“Maynard Solomon, a musicologist and record producer best known for influential, lucidly written biographies of Beethoven and Mozart as well as a hotly debated scholarly article on Schubert’s sexuality, died on Sept. 28 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 90,” writes Anthony Tommasini in Thursday’s (10/8) New York Times. “The cause was Lewy body dementia.… Mr. Solomon’s compelling 1977 biography of Beethoven, later revised and reissued, offered fresh, meticulously researched accounts of the composer’s life and perceptive yet mostly nontechnical discussions of the compositions…. Mr. Solomon’s ‘Mozart: A Life’ was a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in biography…. His 2004 book ‘Late Beethoven: Music. Thought, Imagination’ was also influential… Maynard Elliott Solomon was born on Jan. 5, 1930, in Manhattan.… In 1950 … Maynard and his brother, Seymour, founded Vanguard Records…. Vanguard and its Bach Guild label released an impressively diverse catalog of valuable recordings … and issued pivotal albums of folk music, blues and jazz. The classical repertory included English madrigals, overlooked Bach cantatas, masses by Haydn and a landmark survey of the complete Mahler symphonies.… Mr. Solomon taught regularly in adjunct and visiting professor stints at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Columbia, Harvard and Yale, and joined the graduate faculty at the Juilliard School.”
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