NYT: Robert W. Gutman, Biographer of Wagner and Mozart, Dies at 90

[Frank Forman]

Robert W. Gutman, Biographer of Wagner and Mozart, Dies at 90
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/books/robert-w-gutman-biographer-of-wagner-and-mozart-dies-at-90.html

By MARGALIT FOX

Robert W. Gutman, whose influential biographies of Wagner and Mozart
helped upend popularly held ideas about both composers' lives, died
on Friday in the Bronx. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by Steven Walsh, his husband and only
immediate survivor.

Trained in music and art history, Mr. Gutman was the author of
"Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music" (1968) and
"Mozart: A Cultural Biography" (1999).

His Wagner book, which placed its subject in the larger intellectual
context of his times, infuriated idolaters, for whom the master
could do no wrong.

While commending the beauty and majesty of Wagner's compositions,
Mr. Gutman also took pains to analyze his nonmusical activities--
notably his profuse, turgid and virulently anti-Semitic writings,
which would become a lodestar of Nazi ideology.

Wagner's music, Mr. Gutman argued, was in many respects a reflection
of his personal ethos. Of his 1878 opera, "Parsifal," for instance,
Mr. Gutman concluded that its rendition of the story of the quest
for the Holy Grail was not so much a Christian parable as it was a
brief for Aryan racial purity.

"He has dedicated one of the great talents of the century to ignoble
ends," Mr. Gutman wrote, with obvious regret, of his subject.

Reviewing the biography in The New York Times Book Review, Herbert
Weinstock called it "much the richest and best-accomplished single
volume on Wagner in English."

He further commended Mr. Gutman for "displaying the network of
interconnections which finally enables us to comprehend how all of
Wagner's apparently unrelated activities emanated from the urges of
that single mind and can be understood as manifestations of that
swollen ego."

Mr. Gutman was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to
research his Mozart biography, which likewise examined the composer
through a sociohistorical lens.

In particular, it sought to dispel the idea, perpetuated by Peter
Shaffer in his stage play "Amadeus," which opened on Broadway in
1980, and the 1984 film adaptation, that Mozart was an infantile
genius poisoned by his archrival, the composer Antonio Salieri. (Mr.
Gutman maintained that Mozart died from illness, possibly rheumatic
fever.)

While some book critics spoke of being overwhelmed by the
biography's sheer bulk--it ran to some 840 pages--others
welcomed the breadth of Mr. Gutman's historical net.

"For many, especially those influenced by the 'holy fool' version
depicted in Peter Shaffer's 'Amadeus,' Mozart is the embodiment of a
composer whose life is marginal, at best, to his artistic
achievements," Martin Kettle wrote in The Washington Post. "Gutman's
book is above all an extremely erudite and lucid counterweight to
this approach."

Robert William Gutman was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 1925, the
son of Theodore Gutman, a lawyer, and the former Elsie Edenbaum, a
legal secretary and homemaker. As a young man, he studied the piano
and took instruction in music theory from Kurt Adler, a longtime
conductor of the Metropolitan Opera.

After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in music from New York
University, Mr. Gutman joined the faculty of the Fashion Institute
of Technology in Manhattan in the 1950s. There he taught art history
and interior-design history; he was the founding dean of the
institute's graduate division before retiring in the late 1980s.

A resident of Manhattan, Mr. Gutman was a visiting faculty member at
Bard College and elsewhere. At midcentury, he was a founder of, and
a music-history instructor at, the Bayreuth Festival Master Classes;
the festival, in Bavaria, had been established by Wagner in the late
19th century.

Throughout his work, Mr. Gutman was attuned to the fact that he was
puncturing long-held beliefs about venerated figures. Among them was
the idea that Mozart, who died in 1791, at 35, was dissolute and
destitute at the end.

"I search in vain for the guttering candle of Mozartean myth," Mr.
Gutman wrote. "To the end, he preserved Candide-like qualities:
evergreen expectations, a passion to love and muscle to survive."