Music’s Towering Intellectual, With an Appetite for Trouble
His keeper, not his editor, I used to call myself in affectionate jest — and with enormous pride and respect.
He was a force of nature. He was larger than life. He was one of a kind. Choose your cliché.
Richard Taruskin, a music historian of towering intellect and erudition who delighted in stirring up good trouble, died on Friday at 77. Physically, he was a bear of a man, and his manner, though typically warm and upbeat, could occasionally seem gruff and untamed. He suffered fools not at all. He rode herd on the musicological and critical communities, sending unsolicited — indeed, dreaded — postcards to colleagues with capsule critiques, noting errors or inanities, often scathingly.
Yet he was a joy to work with. His writing was brilliant, profound, stylish and witty, scarcely in need of editing, except for length. He never tired of trying to fit, say, a 2,500-word peg into a 1,500-word hole. That was not so much a problem at Opus, the small, free-form record magazine where I started working with him, in the mid-1980s. But it became a serious issue a few years later, at our next stop, the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, with its hard-and-fast space limitations. Richard’s sparkling prose was not something you — or he — ever wanted to cut wholesale.
But even this proved unproblematic. We would tighten a piece sentence by sentence, word by word, and Richard welcomed suggestions. He eventually took the process as a challenge, a puzzle that we would solve together.
His was the most nimble and retentive mind I’ve ever worked with closely over time. It was almost scary to hear him quote from memory a paragraph of something he had read a decade or two before virtually verbatim. And he seemed to have read everything.
It came as a particular jolt recently to hear that what Richard was dying of was cancer of the esophagus. With suddenly renewed force, I recalled the circumstances of our early work together, at Opus. That started while he was writing his first oversized book, “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” which in 1996 ultimately weighed in at two volumes and 1,757 pages. Richard would work on Stravinsky for three or four weeks, then take a week off between chapters and write for Opus. In one of those breaks, he might produce six or seven 500-word CD reviews, a 1,000-word think piece, two 2,500-word essays and a 4,000- or 5,000-word blowout. They arrived in a fat manila envelope, which, when opened, reeked of cigar smoke. (Cigars are said to be a risk factor for esophageal cancer.)
Cigars, it happens, were something of an odd leitmotif in Richard’s biography. The story was told — vividly, by Peter Kang in Columbia College Today in 2005 — that Richard, as a young pup at Columbia University in 1961, saw a distinguished-looking man enter the music library with a lighted cigar and informed him that smoking was not permitted there. “When the man left,” Kang wrote, “the library staff quickly told Taruskin that the smoker he had just admonished was world-renowned musicologist and professor Paul Henry Lang.”
And therein lies another, larger tale. Richard went on to earn his Ph.D. at Columbia under Lang’s tutelage, writing about Russian opera in the 1860s, a topic that led to several of his many books of essays. Nor was it lost on Richard that Lang’s magnum opus, “Music in Western Civilization,” from 1941, remained in wide use as a textbook at Columbia and elsewhere. Emulating his mentor with an eye toward producing a textbook, Richard embarked on a magnum opus of his own in 1991.
That work grew and grew and grew, as Richard reveled in the opportunity to say his “two cents’ worth about everything.” Finally published in six volumes by Oxford University Press in 2005 as “The Oxford History of Western Music,” it is an endlessly informative, often opinionated page-turner — all 4,272 pages of it.
Well, no, perhaps not all. The sixth volume of “The Ox,” as the tomes have come to be known, consists of a chronology, a bibliography and a 146-page small-type index. Sheer tedium to deal with, but in his mania to get things right, Richard insisted on compiling it himself.
So clearly, “The Ox” would not be the svelte textbook Richard may have envisioned — though he went on to compress it, in collaboration with the music historian Christopher H. Gibbs, to produce a “college edition,” at a mere 1,212 pages.
After his time with Lang, Richard fell under the wing of Joseph Kerman, “the second-most- famous musicologist of those days,” as he called him, who was overseeing the start-up of a new journal, 19th-Century Music, which became what Richard called his “scholarly home” for a time. In 1987, he joined Kerman as a fellow professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained (emeritus since 2014) until his death.
In addition to academic pursuits, Richard began to write more popularly for the short-lived Opus, The New Republic and The Times, developing a reputation as America’s public musicologist, a role he gloried in. On receiving the Kyoto Prize in Japan in 2017 for his contributions to the arts and philosophy, he said of his Times work, “I found it congenial to write about music in relation to what are always the primary concerns of any newspaper, that is, social and political issues.” He also loved having “access to the largest audience a writer on classical music in America could ever dream of having.”
The international acclaim that Richard achieved was all merited and wonderful, but for me it does not eclipse some of my favorite memories of him, as a youngish performer in New York. Whenever I hear the viola da gamba solos in the Bach Passions played politely and limply, as they so often are, I yearn to hear Richard, whose gamba playing had the same grit and guts and flair as his writing.
Fortunately, he lives on in my mind’s ear.
