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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."Maynard Solomon" in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, vol. 5 (N. Slonimsky & D. Kuhn, 2001). Later, he took up musicology, becoming well known for his biographical studies of Viennese Classical composers, specifically Beethoven, Mozart, and Franz Schubert.
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..."
Vanguard's first non-classical signing was The Weavers. They generated the first major commercial success for the label with that group's 1955 Carnegie Hall concert. Solomon also acquired the rights to record and release material from the Newport Folk Festival, which meant he could issue recordings by artists who had not actually signed with Vanguard. In this period, Elektra Records was the main competitor for folk artists. Their singers, Phil Ochs and Judy Collins, were recorded at Newport, as was dynamic young Columbia artist Bob Dylan. The Solomons continued to work with folk artists up until the 1980s.
In 1959, the company signed Joan Baez, who would remain with the Vanguard label for the next twelve years. Two years later, they recorded Odetta at Town Hall (New York). The Rooftop Singers recorded "Walk Right In" in 1963, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic produced by Solomon along with some of their other songs. Their next single, "Tom Cat", was banned for being slightly suggestive, though tame by modern standards. It was probably Solomon's influence that induced Baez to record "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5" by Villa-Lobos.
Solomon insisted on a clean appearance on stage, and clear diction, views in accord with majority public opinion at the time. More bravely, he signed Paul Robeson for Vanguard at the height of the McCarthy era.
Solomon's belief in Marxism was a driving force in these early years, but it was not until 1973 that his writings explicitly reflected this. His book Marxism and Art from that year has been continuously in print since then.
In the late 1960s Vanguard had some success with rock artists, most notably "Country Joe and the Fish" (today usually called Country Joe McDonald), along with some jazz, blues or disco records that have not stood the test of time. One of the most surprising signings he made, in 1969, was Michael Szajkowski, an electronic composer. Szajkowski's material was borrowed from Handel, but the sound, on a synthesizer, was far from classical. Maynard's brother Seymour, however, had previously signed humorous electronic music artists Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley (Perrey and Kingsley) in 1965. That team's work has stood the test of time: their Vanguard music is still used on commercials, children's television, and elsewhere.
The numerous popular classical music series released by the Solomons on Vanguard and Bach Guild between 1950 and 1966 include, in addition to 22 Bach , pieces from the English Madrigal School performed by the Deller Consort, Italian and French madrigal masterpieces, Elizabethan and Jacobean music, Henry Purcell and the virtuoso trumpet, virtuoso flute and virtuoso oboe, along with German University Songs with Erich Kunz, songs of the Auvergne, Viennese dances with Willi Boskovsky, traditional songs by Roland Hayes, Antonio Vivaldi Four Seasons and other concertos from I Solisti di Zagreb, music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, numerous Joseph Haydn symphonies performed by the Esterhazy Orchestra, a double LP record of Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice sung in Italian with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra led by Charles Mackerras, and an influential Gustav Mahler cycle with the Utah Symphony conducted by Maurice Abravanel.
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."Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, "Psychoanalysis and the Historiocritical Method: On Maynard Solomon's Image of Beethoven", in: The Beethoven Newsletter 8/3 (1993/1994), pp. 84–92; 9/3, pp. 119–127 For reaction to his portrayal of Leopold Mozart, see Head (1999).Matthew Head, "Myths of a Sinful Father: Maynard Solomon's 'Mozart'" Music & Letters 80 (1999): 74–85. For a post-Solomon view of the "Immortal Beloved" that admits Antonie Brentano merely as a possibility, see Swafford (2020:585-589).Swafford, Jan (2020). Mozart: The Reign of Love. New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0-062-43357-2.
To put it bluntly, there is no evidence that Schubert or the members of his circle were homosexuals. Solomon has mistranslated several key documents, quoted selected passages out of context, and misrepresented the cultural and artistic context of society in Biedermeier Vienna. It does not speak well of our critical faculties that we are blind to the deficiencies of his argument. Schubert deserves better.Steblin, Rita (1993) The Peacock's Tale: Schubert's Sexuality Reconsidered. 19th-Century Music, Summer, 1993, Vol. 17, No. 1.
Solomon's viewpoint, however, was defended in print, among others by the mainstream musicologist Robert Winter,Winter, Robert S. "Whose Schubert?." Nineteenth-Century Music (1993): 94-101. by music scholar Charles Rosen,(2002). In "The New Musicology", from his book Critical Entertainments. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. A sharp exchange between Rosen and Steblin appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1994, [2]. and by New York Times music critic Donal Henahan. New York Times, 8 August 1989: [3] The 1989 Solomon paper continues to attract citations and scholarly attention.
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 Franz 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.
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