mallets. On the santoor, in contrast with the sitar, sarod or sarangi, the string instruments traditionally used in Hindustani classical music, it is difficult to sustain notes and perform the meends, or glides from one note to another, essential to the Hindustani musical tradition.That might be one reason it took Mr. Sharma so many years to be recognized for his artistry.At the beginning of his career, purists and critics derided the santoor’s staccato sound, and many urged Mr. Sharma to switch to another instrument. Instead he spent years redesigning the santoor to enable it to play more notes per octave, making it more suitable for the complex ragas, the melodic framework of Hindustani music.“My story is different from that of other classical musicians,” Mr. Sharma told The Times of India in 2002. “While they had to prove their mettle, their talent, their caliber, I had to prove the worth of my instrument. I had to fight for it.”He released several albums, beginning with “Call of the Valley” (1967), a collaboration with the acclaimed flutist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and the guitarist Brij Bhushan Kabra.Mr. Chaurasia and Mr. Sharma were close friends and frequent collaborators. Together they composed music for several successful Bollywood films in the 1980s and ’90s including “Silsila” (1981), “Chandni” (1989), “Lamhe” (1991) and “Darr” (1993). Mr. Sharma was one of the few Indian musicians who straddled the worlds of classical and popular music.In 1974, Mr. Sharma performed across North America with the sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar as part of the former Beatle George Harrison’s 45-show “Dark Horse” concert tour, bringing Indian classical music to audiences beyond South Asia alongside some of the finest classical musicians from India — Alla Rakha on tabla, Sultan Khan on sarangi, L. Subramaniam on violin, T.V. Gopalakrishnan on mridangam and vocals, Mr. Chaurasia on flute, Gopal Krishan on vichitra veena and Lakshmi Shankar on vocals.Mr. Sharma, center, in red, in 2018 in Mumbai. He was awarded some of India’s highest honors for his contributions to Indian culture.Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesMr. Sharma was awarded some of India’s highest honors, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1986, the Padma Shri in 1991 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001.Shiv Kumar (sometimes rendered Shivkumar) Sharma was born on Jan. 13, 1938, in Jammu, India, to Pandit Uma Devi Sharma, a classical musician who belonged to the family of royal priests of the maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, and Kesar Devi. He began singing and tabla lessons in with his father at the age of 5, showing great promise. In “Journey With a Hundred Strings” (2002), a biography of Mr. Sharma, Ina Puri wrote that he would spend hours immersed in music, practicing various instruments.“There was an obsessive element in my attitude to music even then,” she quoted him as saying. “It was the air I breathed, the reason I lived.”By age 12 he was an accomplished tabla player, regularly performing on Radio Jammu and accompanying leading musicians who visited the city. When he was 14, his father returned from Srinagar, where he had been working, with a present: a santoor. Mr. Sharma was not happy about learning a new, unfamiliar instrument. But his father was adamant. “Mark my words, son,” he recalled his father saying. “Shiv Kumar Sharma and the santoor will become synonymous in years to come. Have the courage to start something from scratch. You will be recognized as a pioneer.”In 1955, Mr. Sharma gave his first major public performance on the santoor, at the Haridas Sangeet Sammelan festival in Bombay (now Mumbai). The youngest participant at 17, he persuaded the organizers to allow him to play both the santoor and the tabla. He was reluctantly given 30 minutes to play the instrument of his choice, but on the day of the recital he played the santoor for a full hour — to rapturous applause. The organizers called him back for another recital the next day.He soon received offers to play and act in Hindi films, but after one film, the 1955 hit “Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje,” he was determined to focus on classical music. He performed around the country in an effort to establish the santoor as a classical instrument.He moved to Bombay at 22; to make ends meet, he played the santoor on sessions for dozens of popular Hindi film songs while continuing to build his classical reputation.He is survived by his wife, Manorama; his sons, Rahul, a well-known santoor player and composer, and Rohit; and two grandchildren.After Mr. Sharma’s death, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among those paying tribute. “Our cultural world is poorer with the demise of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma Ji,” he wrote on Twitter. “He popularized the santoor at a global level. His music will continue to enthrall the coming generations.” More

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      Teresa Berganza, Charismatic Star of the Opera Stage, Dies at 89

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      The Spanish mezzo-soprano was internationally acclaimed for her dramatic performances in the works of Mozart, Rossini and Bizet.Teresa Berganza, a Spanish mezzo-soprano and contralto renowned for her roles in the operas of Rossini and Mozart and especially for the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen,” died on Friday in Madrid. She was 89.Her family confirmed the death in a statement to the newspaper El País.A dramatic figure with flashing dark eyes, Ms. Berganza was acclaimed as a coloratura mezzo and contralto, with a vocal register that was warm at its lower range and supple at its higher end. Her vast repertoire as a recitalist included German lieder, French and Italian art songs and, most notably, Spanish music — zarzuelas, arias and Gypsy ballads — which she consistently championed.In addition to exuding charisma and sensuality, Ms. Berganza embraced a disciplined, analytical approach to her roles. “For the most part, she sings exactly what is written in perfect pitch and accurate rhythm,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in a review of Ms. Berganza’s performance in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” at the San Francisco Opera in 1969. He lauded her as “one of the most gifted of coloratura singers.”Ms. Berganza viewed her growth as a diva as a deliberate progression from Rossini to Mozart and finally to Bizet. “Rossini for his technique, agility, and Mozart for his style, his soul,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Un Monde Habité par le Chant” (“A World Inhabited by Song”), written with Olivier Bellamy and published in 2013. Only after feeling confident about works by those composers did she attempt “Carmen” — with great success. The conductor Herbert von Karajan declared her “the Carmen of the century.”Teresa Berganza Vargas was born in Madrid on March 16, 1933, to parents who reflected Spain’s deep divisions on the eve of its civil war. Her father, Guillermo Berganza, an accountant, was an atheist who favored left-wing causes. Her mother, Ascensión Vargas, a homemaker with two older children, Guillermo and Ascensión, was a deeply religious Roman Catholic, a monarchist and a supporter of the future dictator Francisco Franco.Encouraged by her mother, Teresa aspired to become a nun when she was an adolescent. She attended the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, where she hoped her piano, organ and vocal studies would prepare her to lead a convent choir or teach music at a religious school.It was her voice tutor, Lola Rodríguez Aragón, who convinced her that she was too talented to retreat from a secular life. Under her instruction, Teresa won first prize for voice at the conservatory in 1954. She continued to consult and practice with Ms. Rodríguez Aragón throughout her career.Ms. Berganza also met her future husband, Félix Lavilla, a piano student, at the Madrid conservatory. He became her longtime accompanist at recitals. They had three children, Teresa, Javier and Cecilia, but their marriage ended after two decades.Ms. Berganza turned for spiritual guidance to José Rifá, a Spanish priest who had long admired her singing. He quit the priesthood to marry her, and he regularly introduced himself as Mr. Berganza. They divorced after 10 years.Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Berganza made her operatic debut as Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1957 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. In 1958, she made her first appearance at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala as Isolier in Rossini’s “Le Comte Ory.” The next year she debuted at Covent Garden in London as Rosina in Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” which would become one of her signature roles. Critics delighted in her rich, fluid contralto voice, which easily handled the complex embellishments demanded of Rossini heroines.In 1967, Ms. Berganza made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” It would become yet another popular role for her.For years, Ms. Berganza declined offers to perform the lead in “Carmen,” saying that she found the complexity of the character too intimidating. She finally agreed to take it on in 1977, at the King’s Theater in Edinburgh. In preparation, she studied the 1845 novella“Carmen,” by Prosper Mérimée, on which the opera was based, as well as the libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.She then spent weeks in southern Spain interviewing women living in the caves outside Granada to, as she put it, “better understand Gypsy life.” Rejecting the more traditional portrayal of Carmen as a prostitute, she chose to play her instead as a rebellious Gypsy. “She speaks with her heart, her body, her guts,” Ms. Berganza wrote in her autobiography.Reviewing a Carnegie Hall recital in November 1982. the Times critic Donal Henahan wrote, “The Berganza voice, always a wonder of suppleness and dark polish, has now become, if anything, more excitingly robust and dramatic.”Ms. Berganza in 2013. She continued to perform into her 70s.Alberto Aja/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Berganza, he added, had also become a superior actor. He praised her intense reading of Joseph Haydn’s “Arianna auf Naxos,” a cantata that demands frequent sudden changes in emotional expression, which she followed with a witty rendering of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Nursery” cycle, in which she alternately portrayed the child and the nurse.In the days leading up to a stage performance, Ms. Berganza would go to extremes to protect her voice. When her children were still young, she wore a scarf over her mouth to remind them she wasn’t supposed to speak. Instead, she wrote notes to answer their questions or give them instructions. At night, fearful of tobacco smoke, she avoided restaurants.When she was performing away from Madrid, she began each day singing warm-ups in her hotel bathroom. “If the notes are not there, I am in agony the whole day,” she said in a 2005 interview with Le Figaro.Fittingly, Ms. Berganza’s last opera performance, at age 57, was in “Carmen” at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, not far from the former tobacco factory that was the setting for the Carmen story. Plácido Domingo conducted and José Carreras played the role of Don José, the jilted lover who kills Carmen, in that 1992 production.Ms. Berganza would continue to give recitals into her 70s.She insisted she had no regrets about not having been born a soprano, which would have given her the opportunity for many more leading stage roles. She preferred being a mezzo, she said, just as she favored the more mellow sound of a cello over a violin. “If I could not sing,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I would want to be a cellist.” More

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      Fred Ward, Actor Who Starred in ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Tremors,’ Dies at 79

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      The versatile actor was known for bringing a grounded charisma to roles across a decades-long career.Fred Ward, the versatile actor who played an astronaut in “The Right Stuff,” a grizzled drifter in “Tremors” and the titular writer in “Henry and June” across a decades-long career, died on Sunday. He was 79.His publicist, Ron Hoffman, confirmed his death. He did not specify the cause of death.“The unique thing about Fred Ward is that you never knew where he was going to pop up, so unpredictable were his career choices,” Mr. Hoffman said in a statement.Mr. Ward was likely best known for his performances in “The Right Stuff,” the acclaimed 1983 adaptation of a book by Tom Wolfe, and “Tremors,” a monster movie that ascended to cult classic status since its release in 1990.But his long career included a broad range of roles in which he applied a sometimes gruff but almost always grounded charisma to parts on film and TV: among other parts, a union activist in “Silkwood,” a detective in “Miami Blues,” Henry Miller in “Henry and June,” and a motorcycle racer in “Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann.”Mr. Ward also played the lead in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” which was intended to be the first in a series but fared poorly in theaters in 1985 and drew mixed reviews.In an interview with The New York Times in 1990, Mr. Ward explained how he chose some roles, saying, “I look for change, a person that changes — he’s on a voyage.”He said he was drawn to the part of Henry Miller because, “I’m part of a generation that, I think, was heavily influenced by Henry Miller, Paris, the ideals there: liberation, a kind of personal and benevolent anarchy that sings through all his pages.”He is survived by his wife, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward. More