“Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964-1976.” Edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel. 609 pp., illustrations, index. Oxford University Press, 2026. Available HERE.

Michael Steinberg, expert and generous writer on music, died 17 years ago, but his written legacy, four published volumes and more, is still cherished by those who can find it. He would be 98 years old this year; born in Poland, he escaped with the Kindertransport to England and eventually to St. Louis, trained at Princeton University, and spent a major portion of his career in and around Boston.

This volume assembles 300 (out of about 2000)) of Michael Steinberg’s Globe essays, including concert reviews written at speed for immediate publication but also many longer pieces, and these cover a fine range of musical thought — analysis of works, philosophical questions about listening and audiences, and musicological issues informed by Steinberg’s background during the golden years of Princeton graduate musicology (full disclosure: I shared some of those years). Following his 12 years with the Globe, Steinberg moved on to become program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the very institution which once petulantly banned him from attendance (his offending review, comparing Carlo Maria Giulini’s gymnastic conducting style to Danny Kaye’s, is in the book; 8.xi.69) but forgave him, probably because he himself wasn’t a conductor. Steinberg’s second wife, the violinist Jorja Fleezanis, was the initial editor of the compilation project, and did much of the preliminary sorting prior to her own death in 2022.

A particular delight in the book is Steinberg’s vigorous, witty, colorful prose style. His total musicianship and comprehensive musical learning are apparent on every page, and he is always aware that his audience is those who love and are widely familiar with classical music, even if not themselves performers. Like no other newspaper-based critic of his time, he is especially sensitive to and appreciative of composers who are his own contemporaries as well as the Second Viennese School, yet he writes with equal comfort and seriousness about Monteverdi’s Orfeo (21.vi.70) as about Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Huxley Variations, about The Rake’s Progress and Moses und Aron, about reactions to Wagner and Richard Strauss in Israel. Steinberg effortlessly proclaims the importance of American composers, especially important when generally neglected in the BSO by Leinsdorf and Ozawa, after Koussevitzky and Munch had served them loyally. Steinberg encouraged Michael Thomas’s adventurous spirit with a number of American composers (Ives, 11.x.69; Piston and Schuman, 3.x.70; Harrison, 28.x.70; Piston, 23.ix.72; Reich, 20.iv.75). As a graduate alumnus (who didn’t finish his Ph.D. dissertation), Steinberg carefully introduces Princeton composers known also for their prose style to Boston audiences: Sessions, Babbitt, and Cone, as well as their colleague Elliott Carter, and their American spiritual fathers Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Much of Steinberg’s writing in this book deals with different conductors of the Boston Symphony and how they got there, and from the political standpoint, we have something to learn today that will be relevant as our beloved home orchestra finds its leadership feet in the coming months. William (no relation) Steinberg had a three-year contract with the BSO, and a year before it expired Michael Steinberg speculated about possibilities for his successor (14.ii.71). There’s an interesting piece on Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto (27.iii.69; Silverstein/Leinsdorf); would that we might hear that difficult but noble work today, especially with Hilary Hahn, who has recorded it beautifully, now available close by at the New England Conservatory.

Leonard Bernstein looms large in these writings, earning well-deserved credit as a conductor and director, as well as scorn for the vulgarities of Kaddish (1.ii.64) and Mass (9.ix.71) and for the ludicrous fumbling in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures (25.xi.73). Michael Tilson Thomas, who began as a Tanglewood student but rose to become Associate Conductor of the BSO, gets even more space and more praise as he matures. Both Bernstein and Thomas deserve a share of honor for bringing Mahler’s music more confidently rooted into the American consciousness, and Steinberg acknowledges others who share that as well. William Steinberg’s performance ot Mahler’s enigmatic Seventh elicits some juicy hyperbole in Michael’s review (19.xii.70): “The first movement… is predominantly tragic; the finale, on the other hand, seems like a picture of Mahler stuck on a desert island without a score of Meistersinger, trying to remember how the overture goes and becoming enraged when he can’t.”

The most revelatory, and the most satisfying, aspects of this large collection of very readable essays are their seriousness and the scope — with every kind of classical music covered, opera, Renaissance, Bach, Romantic piano, classical chamber, even community concerts, organ music, and voice recitals, from every profession and every county, and including huge tracts of musical politics, playing technique, and personal interviews with individual artists and chamber groups. A pianist himself who had studied with Eduard Steuermann, Steinberg gives scrupulous attention to pianists: Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Brendel, Rosen, Benjamin Britten, even Horowitz, and several outstanding younger ones: Peter Serkin, Garrick Ohlsson, Murray Perahia.

A 600-page book obviously couldn’t cover everything, yet I can’t imagine why Michael’s review of March 20, 1972, of the MIT Symphony Orchestra’s concert two days earlier in Kresge Auditorium (Robert Freeman conducting) wasn’t included, so I’ll mention it here: “Debussy premiere, well, almost, at MIT,” as the headline read. This was of my orchestration of Debussy’s one-movement Symphony in B Minor, composed in 1880 in a piano-duet draft and discovered in Russia only in 1930: “It is fluent, melodious, luscious and full of an interesting, sinuous sort of rhythmic detail… DeVoto’s scoring is completely convincing. To be sure, it is a minor find, but it provided a welcome, fresh moment in our concert life…and also showed that at 18 Debussy was already a real composer.” The long program also included Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante K. 364/320d, Ravel’s Tzigane, and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony: “I noted that at $1 a head, this nonprofessional orchestra, without benefit of big or even a-little-bit-big names, packed a hall with 1200-plus seats.” The group of more than 90 players consisted entirely of MIT students, faculty, and community members; and the Wagner tubas were lent by the Boston Symphony.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.