Maynard Solomon

Maynard Elliott Solomon (January 5, 1930 – September 28, 2020) was an American music executive and musicologist. In his career in the music industry, he was a co-founder of Vanguard Records as well as a music producer.[1] Later, he took up musicology, becoming well known for his biographical studies of Viennese Classical composers, specifically Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert.[2]

Education

Having attended New York's High School of Music & Art, Solomon graduated Phi Beta Kappa[3] from Brooklyn College, CUNY, with a BA in 1950, subsequently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University from 1950 to 1952. In 1979 he became adjunct associate professor at the Graduate School, CUNY, and between 1988 and 1994 held visiting professorships at SUNY Stony Brook, Columbia University, Harvard University and Yale University, joining the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School of Music in 1998.[1][4]

Career in the recording industry

Maynard Solomon founded Vanguard Records jointly with his brother Seymour Solomon in 1950. They started the business with a $10,000 loan from their father, Seymour becoming company president and Maynard, the younger brother, vice president.[5] The label was one of the prime movers in the folk and blues boom for the next fifteen years, as well as being a major classical label. As well as producing many albums, Solomon was a prolific writer of liner notes; a foreshadowing of his later career as music scholar.

His nascent venture's first disc was of J.S. Bach's 21st cantata, "Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21" ("I had much grief"), with Jonathan Sternberg conducting Hugues Cuénod and other soloists, chorus and orchestra. "What speaks for the Solomons' steadfastness in their taste and their task", wrote a Billboard journalist in November 1966, "is that this record is still alive in the catalogue (SC-501). As Seymour says, it was a good performance, not easy to top. Of the whole Vanguard/Bach Guild catalogue, numbering about 480 issues, 30 are Bach records..."[3]

Vanguard's first non-classical signing was The Weavers. They generated the first major commercial success for the label with that group's 1955

As musicologist

Solomon later began a second career as a musicologist, notably as author of composer biographies, and his work (particularly his studies of Mozart and Beethoven) has met with both acclaim and criticism. Three key works have been:

These biographical works are filled with facts and reflect extensive research, a trait they share with many modern composer biographies. Where Solomon's work stands out is in his ability and willingness to launch striking and novel claims, often in the face of skepticism from the scholarly community. Here are some examples.

A number of these research projects suggest Solomon relished detective work. The data he used were in general not new to scholarship, but he attempted to sift through the facts in novel ways: things like the details of mail coach schedules, close interpretation of letters, study of slang terms used by gay people, and so on, were marshaled to make the case for the surprising conclusion.

Solomon's efforts almost always provoked pushback from other scholars, both on general grounds and against the specific claims made. For instance, Tellenbach describes his work as involving "anachronistic assumptions and a lack of understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German."[7] For reaction to his portrayal of Leopold Mozart, see Head (1999).[8] For a post-Solomon view of the "Immortal Beloved" that admits Antonie Brentano merely as a possibility, see Swafford (2020:585-589).[9]

Collaborations and later career

Solomon's concentration on the life and work of Beethoven resulted in close collaboration with German scholars; in 1996 he was made a scholarly adviser to the Beethoven-Archiv in Bonn, in addition to becoming a member of the editorial committee for the Neue Ausgabe Beethovens Briefe (the New Edition of Beethoven's letters, Munich, 1996–1998).[4]

Solomon became, in 1997, a member of the International Musicological Society, and addressed its congress in London. He was the author of Mozart: A Life, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography which won the Deems Taylor Award, as did his biography of Beethoven and his study of Charles Ives. His Beethoven Essays won the Otto Kinkeldey Award for most distinguished book on music published in 1988.

An associate editor of American Imago, and co-founder of the Bach Guild (a subsidiary Vanguard record label), he also published articles in applied psychoanalysis and edited several books on aesthetics. His later projects included a life of Schubert and a book tentatively titled Beethoven: Beyond Classicism.

Solomon died on September 28, 2020, in Manhattan from Lewy body dementia at the age of 90.[18]

Selected discography of records produced by Solomon

• "Best of the Vanguard Years" (2000) (The Clancy Brothers)
• "Best of the Vanguard Years" (2000) (Tom Paxton)
• "Best of the Vanguard Years" (1998) (Ian & Sylvia)
• "Best of the Vanguard Years" (2004) (The Rooftop Singers)
• "Best of the Vanguard Years" (2003) (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
• "Best of John Hammond" (1989) (John Hammond)
• "Best of Eric Andersen" (1970) (Eric Andersen)
• "Vanguard Sessions: Baez Sings Dylan" (1998) (Joan Baez)
• "Reunion at Carnegie Hall, 1963, Pt 1" (2001) (The Weavers)
• "Reunion at Carnegie Hall, 1963, Pt 2" (2001) (The Weavers)

Bibliography

• The Joan Baez Songbook (1964) (by Solomon and Eric Von Schmidt)
• Noel: The Joan Baez Christmas Songbook (1967) (by Joan Baez, Solomon and Eric Von Schmidt)
• Marxism and Art (1973)
• Beethoven and the Enlightenment, Telos, 19 (Spring 1974). New York: Telos Press.
• Myth Creativity Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Harry Slochower (1979)
• Beethoven (1977, 1998), Beethoven (Second, revised edition, 2001)
• Beethoven's Tagebuch: 1812–1818 (1983)
• Beethoven Essays (1988). Winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society
• Mozart: A Life (New York, 1995)
• "Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini", 19th-Century Music, 12 (3) University of California Press: 193–206,
• (translator) Memories of Beethoven (2003) (by Gerhard von Breuning).
• Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (2004)

External links

• Norman Weinstein (December 4–11, 1997). "Folk'd Up: The Good and the Bad of Vanguard", Boston Phoenix.