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      Edita Gruberova, Dazzling Soprano With Emotional Power, Dies at 74

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      A Slovak coloratura, she was a fixture at the opera houses of Vienna and Munich, artfully balancing technical brilliance with deep expression.Edita Gruberova, a Slovak soprano who enchanted audiences with gleaming, vibrant and technically dazzling singing over a 50-year career, becoming a leading exponent of the coloratura soprano repertory, died on Monday in Zurich. She was 74.The cause was a head injury from a fall in her home, said Markus Thiel, a music journalist and her biographer.Ms. Gruberova, whose career was mainly in Europe, was a true coloratura soprano. She had a high, light and agile voice that was easily capable of dispatching embellished runs, all manner of trills and leaps to shimmering top notes.She excelled in the roles associated with her voice type, especially in the early 19th-century bel canto operas of Bellini (Elvira in “I Puritani” and Giulietta in “I Capuleti e i Montecchi”), Donizetti (the title role in “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Elizabeth I in “Roberto Devereux”) and Rossini (notably Rosina in “Il Barbieri di Siviglia”).Reviewing her 1989 performance as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera, the critic Martin Mayer wrote in Opera magazine that Ms. Gruberova “trills without thinking about it,” could “sing very softly and still project into the house,” and “soars over ensemble and orchestra in the great third-act finale.” Many opera devotees considered her a successor to the formidable Joan Sutherland.Ms. Gruberova knew that opera fans were often swept up in the sheer pyrotechnics of a coloratura soprano’s singing. That was the easy part, she said in an interview recorded at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1986, where she was starring in “Lucia di Lammermoor.” The hard part was conveying emotion through the technical feats.This, she said, “is what people want to hear from me, or what they hear from me and like.” Even a coloratura’s high notes, including a big final high note in an aria, “must also be the expression from emotions,” she said. It must “say something” and not be “for display.”Reviewing that 1986 “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Chicago for The Christian Science Monitor, Thor Eckert Jr. wrote that Ms. Gruberova had given “an astonishing demonstration of her art.”“The level of poise, of sheer vocal mastery, of musical and dramatic insight” were unmatched on the vocal scene of the time, he said. Her performance of the Mad Scene, he added, was “a study in the communicative power of histrionic simplicity.”Yet there were dissenters on this occasion, including John von Rhein, the critic for The Chicago Tribune, who wrote that she had treated the scene as if it were “merely a florid showpiece.”To her many admirers, however, Ms. Gruberova artfully balanced technical execution and emotional expression, a quality described in a 2015 Opera News article by the soprano Lauren Flanigan. Ms. Flanigan was an understudy to Ms. Gruberova in the title role of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” in Barcelona in 1992.In that troubled queen’s first aria during the run, Ms Gruberova “was by turns girlish and direct, vulnerable and overbearing,” Ms. Flanigan wrote, adding, “Her voice was compelling me to pay attention and listen.”Ms. Gruberova in 1970. A teacher arranged for her to audition the previous year at the Vienna State Opera without the knowledge of Czechoslovakia’s Communist authorities.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesEdita Gruberova was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (in what is now Slovakia), the only child of a German father, Gustav Gruber, and a Hungarian mother, Etela Gruberova. Her father, a laborer, was a volatile man who drank to excess and was imprisoned for anti-Communist activities when Ms. Gruberova was a child. Her mother, who worked on a collective farm, a vineyard, had a pleasant singing voice and encouraged her gifted daughter’s singing in school choirs and local ensembles.Ms. Gruberova attended the Bratislava Conservatory and continued her studies at the city’s Academy of Performing Arts. While still in training, Ms. Gruberova performed with the Lucnica folk ensemble and appeared with the Slovak National Theater. She once played Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.”She made her official debut in 1968, in Bratislava, as Rosina in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” That same year she won a voice competition in Toulouse, France, and the acclaim led to appearances with an opera ensemble in the central Slovakian city of Banska Bystrica.Her teacher at the conservatory, Maria Medvecka, arranged for Ms. Gruberova to audition for the Vienna State Opera in 1969. She did so secretly so that the Czech authorities would not find out.An engagement there as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” followed in 1970 and brought her considerable attention. That year she emigrated to the West. She would go on to give more than 700 performances with the Vienna State Opera, the last a farewell gala concert in 2018. She became a mainstay as well of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Mozart’s Queen of the Night was also her role in a highly praised debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in England in 1973 as well as in her Met debut in 1977. A breakthrough came in 1976 when Ms. Gruberova sang Zerbinetta in a new production of Strauss’s “Ariadne aux Naxos” in Vienna, with Karl Böhm conducting.The reviews were sensational, especially for her brilliant rendering of Zerbinetta’s long showpiece aria, when the character, a coquettish member of a comedy troupe, tries to persuade the heartsick Ariadne to forget the godly lover who has abandoned her and look to other men.The eminent Böhm, who had worked closely with the composer, famously commented at the time, “My God, if only Strauss had heard your Zerbinetta!”Performing primarily in Europe, Ms. Gruberova made only 24 appearances with the Met through 1996, including performances as Verdi’s Violetta (another of her trademark roles), Donizetti’s Lucia and Bellini’s Elvira.In 1970, she married Stefan Klimo, a musicologist and choir master. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. She is survived by two daughters, Barbara and Klaudia Klimo, and three grandchildren. From 1983 to 2005 she was in a relationship with Friedrich Haider, an Austrian conductor and pianist.Ms. Gruberova leaves a large discography of recordings, including classic accounts of operas by Strauss, Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, and albums of arias and songs. She appeared in several films of operas, most notably two directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” in 1982, singing Gilda to Luciano Pavarotti’s Duke of Mantua, with Ingvar Wixell in the title role, and Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1988, singing Fiordiligi.Ms. Gruberova’s last performance in opera was as Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” in Munich in 2019.In 1979, while singing Zerbinetta at the Met, she was briefly interviewed for the afternoon radio broadcast and made comments about the role that seemed pertinent to her own character.“I don’t see her as a soubrette but as a young lady who has lived, you could say, with quite a past,” Ms. Gruberova said. “But she does not take anything too seriously, because she can laugh it off. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word melancholy.” More

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      Bernard Haitink, Conductor Who Let Music Speak for Itself, Dies at 92

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      Mr. Haitink, who was closely identified with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, drew direct, unaffected interpretations of symphonic works and opera.Bernard Haitink, an unaffected maestro who led Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 27 years and was known for presenting powerful readings of the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven conducting orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 92. His death was announced by his management agency, Askonas Holt.Along with the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink had long associations in Britain with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Glyndebourne Festival. He was also a prolific recording artist, putting on disc the complete symphonies of nearly a dozen canonical composers — sometimes twice.Mr. Haitink let the music emerge from the orchestra, often transcendently, without imposing a heavy-handed interpretation that a star conductor might.His self-effacing nature was noticed early on.He was “not one of the glamour boys on the podium,” Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, wrote in January 1975 after Mr. Haitink’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.“He does not dance, he does not patronize the best tailor on the Continent,” Mr. Schonberg continued. “But he is a dedicated musician, always on top of the music, getting exactly what he wants from his players.”Reviewing his performance of the same symphony with the Philharmonic in 2011, the critic Steve Smith wrote in The Times: “Some conductors strive for mysticism in late Bruckner; Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself, with results that can approach the supernatural and often did here.”Mr. Haitink was so humble as a young man that he almost missed out on his first big break. The Concertgebouw had asked him in 1956 to replace an indisposed Carlo Maria Giulini for a performance of Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor. But he initially turned down the opportunity, despite having conducted the work many times. He said he didn’t feel ready.But he changed his mind, the concert was a success, and so began his long collaboration with the Concertgebouw. He became a regular guest conductor, was appointed co-chief conductor in 1961 and then chief conductor in 1963.Mr. Haitink began conducting opera in the 1960s and made his debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1972, leading Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio.” He was music director of the Glyndebourne Opera from 1977 to 1988 and of the Royal Opera from 1987 to 2002.In an opera world where increasingly outlandish stagings were becoming the fashion, Mr. Haitink had a strategy when required to conduct a production he didn’t like. “One closes one’s eyes and lives in the music,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Guardian.That strategy seemed to have worked at Covent Garden for a mid-1990s staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle by Richard Jones, in which Brünnhilde wore a body-stocking with a skeleton print and a gym skirt, and the Rhinemaidens sported latex nude-body suits.The critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in The Spectator that the “sketchiness” of the staging “was cruelly shown up by the contrasting finish and maturity of the musical aspects of the performance.”“I have never heard Bernard Haitink conduct anything better than this Götterdämmerung,” he added. “In its combination of fluency and subtlety with blazing grandeur, it was consummate.”In addition to the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink held conductorships of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle. He also regularly led the Vienna Philharmonic, and in 2006 he was hired as principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.“These things are never planned, but things just happen to me — I’m not a chess player,” he told the Guardian, regarding the Chicago appointment.His reputation for being unassuming trailed him throughout his career. In 1967, Time magazine described him as “a short, quiet man who likes to take long bird-watching rambles in the woods,” and pointed out that “in a profession where flamboyance and arrogance are often the hallmarks of talent, the diffident Haitink is an anomaly.” A New York Times article in 1976 carried the headline “Why Doesn’t Bernard Haitink Act Like a Superstar?”Mr. Haitink’s colleagues lauded his modesty, integrity and musicianship when he was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. The pianist Murray Perahia, who recorded the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mr. Haitink and the Concertgebouw, praised him as being “dedicated to a real collaboration: neither dictating an interpretation, nor slavishly following — but a natural give and take.”But Mr. Haitink did not shy away from taking a stand when he thought it necessary. In 1982, he threatened to “never set foot on a Dutch stage again” after learning that the Dutch government planned to reduce the Concertgebouw’s subsidy, a move that might have led to the firing of some two dozen orchestral musicians. The cuts were eventually avoided. And in 1998 he resigned from the Royal Opera in London to protest a yearlong closing that was to take effect in January 1999 after a period of artistic and financial tumult. He rescinded his resignation shortly afterward, however.Mr. Haitink frequently gave master classes. In an event held at the Royal College of Music in London, he wryly advised a class of young conductors not to criticize the orchestra musicians since any flaws might be as much the mistake of the conductor as of the players.“You are there to give them confidence even if things aren’t going perfectly,” he said.“Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself,” a critic once wrote, “with results that can approach the supernatural.” He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., in 2006.Michael Lutch for The New York TimesBernard Haitink was born on March 4, 1929, into a well-off family in Amsterdam. His father, Willem Haitink, was a civil servant, and his mother, Anna Clara Verschaffelt, worked for the French cultural organization Alliance Française. Neither were musicians. The family lived under Nazi occupation during World War II, and Willem was imprisoned for three months in a concentration camp.Mr. Haitink referred to his youth as his “lazy days.”“I wasn’t stupid,” he explained, “but I just wasn’t there. Half the time we were taught under our desks because of air raids. But even when things became normal, I wasn’t interested. Maybe this is why now, when I am over 70, that people always ask me why I work so hard.”He began playing the violin at age 9 and later studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He joined the second violin section of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra but was insecure about his abilities as a violinist. After taking a conducting course, he was appointed conductor of the orchestra in 1955 at age 26.Mr. Haitink, who once said that “every conductor, including myself, has a sell-by date,” officially retired during his 90th year after an acclaimed farewell tour of European summer festivals. Reviewing his concert with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall in London on that tour, the critic Erica Jeal wrote that the “last word had to be from Bruckner.”“Haitink, as ever, emphasized beauty over structure,” she wrote, “yet did not allow the music’s sense of shape to slacken for a moment.”His extensive recordings include, for the Philips label, the complete symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Schumann; the complete symphonies of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, for EMI; the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, for Decca; the complete Debussy orchestral works, also for Philips; and Beethoven and Brahms symphony cycles for the London Symphony Orchestra’s LSO Live label.Mr. Haitink was married four times and had several children and grandchildren. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2011, in another interview with The Guardian, Mr. Haitink mused on the strange life of a conductor. “I have been doing this job for 50 years,” he said. “And, you know, it is a profession and it is not a profession. It’s very obscure sometimes. What makes a good conductor? What is this thing about charisma? I’m still wondering after all these years.” More

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      Diane Weyermann, Executive Who Championed ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ Dies at 66

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      A former public interest lawyer, she oversaw this and many other documentaries that addressed urgent social issues.Diane Weyermann, who oversaw the making of potent documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Citizenfour” and “Food Inc.,” and in so doing helped change the documentary world from an earnest and underfunded backwater of the movie industry into a vibrant must-see category, died on Oct. 14 at a hospice facility in Manhattan. She was 66.Her sister Andrea Weyermann said the cause was lung cancer.“Diane was one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever known,” Al Gore, the former vice president and presidential candidate whose seemingly quixotic mission to educate the world about climate change through a decades-long traveling slide show became an unlikely hit film with an odd title, “An Inconvenient Truth,” said in an interview. “She was enormously skilled at her craft and filled with empathy,” he added. “It is not an exaggeration to say she really did change the world.”So did his movie. “An Inconvenient Truth” earned an Oscar in 2007, and Mr. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The film, which became one of the highest-earning documentaries ever made, was the second documentary made by the activist film company Participant, where Ms. Weyermann was a longtime executive, and hardly anyone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea. It was a movie about a slide show, after all.When the filmmakers screened it for a major studio in hopes of getting distribution, some of the executives fell asleep. “There was audible snoring,” recalled Davis Guggenheim, the director, “and when it was over one of them said, ‘No one is going to pay a babysitter so they can go to a theater and see this movie, but we’ll help you make 10,000 CDs for free that you can give to science teachers.’”Dejected, Mr. Guggenheim, Mr. Gore, Ms. Weyermann and others repaired to a steakhouse in Burbank, Calif., to brood, but Ms. Weyermann refused to be cowed.“Just wait till Sundance,” she said.“An Inconvenient Truth” received four standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival, and Paramount bought the distribution rights.No one thought that a movie about a former vice president and his slide show about the dangers of climate change would make for great cinema. But “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring Al Gore, was a hit, and Ms. Weyermann was one of its early boosters.Eric Lee/Paramount ClassicsParticipant had been started in 2004 by Jeff Skoll, a social entrepreneur and the first president of eBay, with its own mission: to make movies about urgent social issues. A former public interest lawyer, Ms. Weyermann was running the documentary program at the Sundance Institute when Mr. Skoll hired her in 2005, though he was worried that Robert Redford, a friend and the founder of the institute, would be irked. (He wasn’t, and blessed the move).“From the start, Diane brought knowledge, relationships, context and industry insights into our team,” Mr. Skoll said in an email. “Participant was a small, burgeoning company at the time, direct film industry expertise was limited, and we had very little documentary experience.”Participant would go on to make over 100 films, including the features “Spotlight,” “Contagion” and “Roma” and the documentaries “My Name Is Pauli Murray” and “The Great Invisible.”“Diane built an incredible slate of films that have made a difference in everything from nuclear weapons to education to the environment and so much more,” Mr. Skoll added. “She was the heart and soul of Participant.”It was Ms. Weyermann’s job to find, fund, form and promote documentaries from all over the world, and she traveled constantly doing so.In 2013, Laura Poitras, the director of “Citizenfour” — the Oscar-winning tale of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who exposed the government’s widespread surveillance programs — was holed up in Berlin when Ms. Weyermann came to see her.“Diane knew I couldn’t travel to the U.S.,” Ms. Poitras said, because she was worried that she might be detained or arrested; during the course of her reporting, Mr. Snowden had become a fugitive and a cause célèbre. “She wanted to make sure I was OK, and I wanted her to see the cuts. I had hundreds of hours of film, and I told her right off, ‘I’m not going to be able provide any documentation’” — film studios typically require detailed written proposals — “and she immediately said, ‘We’re going to do this and I’ve got your back.’”“She loved being in the editing room,” Ms. Poitras added. “She had an amazing ability to see a film when it was really raw and be in tune with it and what the filmmaker needed. You wanted her notes; she always made the work better.”“A director’s whisperer” is how Mr. Guggenheim described her.The former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, left, and the journalist Glenn Greenwald in Laura Poitras’s documentary “Citizenfour” (2014). Ms. Weyermann, Ms. Poitras said, “had an amazing ability to see a film when it was really raw and be in tune with it and what the filmmaker needed.”Laura Poitras/Praxis FilmsIt wasn’t just the big box-office movies she supported, said Ally Derks, the founder of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. “It was the small, fragile films she nurtured too. She was in India with Rahul Jain, whose movie about pollution in New Delhi just screened at Cannes. She was in Siberia with Victor Kossakovsky” — the Russian filmmaker whose 2018 film, “Aquarela,” has barely any dialogue or human beings and takes an immersive look at water, from a frozen Siberian lake to a waterfall in Venezuela to glaciers crumbling in Greenland.In her New York Times review, Jeannette Catsoulis called “Aquarela” a “stunning, occasionally numbing, sensory symphony,” and took note of the film’s ending: a rainbow over the world’s tallest waterfall. “It feels,” she wrote, “a little bit like hope.”Diane Hope Weyermann was born on Sept. 22, 1955, in St. Louis. Her father, Andrew, was a Lutheran minister; her mother, Wilma (Tietjen) Weyermann, was a homemaker and later worked for a glassware company.Diane studied public affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, graduating in 1977, and four years later earned a law degree from the Saint Louis University School of Law. She worked as a legal aid lawyer before attending film school at Columbia College Chicago, graduating in 1992 with an M.F.A. in film and video.That same year, “Moscow Women — Echoes of Yaroslavna,” her short documentary film about seven Russian women, filmed by a Russian and Estonian crew, was screened at Ms. Derks’s festival in Amsterdam. She also made a short film about her father’s hands.Ms. Weyermann turned from making movies herself to helping others make them in 1996, when she became director of the Open Society Institute’s Arts and Culture Program, one of the billionaire investor George Soros’s philanthropies, now known as the Open Society Foundation. She started the Soros Documentary Fund, which supported international documentaries that focused on social justice issues. When she was hired by the Sundance Institute to set up its documentary film program in 2002, she brought the Soros Fund with her. There she set up annual labs for documentary makers, where they could work on their films with others, creating the sort of community that documentarians craved.Ms. Weyermann, left, with Ally Derks, center, the founder of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and the movie producer Elise Pearlstein at the Women’s March at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. Laura KimIn addition to her sister Andrea, Ms. Weyermann is survived by a brother, James. Another sister, Debra Weyermann, an investigative journalist, died in 2013.When Ms. Weyermann became co-chair, with the screenwriter and producer Larry Karaszewski, of the foreign-language film category for the Academy Awards in 2018, they promptly changed the name of the category to “international feature film,” pointing out that the word “foreign” was not exactly inclusive. “Diane had a way of cutting through everyday nonsense,” Mr. Karaszewski said.In a 2008 interview, Ms. Weyermann was asked if she thought it was asking too much for a film to make a change in society.“When films are made solely for that purpose they fall like a lead balloon,” she replied. “What I love about film is it’s a creative medium. It’s not just ‘Let’s focus on an issue and educate,’ but ‘Lets tell a story, let’s tell it beautifully, let’s tell it poetically. Let’s tell it in a way that isn’t so obvious.’” More

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      Leslie Bricusse, Prolific Songwriter for Stage and Screen, Dies at 90

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      His songs from “Stop the World,” “Willy Wonka,” “Goldfinger” and other shows and movies became hits for a range of performers.Leslie Bricusse, a composer and lyricist who contributed to Broadway hits like “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off” and “Jekyll & Hyde” and popular films like “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and “Goldfinger,” died on Tuesday. He was 90.The BBC said his agent had confirmed his death. News accounts said he died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, where he had a home.Mr. Bricusse’s songs, many written with the actor and singer Anthony Newley or other partners, were recorded by a vast range of vocalists. Among the first was Sammy Davis Jr., who, when performing in London in 1961, saw the Newley-Bricusse show “Stop the World,” which had just opened in the West End, and became an ardent fan. He garnered a Top 20 hit in America in 1962 with his version of a song from that show, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”A decade later Mr. Davis would take Mr. Newley and Mr. Bricusse (pronounced BRICK-us) to the top of the charts when he recorded a largely unnoticed song from the film musical “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” with the Mike Curb Congregation. (The film had been released the previous year to negative reviews.) The song was “The Candy Man,” and it reached No. 1 on both Billboard’s pop and easy listening singles charts, the biggest hit of Mr. Davis’s long career.Another song from “Willy Wonka,” “Pure Imagination,” has been recorded by numerous artists, among them Josh Groban, Maroon 5 and Barbra Streisand. Shirley Bassey had a Top 10 hit in 1965 with “Goldfinger,” the title song from the 1964 James Bond movie, for which Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Newley wrote the lyrics to John Barry’s melody. Another Bond film, “You Only Live Twice,” featured a title song by Mr. Barry and Mr. Bricusse that was sung by Nancy Sinatra and recorded later by many others.One of Mr. Bricusse’s biggest, and earliest, hits in his native England was a song that some listeners may not have even realized he had a hand in: “My Old Man’s a Dustman,” a chart-topping novelty number recorded by Lonnie Donegan in 1960. Mr. Bricusse wrote it with Mr. Donegan and Peter Buchanan but used a pen name, Beverly Thorn, “because I was worried about it being down-market,” as he told The Telegraph of Britain in an interview in January.When Mr. Bricusse published a memoir in 2015, “Pure Imagination: A Sorta-Biography,” one of its several forewords was written by his friend Elton John.“His catalogue of songs is enormous — his achievements endless,” Mr. John wrote. “Anyone who has written ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ and ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ should be revered for ever.”Sean Connery as James Bond on the set of “Goldfinger” (1964). Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Newley wrote the words and John Barry wrote the melody for the movie’s title song.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty ImagesLeslie Bricusse was born on Jan. 29, 1931, in London.“I fell in love with the idea of writing songs when I was a child,” he told The Herald of Glasgow in 2016. “I thought I was going to be a journalist at first, but I gradually fell in love with all these great writers like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, who were at the peak of their powers then. The great thing about them as well was that they were literate, and wrote story songs.”As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, he was active in the drama club Footlights, writing and directing musical comedy shows. Beatrice Lillie, a star of the day known for offbeat musical comedy, saw his work and was impressed, hiring him to be her comic foil in a show she was performing at the Globe Theater, “An Evening With Beatrice Lillie.”“Auntie Bea sort of adopted me,” Mr. Bricusse told The Sunday Express of Britain in 2017.In 1961 he was working for Ms. Lillie when Mr. Newley approached him about collaborating on what became “Stop the World,” a show about an Everyman character named Littlechap and the lessons he learns from birth to death. Mr. Bricusse had free use of Ms. Lillie’s apartment in New York, and Mr. Newley joined him there from England; they wrote the show in four weeks (or, in another telling by Mr. Bricusse, eight days).“We had a nice thing of it in New York,” Mr. Newley told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1961. “Pleasant flat, no one to bother us. It went like cream.”From left, Anna Quayle, Mr. Newley and Susan Baker in the Broadway production of “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off,” the first Bricusse-Newley collaboration.Friedman-AbelesThe show, with Mr. Newley starring, opened at the Palace Theater in Manchester, England, in June 1961 and then hit London, where it caught on, propelled by strong songs like “Gonna Build a Mountain” and “I Wanna Be Rich,” in addition to “What Kind of Fool Am I?” It opened on Broadway in October 1962 and ran there for more than a year.The two men followed that with “The Roar of the Greasepaint — the Smell of the Crowd,” an allegory in revue form about class struggle in which Mr. Newley again starred; it also made Broadway, in 1965. Decades later, Mr. Bricusse had two other Broadway successes: “Victor/Victoria” (1995), for which he wrote the lyrics (as he had done for the 1982 film on which it was based), and “Jekyll & Hyde” (1997), for which he wrote both the lyrics (Frank Wildhorn did the music) and the book. That book earned him a Tony Award nomination, his fifth.He was equally successful in the film world, and not just for songs. He wrote the screenplays as well as the music for “Doctor Dolittle” (1967) and “Scrooge” (1970), among other films. He later adapted both into stage musicals. His song “Talk to the Animals” from “Doctor Dolittle” won him an Oscar, and he shared an Oscar with Henry Mancini for “Victor/Victoria.”Rex Harrison in the title role of “Dr. Dolittle” (1967), for which Mr. Bricusse wrote the screenplay as well as the songs. The best-known song from that score, “Talk to the Animals,” won Mr. Bricusse an Oscar.PhotofestIn an interview this year with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Mr. Bricusse recalled that when he visited the set during the filming of “Willy Wonka” he was struck by the contrast between the treatment it was receiving and the slick production being filmed on a neighboring soundstage: “Cabaret.”“I was a bit nervous about the amateur style of our show compared with the professionalism of Bob Fosse,” the director of “Cabaret,” he said.The critics, too, found “Willy Wonka” a bit amateurish, but it developed a following over time, especially once it began turning up on television and the music filtered into popular culture.Mr. Davis’s hit version of “The Candy Man” was one of some 60 songs he recorded that Mr. Bricusse wrote or co-wrote. One of Mr. Bricusse’s more recent projects had been a musical about Mr. Davis’s life and career. A version of it was staged at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in 2009, and Mr. Bricusse had been continuing to refine it.Mr. Bricusse’s survivors include his wife, the actress Yvonne Romain, and a son, Adam.In a 2015 interview with the London publication The Stage, Mr. Bricusse talked about how he and Mr. Newley, who died in 1999, worked.“When I write a song, I hear the music and words at the same time — one suggests the form of the other,” he said. “And Tony was exactly the same. We would sing at each other across the room; it was a very bizarre, unofficial way of writing songs.”He was nonchalant about his ability to work with a wide range of other writers and composers.“I’m a good collaborator: I haven’t ever fallen out with any of them,” he said. “Though there have been one or two tricky ones that I won’t name.” More

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      Betty Lynn, Thelma Lou on ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ Dies at 95

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      She played Deputy Barney Fife’s girlfriend on the long-running sitcom and was remembered by fans with fondness more than 50 years later.Betty Lynn, who portrayed Thelma Lou, the patient girlfriend of Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff of the homespun town of Mayberry in the long-running 1960s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show,” died on Saturday in Mount Airy, N.C. She was 95.The death was announced by the Andy Griffith Museum in Mount Airy, Mr. Griffith’s hometown and the inspiration for fictional Mayberry.Ms. Lynn joined the cast of the show in 1961, late in the first season, for an episode in which Sheriff Andy Taylor (Mr. Griffith) plays matchmaker between Barney and Thelma Lou.Thelma Lou’s occupation through 26 episodes remained a mystery, as did her surname. Although Barney (Don Knotts) had an occasional telephone flirtation with Juanita, a diner waitress who was never seen, it was clear that Thelma Lou was Barney’s steady girl. But in a 1966 episode, after Mr. Knotts departed as a series regular, Barney returned for a high school reunion to learn that Thelma Lou had gotten married.Still, all was not lost for him. When much of the cast reunited in 1986 for a two-hour television movie, “Return to Mayberry,” Thelma Lou had gotten divorced. She and Barney married in the film.Ms. Lynn moved from West Hollywood to a retirement community in Mount Airy in 2007. In addition to the Griffith museum, the town offers recreations of familiar Mayberry haunts like Floyd’s barber shop. Ms. Lynn became a nostalgic lure to tourists, who would stand in line once a month to get her autograph, to give her a kiss or to chat about the series.“I think God’s blessed me,” she told The Associated Press in 2015. “He brought me to a sweet town, wonderful people, and just said, ‘Now, that’s for you, Betty.’”Elizabeth Ann Theresa Lynn was born on Aug. 29, 1926, in Kansas City, Mo. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a singer, organist and church choir director who raised Betty with her parents. By 14, Betty was singing in local supper clubs and at 18 began performing in U.S.O. shows. After the war, she had small roles in the Broadway musicals “Park Avenue” and “Oklahoma!”She appeared in films like “Sitting Pretty” and “June Bride” in 1948 and “Cheaper by the Dozen” in 1950. On television, she acted in anthology series, westerns and sitcoms, including “Family Affair and “My Three Sons.” In 1986, she played Mr. Griffith’s secretary on four episodes of his dramatic series, “Matlock,” in which he played a lawyer.Ms. Lynn never married and did not leave any immediate survivors. Among regular cast members of “The Andy Griffith Show,” only the director Ron Howard, who played Opie, Sheriff Taylor’s son, is still alive.Ms. Lynn said that she could have stayed with the series, which ended in 1968, had she accepted the producers’ offer to make her the owner of a hairdressing salon. But Mr. Knotts was gone, having moved on to a film career.Without Barney, she told The A.P. in 2007, “I didn’t think Thelma Lou made much sense.” More

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      Brian Goldner, Hasbro Executive With Hollywood Vision, Dies at 58

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      He turned a traditional maker of toys and games into an entertainment company with its own TV and movie studio.Brian Goldner, who transformed Hasbro, a traditional maker of toys and games, by rethinking its many brands as properties that could become films, television series and online games, died on Monday at his home in Barrington, R.I. He was 58.Hasbro announced the death but did not give a cause. Mr. Goldner received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2014 and took a leave of absence from the company the day before he died.Mr. Goldner, who was named Hasbro’s president in 2008, oversaw a company whose brands include My Little Pony, Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, Power Rangers and Nerf.One of his most notable successes was persuading Hollywood executives that Hasbro toys and action figures like Transformers and G.I. Joe were as film-worthy as Batman or Spider-Man.“We had relegated these brands to an experience that was limited to the playroom floor or the kitchen table,” Mr. Goldner told The New York Times in 2009. What he envisioned for the company was something more expansive.The Transformers — toy robots that can turn into vehicles or beasts, which Hasbro introduced in 1984 — were adapted into six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide since the release of “Transformers” in 2007. Mr. Goldner was an executive producer on all those films and a producer on two G.I. Joe movies.Since 2007, Optimus Prime and the other Transformers, which began life as Hasbro action figures, have starred in six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide.HasbroTo coincide with the opening of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (2014), the fourth film in the franchise, he challenged his design team to recapture the toys’ original magic by making them less complex so that they could transform with the push of a button rather than in a dozen steps.“We’ve made incredibly sophisticated robots, but it can be like a 1,000-piece puzzle,” he told The Times in 2014.For much of his time at the company, which is based in Pawtucket, R.I., Mr. Goldner espoused a brand blueprint that reimagined Hasbro as a play and entertainment company.“He came into a traditional toy company that was making stuff, and he believed we weren’t in the business of making things but in the business of storytelling,” Rich Stoddart, the interim chief executive of Hasbro, said in a phone interview.But, he added, Mr. Goldner encountered some skepticism with his plans.“Some people said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it sounds nice,’” Mr. Stoddart said, but Mr. Goldner had to keep pushing to bring his vision to reality. “He didn’t waver, because he believed to his toes that it was the right strategy.”Mr. Goldner’s effort to tell stories using Hasbro brands went even further in 2019 with the $3.8 billion acquisition of Entertainment One, a Canadian production studio that is also known by the shorthand name eOne. At the time, it was producing the popular children’s series “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”The purchase of eOne gave Hasbro the ability to produce its own programming, rather than make it only in partnership with Hollywood studios, which it had done with its Transformers and G.I. Joe movies as well as with its movie “Battleship” (2012). The film was part of an ultimately failed deal with Universal Pictures that was to have included movies based on the games Monopoly and Candy Land.“What we’ve found is that as all of the big studios have streaming services, they are increasingly holding on to their own I.P.,” Mr. Goldner told CNBC this year, referring to intellectual property. “Therefore, it gives us the opportunity as an independent to go out and present world-class, powerful brand I.P. to these streaming services like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and several others who used to have access to other people’s content and are now looking for great brands.”Mr. Goldner, left, and Adam Goldman, the president of Paramount Pictures, at the premiere of the movie “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” in Los Angeles in 2013.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBetween 2022 and 2023, he added, eOne would produce two to three movies and three or four streamed programs every year.Among the projects in development are Power Rangers and Dungeons & Dragons films and TV series based on Transformers and the board games Risk and Clue. The animated film “My Little Pony: A New Generation,” based on that Hasbro line of toys, had its premiere on Netflix last month.Eric Handler, an analyst at the equity trading firm MKM Partners, said by phone that Mr. Goldner had taken “the Disney approach to creating a virtuous circle and monetizing brands beyond the toy aisle.”He added: “Toys are still the core of Hasbro’s business, at least for now. But Brian recognized that you can do so much more with its brands and build them across franchises that cut across toys, consumer product licensing, movies, TV shows and theme park attractions.”Under Mr. Goldner, Hasbro also became a toy and game licensee for the Walt Disney Company’s Marvel universe of characters, including Iron Man and Spider-Man, and continued its licensing of “Star Wars” characters, which began in the 1970s.Brian David Goldner was born on April 21, 1963, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. His mother, Marjorie (Meyer) Goldner, was an investment adviser. His father, Norman, worked at Eaton, a power management company.After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in government, Mr. Goldner was hired as a marketing assistant at a health care company. He then worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he rose to director in charge of entertainment before leaving to become an executive vice president of Bandai America, a subsidiary of a Japanese toy company.He became chief operating office of Bandai but left in 2000 to join Hasbro as executive vice president and chief operating officer of its Tiger Electronics subsidiary, which makes the Furby robotic toy and many other products. He climbed quickly, becoming Hasbro’s chief operating officer in 2006. The success of the first “Transformers” movie helped lead to Mr. Goldner’s appointment in 2008 as president and chief executive. He was named chairman in 2015.He is survived by his wife, Barbara (Genick) Goldner; their daughter, Brooke Goldner; his mother; and a brother, Bradford. A son, Brandon, died of a heroin overdose in 2015.In 2018, Hasbro acquired the Power Rangers television and toy brand (originally the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) from the billionaire Haim Saban for $522 million. For Mr. Goldner, it was a reunion: He had worked with Mr. Saban when Bandai had been the Power Rangers’ global master toy licensee.“From time to time,” Mr. Saban said when the acquisition was announced, “Brian would say to me, ‘So when are you coming to Hasbro?’”It took a while, but Mr. Goldner finally added the Power Rangers to Hasbro’s ever-widening constellation of merchandising, television and movies. More

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      Andrea Martin, R&B Songwriter, Dies at 49

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      She co-wrote hits for En Vogue, Toni Braxton and other artists in the 1990s and 2000s and was also a singer, releasing an album.Andrea Martin, a songwriter behind a string of R&B hits, including Monica’s “Before You Walk Out of My Life” and Toni Braxton’s “I Love Me Some Him,” died on Sept. 27 in a hospital in New York City. She was 49.Her songwriting partner, Ivan Matias, confirmed her death but said the cause was undetermined.Ms. Martin’s first major songwriting credits, which she shared with Mr. Matias and other co-writers, came in 1995. Along with Carsten Schack and Kenneth Karlin, she wrote “Before You Walk Out of My Life,” which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and established Ms. Martin as an in-demand writer.Ms. Martin, Mr. Matias and Marqueze Etheridge together wrote En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go (Love),” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and was nominated for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal at the 1996 Grammy Awards.Ms. Martin was also a talented vocalist, initially finding work as a backup singer, and Drew Dixon, a vice president at Arista Records in the 1990s, took notice. She signed Ms. Martin to her label as a solo artist, and Arista released her album “The Best of Me” in 1998. The record was not a commercial success, though one of its tracks, “Let Me Return the Favor,” charted on the Billboard Hot 100 as a single.“Hearing people sing my songs was the greatest feeling ever, but it wasn’t a chance for me to express how I felt,” Ms. Martin said in a 1999 interview with The Daily News of New York about the release of her album. “The songs were about my life, but somebody else was singing it. I just wanted people to know this is me and present an album that represents me.”Ms. Dixon cited racism and colorism in the recording industry as possible reasons that Ms. Martin’s solo career did not take off. Had she been lighter-skinned, Ms. Dixon said, her career might have gained more traction.“Andrea was, without a doubt, one of the best singers I ever encountered in my career, and I’m including Whitney, Aretha, Lauryn and Deborah Cox when I say that,” Ms. Dixon said.Andrea Martin was born April 14, 1972, in Brooklyn to Reginald Martin Sr. and Mavis Martin. Her family lived in the East New York neighborhood.She told The Daily News that her biggest inspiration as a child was Michael Jackson. “I’d try to imitate him all day,” she said.She attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1990, and jumped right into writing songs and performing locally — even resorting to singing in the lobbies of buildings housing music publishing companies to attract the attention of executives. Her big break came when Rondor Music, a major publisher, signed her to a contract in the early 1990s.She is survived by two children, Eresha and Amaya; her parents; her sisters, Audrey and Wendy Martin; and her brothers, Reginald Jr., Michael and Shane.Ms. Martin continued to work steadily through the 2000s, writing for Leona Lewis, Melanie Fiona and Sean Kingston and appearing as a featured artist and backup singer for other acts. Mr. Matias said he expected to see unreleased projects featuring Ms. Martin emerge in the coming years.“She had a very specific sound to her writing,” Mr. Matias said. “And it didn’t matter who she worked with. She was infused into the melody.” More

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      Raymond Gniewek, 89, Met Orchestra’s Enduring Concertmaster, Dies

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      For 43 years he was a steadying force with the ensemble as he helped it become one of the world’s most esteemed.Raymond Gniewek, the concertmaster for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for 43 years and a quiet but vital force in elevating that ensemble to a new level of renown, died on Oct. 1 in Naples, Fla. He was 89.His daughter Susan Law said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Gniewek (pronounced NYEH-vik), a violinist whose solos invariably drew acclaim, was just 25 in 1957 when he was named the orchestra’s concertmaster. He had two obstacles to overcome.In a genre, opera, with a heavily European heritage, he was only the second American-born musician to hold the job at the Met. And he was the youngest member of the orchestra when he was made concertmaster, whose duties include advising musicians with much more tenure and experience.He managed to make it work.“I sort of waded my way through things, wasn’t too arrogant, and the musicians were very supportive,” he told The New York Times in 2000 in an interview occasioned by his retirement.The concertmaster, the leader of the violin section, is most visible in tuning up the orchestra before a concert, but is more crucially a conduit between the conductor and the rest of the players, helping to bring about the interpretation the conductor wants. That often means mastering a particular passage or effect, then demonstrating to fellow violinists the bowing technique or fingering needed to achieve it.“It’s my job to make technical translations of the desired sound,” Mr. Gniewek said in the 2000 interview. “And you have to show, not tell, because the same words can mean different things to different people.”Another part of the job is to ensure stability and continuity, especially important in an orchestra like the Met Opera’s that is often led by guest conductors. As the Berklee College of Music describes the job on its careers page, “While conductors may come and go — with differing styles and approaches — the concertmaster provides the orchestra with consistent and technically oriented leadership.”Mr. Gniewek found that being concertmaster could mean being an alarm clock. There is Met lore about a German conductor who would fall asleep during the dialogue of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz”; Mr. Gniewek would awaken him with a subtle, “Jetzt, maestro” (“Now, maestro”).Mr. Gniewek was credited with helping to raise the ensemble’s game considerably. When he was first named to the post, the orchestra was workmanlike at best. By the early 1990s it was playing concerts, making acclaimed recordings and being compared to the world’s great orchestras.“It plays with astonishing precision, nuance and insight,” Katrine Ames wrote of the Met Orchestra in Newsweek in 1991, adding, “Fifteen years ago that orchestra was little more than adequate: it gave some fine performances (usually Verdi) and some dismal ones (usually Mozart). To hear it was largely to ignore it.”Much of that improvement was credited to James Levine, who became the Met’s principal conductor in the 1973-74 season and was soon named its music director. But insiders knew that Mr. Gniewek was vital to executing Mr. Levine’s vision, something Mr. Levine himself acknowledged when Mr. Gniewek retired.“The single luckiest thing to happen to me since I have been at the Met,” he said, “is that Ray Gniewek was the concertmaster.”“I sort of waded my way through things, wasn’t too arrogant, and the musicians were very supportive,” Mr. Gniewek said of how he navigated becoming concertmaster in his mid-20s, when he was the youngest member of the orchestra.Raymond Arthur Gniewek was born on Nov. 13, 1931, in East Meadow, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Jacenta, was a tradesman and barber who also played violin, and his mother, Leocadia (Kurowska) Gniewek, was a church organist and homemaker.After graduating from Hempstead High School, he attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., becoming a member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra while an undergraduate. He graduated in 1953. In 1955, he was named concertmaster of the Rochester Civic Orchestra and assistant concertmaster of the Rochester Philharmonic.He had been Met concertmaster for almost a decade — and for some 1,700 performances — when he made his New York City recital debut in 1966 at Town Hall. Richard D. Freed, reviewing that performance in The Times, could barely contain his enthusiasm.“Mr. Gniewek has everything that could be wanted in a violinist — impeccable intonation, a technique so secure that he is free to concentrate on problems of interpretation and a pronounced flair for particular style,” he wrote.Early in his tenure, in 1958, Mr. Gniewek had to take the baton when the conductor Fausto Cleva fell ill during a performance of “Manon Lescaut.” That might have been a fantasy fulfilled for some concertmasters with conducting aspirations, but not for Mr. Gniewek.“I’d rather play,” he told The Times in the 2000 interview. “I have strong feelings about sound, the actual act of playing of the instrument. It’s what I do best.”Mr. Gniewek moved to Florida after retiring and lived in Naples at his death. His first marriage, to Doris Scott in the 1950s, ended in divorce, as did his marriage in 1960 to Lolita San Miguel. In addition to his daughter, who is from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, the soprano Judith Blegen; a sister, Cecilia Brauer, who is also a musician; a stepson, Thomas Singher; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Davi Loren, died in May.In 2000, in Met Orchestra concerts that were to be among Mr. Gniewek’s last, Mr. Levine gave him a rare honor by having him stand out in front at the program’s end to play Massenet’s Meditation from “Thais,” as an encore. When he did so at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Willa J. Conrad of The Star-Ledger of Newark wrote, “It was pure eloquence and grace, and as tribute to a particular musician’s legacy to a normally invisible orchestra, provided a particularly poignant close.”When he did the same at Carnegie Hall two nights later, the ovation — from the orchestra as well as the audience — stretched past the five-minute mark, lasting longer than the solo itself. More