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. The cause was Lewy body dementia, his family said. Reviewing Mr. Solomon’s 1988 book “Beethoven Essays,” the New York Times music critic Donal Henahan described the author as “one of the most persuasive voices on behalf of the perilous intellectual voyage known as psychobiography — or, less kindly, ‘psychobabblography.’” But in investigating the mysteries of creative energy, he wrote, Mr. Solomon “builds even his most speculative essays on musicological foundations, not moonbeams.”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. Going further, he boldly framed the narrative with psychological speculations on the composer’s life, including the young Beethoven’s fraught relationship with his bullying, alcoholic father and his fantasies of having been born illegitimate and of having royal blood.

Source: New York Times October 08, 2020 16:13 UTC