Harvey Sachs
Harvey Sachs is an American-Canadian writer who has written books on musical subjects. He has been a member of the Curtis Institute of Music faculty since 2009.
Writing
His books include biographies of and a book of essays on the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, plus an edited collection of Toscanini's letters.Toscanini, Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1978.Reflections on Toscanini, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, ed., New York: Knopf, 2002.Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.Ten Masterpieces of Music deals with works in ten different genres by ten different composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms, Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky; it provides descriptive analyses of the ten compositions plus commentary on and historical background to the life of each composer. Sachs has also written books on musical virtuosi, a history of music in Italy during the fascist period, a biography of Arthur Rubinstein, and a book on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that is part cultural history, part musical description, and part personal memoir:Virtuoso, London, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1982.Music in Fascist Italy, New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.Rubinstein: A Life, New York: Grove Press, 1995.The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, New York: Random House, 2010.Ten Masterpieces of Music, New York: Liveright, 2021
He has written Schoenberg: Why He Matters, an interpretive biography, which was published by Liveright, New York, in 2023. It was reviewed by composer John Adams.
Sachs also co-authored the memoirs of Plácido Domingo and Sir Georg Solti:
- Domingo, Plácido, My First Forty Years, New York: Knopf, 1983.
- Solti, Georg, Memoirs, New York: Knopf, 1997.