Richard Wagner the Man His Mind and His Music Gutman Review
Robert W. Gutman, Biographer of Wagner and Mozart, Dies at xc
Robert Westward. Gutman, whose influential biographies of Wagner and Mozart helped upend popularly held ideas nearly both composers' lives, died on Friday in the Bronx. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Steven Walsh, his husband and just firsthand survivor.
Trained in music and art history, Mr. Gutman was the author of "Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music" (1968) and "Mozart: A Cultural Biography" (1999).
His Wagner book, which placed its subject in the larger intellectual context of his times, infuriated idolaters, for whom the chief could do no incorrect.
While commending the beauty and majesty of Wagner's compositions, Mr. Gutman also took pains to analyze his nonmusical activities — notably his profuse, turgid and virulently anti-Semitic writings, which would become a lodestar of Nazi credo.
Wagner'southward music, Mr. Gutman argued, was in many respects a reflection of his personal ethos. Of his 1878 opera, "Parsifal," for case, Mr. Gutman ended that its rendition of the story of the quest for the Holy Grail was not then much a Christian parable equally it was a brief for Aryan racial purity.
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"He has dedicated one of the slap-up talents of the century to ignoble ends," Mr. Gutman wrote, with obvious regret, of his subject.
Reviewing the biography in The New York Times Book Review, Herbert Weinstock called information technology "much the richest and best-achieved single book on Wagner in English language."
He farther commended Mr. Gutman for "displaying the network of interconnections which finally enables us to comprehend how all of Wagner'south apparently unrelated activities emanated from the urges of that single mind and can exist understood equally manifestations of that swollen ego."
Mr. Gutman was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to enquiry his Mozart biography, which likewise examined the composer through a sociohistorical lens.
In particular, information technology sought to dispel the idea, perpetuated by Peter Shaffer in his play "Amadeus," which opened on Broadway in 1980, and the 1984 film adaptation, that Mozart was an infantile genius poisoned by his archrival, the composer Antonio Salieri. (Mr. Gutman maintained that Mozart died from illness, peradventure rheumatic fever.)
While some book critics spoke of existence overwhelmed by the biography'due south sheer bulk — information technology ran to some 840 pages — others welcomed the latitude of Mr. Gutman's historical cyberspace.
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"For many, especially those influenced by the 'holy fool' version depicted in Peter Shaffer's 'Amadeus,' Mozart is the embodiment of a composer whose life is marginal, at best, to his creative achievements," Martin Kettle wrote in The Washington Post. "Gutman'south book is to a higher place all an extremely erudite and lucid counterweight to this approach."
Robert William Gutman was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 1925, the son of Theodore Gutman, a lawyer, and the former Elsie Edenbaum, a legal secretary and homemaker. As a young man, he studied the pianoforte and took education in music theory from Kurt Adler, a longtime conductor of the Metropolitan Opera.
Afterward earning bachelor's and principal's degrees in music from New York University, Mr. Gutman joined the faculty of the Mode Institute of Engineering in Manhattan in the 1950s. In that location he taught art history and interior-blueprint history; he was the founding dean of the institute's graduate division before retiring in the tardily 1980s.
A resident of Manhattan, Mr. Gutman was a visiting faculty member at Bard Higher and elsewhere. At midcentury, he was a founder of and a music-history instructor at the Bayreuth Festival Master Classes; the festival in Bavaria had been established by Wagner in the late 19th century.
Throughout his work, Mr. Gutman was attuned to the fact that he was puncturing long-held beliefs about venerated figures. Among them was the idea that Mozart, who died in 1791 at 35, was dissolute and destitute at the finish.
"I search in vain for the guttering candle of Mozartean myth," Mr. Gutman wrote. "To the finish, he preserved Candide-like qualities: evergreen expectations, a passion to love and muscle to survive."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/books/robert-w-gutman-biographer-of-wagner-and-mozart-dies-at-90.html
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