Michael Steinberg (music critic)

This article is about the music critic and musicologist. For the filmmaker, see Michael Steinberg (filmmaker).

Michael Steinberg (4 October 1928 – 26 July 2009) was an American music critic, musicologist, and writer. Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), Steinberg left Germany as one of the Kindertransport child refugees. He later immigrated to the United States before the end of the war with his brother and mother, and earned a degree in musicology from Princeton University (the classical-music scholar and pianist Charles Rosen was his roommate), before joining the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, where he taught music history. In 1964 he left his teaching position to become music critic for the Boston Globe. After writing for the paper for almost 12 years, he became program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1976-1979. He then worked as the publications director and artistic advisor of the San Francisco Symphony 1979-1989. He was program annotator for a number of other orchestras during his career, including the New York Philharmonic and the Minnesota Orchestra, the latter of which he served as artistic advisor during the 1990s. He contributed several entries to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, wrote articles for music journals and magazine, notes for CDs, and published a number of books on music, both collected published annotations and new writings. He died in Edina, Minnesota, at the age of 80.

Bibliography

• Steinberg, Michael, The Symphony (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). ISBN 0-19-506177-2.
• Steinberg, Michael, The Concerto (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN 0-19-510330-0.
• Steinberg, Michael, Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.