Category Archives: Obituaries

In memoriam: Jonathan Harvey

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Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012).

UPDATES: The first obit to appear is this, from the London Times; Alex Ross writes that “Some celebrated composers fade after death, their fame dependent on personality and on networks of influence. Harvey, a passionate loner, will only ascend.” Harvey’s publisher, Faber Music, has this remembrance. From Imogen Tilden’s obituary for the Guardian:

“I have worked closely with Jonathan for 30 years,” said Sally Cavender, vice-chairman of Faber Music. “His impact as a composer has been profound and international in its scope. The spirituality of his music also pervaded his personality; no one who met him came away without commenting on his gentleness, generosity and breadth of imagination … Music simply poured out of him, naturally and organically. In every sense he was a superior human being and one that it has been a privilege to know, as much as it has been a delight to treasure his music.”

Also for the Guardian, Ivan Hewitt offers a more musicological approach to Harvey’s music here:

One of the striking things about Harvey’s later works is their hospitality to old-fashioned consonances, including the major triad. When asked why he didn’t go “all the way” and write tonal music, he said self-mockingly that if he did, he would turn into a boring imitation-19th-century Anglican composer. But a deeper reason was that otherworldly electronic sounds were equally attractive to him, and for much the same reason: they were symbols of divine unity.

These were rooted in the complex vibrations of resonating bodies, and could be regarded as natural, whereas the triad is a deeply artificial product of culture. For that reason, some would find the idea of yoking them together inconsistent, but this did not bother Harvey.

Word arrives this morning that British composer Jonathan Harvey has died at the age of 73. Apart from his own splendidly spiritual music, he also wrote two quite fine books, an introduction to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and In Quest of Spirit: Thoughts on Music. Obituaries will be added here as they appear; there is also this January 2012 interview with the composer from Tom Service in the Guardian. Service also offers this guide to Harvey’s music. “It’s not every composer whose music is guaranteed to uplift and revivify you, which makes you feel a sense of essential positivity about the world and our place within it,” he writes. “[Harvey] belongs in that special category, and he does it not through creating a trivial sense of comforting musical escapism but by confronting, describing, and transcending the world and its pains, joys and sufferings.”

In the below clip from an interview, Harvey discusses his 2006/2007 composition Speakings:

Martin E. Segal (1916-2012)

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Martin E. Segal in 1998.

Martin E. Segal in 1998. Photo: Librado Romero for the The New York Times.

A few years ago, it was my pleasure to meet and briefly talk with Martin E. Segal, who established the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2000. Mr. Segal was a gentleman of the old school (the Segal Theatre Center seems to attract them), generous and gregarious in conversation, and without doubt dedicated to not only preserving the art of theatre but to providing a proving ground for its future innovators as well. Numberless theatre artists owe him a great debt (as do I; it was the Segal Center that co-produced my Howard Barker event in 2010 with my theatre minima company). As do, for that matter, many New Yorkers: he served as chairman of Lincoln Center from 1981 to 1986 and founding president and chief executive of the Film Society of Lincoln Center from 1968 to 1978, among many other cultural roles.

Mr. Segal passed away on Sunday at his New York home, and the New York City theatre world will be poorer for his absence, as proven by Robin Pogrebin’s obituary for the New York Times here. This, and that of the Segal Center’s Daniel Gerould in February, are irreplaceable losses.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)

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Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

This morning brings news of the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who would have been 87 in just ten days. Terry Teachout has this; the Guardian has an obituary here; the New York Times runs a much more extensive obituary by Daniel Lewis here. Below, a YouTube video of the great lieder master singing Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig. His accompanist is Gerald Moore.

Barney Rosset (1922-2012)

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Photo: Michael Falco for The New York Times.

UPDATE: Ken Jordan’s extended and fascinating interview with Rosset, conducted in the mid-1990s, can be found on The Paris Review‘s Web site here.

It is hard, if not impossible, to overestimate the role that Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, played in revolutionizing both the American theatre and the American literary consciousness. From the time he bought the small company in 1951 to the time he sold it to Ann Getty and George Weidenfeld in 1985, Rosset championed and published — at great personal cost — magazines, plays, and books that exploded the comfortable ease of the American literary scene. His publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch led to dozens of obscenity trials, almost all of which Rosset won, but just as importantly, the Grove Press drama backlist reads like a curriculum of experimental and international theatre of the second half of the twentieth century. Grove Press published extensive lists of almost every significant European playwright of the era, from Arrabal and Artaud to Charles Wood, with Beckett, Brecht, Havel, Ionesco, Pinter, and countless others in between. Nor did Grove Press neglect radical politics; both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and books by Che Guevara were issued by the house.

The book cover as madeleine: The cover of the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch that I bought in the 1970s.

I first came across Grove Press as a teenager in the mid-1970s, when I was living in Hazleton, PA, and had dreams of becoming a playwright. My home away from home was the City Book Store, which was run by two veterans of the 1960s radical campus wars, and it was there that the idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable cover designs of the Grove Press books became a part of my Proustian memory. The owners kept a long list of Grove Press titles in stock, and it was rare that they did not instantly have an effect on my thinking and my life, from Henry Miller and William Burroughs to Pinter, Brecht, and of course Beckett. I suppose I have Rosset to thank for planting the seeds of my later writing and thinking, and I know that I’m not alone in this. The Swiftian brilliance of Naked Lunch; the lascivious celebrations of Tropic of Cancer; the nightmarish but titillating underworlds of the Marquis de Sade; and of course the darker corners of Endgame, The Homecoming, and Mother Courage all were revealed through Rosset’s courageous and uncompromising dedication to freedom of expression and cosmopolitan, internationalist perspectives. Heady stuff for a 14-year-old, and heady stuff now — but they changed me, hinting at the brilliant possibilities that could be explored in both life and art, if only I had the courage of those Grove Press writers I read. (The same could be said for books from James Laughlin’s New Directions and, to a lesser extent, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, the other crusading publishers of the era.)

The 2007 documentary Obscene is a portrait of Rosset and his career at Grove Press, and is a very good overview of his influence and place in American publishing history. Douglas Martin’s obituary for The New York Times is here.

Many of those unique, memorable Grove Press covers were designed by Roy Kuhlman. A gallery of a few of these is below (click on the image to rotate through the slideshow); more information on Kuhlman can be found here.

Daniel Gerould (1928-2012)

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UPDATE: Yale University’s Krystyna Lipińska Iłłakowicz offers her thoughts on Prof. Gerould’s passing at the culture.pl Web site here.

The Polish Cultural Institute here in New York published this remembrance.

Playbill‘s obituary, written by Robert Simonson and published on 16 February, is available here.

Yesterday brought news of the recent death of Daniel Gerould, Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Prof. Gerould also held the posts of Director of Academic Affairs and Director of Publications at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.

Prof. Gerould was perhaps singlehandedly responsible for bringing American attention to the great achievements of Central and Eastern European drama and theatre of the twentieth century. With his writing on Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and other revolutionary dramatists of the region, he revealed the unique incendiary qualities of this work from the center of Europe. He also focused spotlights on American melodrama and the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck. It was, though, in his advocacy for Polish drama that he had the greatest influence, and were it not for his academic rigor and continuing enthusiasm for these plays, American stages would be far poorer.

I knew Prof. Gerould only slightly, and never in the classroom, but what struck me most about him was his consistent and constant good cheer, his encyclopedic knowledge of world theatre (which he carried with delightful ease), his modesty and gentleness, and his always impeccable manners. He was among the last of a disappearing breed of gentlemen scholars, and to spend time in his company was a pure pleasure. Though the American academic study of Central European drama is eternally in debt to him for his unceasing work and enthusiasm, we are all in debt to him for his example.

His Web page at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center’s site details only a few of his many accomplishments. His most recent book, Quick Change, was published last year and collects several of his essays, including those on erotic French puppetry, the Grand Guignol, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and of course his beloved Central European theatre. I will post links to other obituaries and remembrances as they appear.