Maynard Solomon - As Musicologist

As Musicologist

Solomon then 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 (overly simplistic psychological interpretations of their subjects).

Characteristic of Solomon's approach is a careful sifting of the scholarly evidence, often with the goal of supporting new hypotheses about the events or motivations of the great composers in question and those around them (for instances cited in this encyclopedia, see Maria Anna Mozart, Mozart's Berlin journey, Mozart's name and Antonie Brentano). A great deal of effort seems to reside in the attempts to compare and contrast certain ideas that need to be analyzed. Solomon is also careful to avoid uncritical repetition of old formulae in composer biographies; for example, like other recent biographers, he characterizes 1791, the last year of Mozart's life, as of personal revival cut off by terminal illness rather than the steady slide toward the grave typical of more traditional biographies. Most boldly, he hasn't hesitated to offer specific psychological analyses and diagnoses of his subjects. He has, however, been criticized for anachronistic assumptions and a lack of understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German.

Solomon became, in 1997, a member of the International Musicology Society, and addressed its congress in London. He is the author most recently 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 has also published articles in applied psychoanalysis and edited several books on aesthetics. His current projects include a life of Schubert and a book tentatively titled Beethoven: Beyond Classicism. He has held visiting professorships at Yale, Harvard and Columbia, and is currently on the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School.