Martin Bernheimer, 1936-2019

The esteemed critic Martin Bernheimer died today, a day after his 83rd birthday, of sarcoma. According to his wife, Linda Winer, he'd been ill with sarcoma for several years.

Bernheimer is surely best known for his 31 years at the LA Times, from 1965 to 1996. In more recent years, he was the NYC correspondent for the Financial Times.

I exchanged email from time to time with Bernheimer. At one point, I was grievously wrong in thinking he'd written a review with....some problems...in Opera News; it was, in fact, a different reviewer. I helped him out a couple of times when he had issues with his opera-l subscription.

I also read a fair number of his FT reviews, which I found variable. Sometimes I thought they were most likely right on, other times? Well, I found this in old email:

My favorite Bernheimer diatribe was the one where he berated the Met for canceling Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk without noting that the Met still had on its schedule The Nose.

Seriously, why?

That said, we are rapidly losing the older generation of music critics. Bob Commanday has been gone since 2015; this year, we've lost Allan Ulrich and now Bernheimer. Condolences to his family and friends, who were clearly many, from what I'm seeing on Facebook and elsewhere.

Here are published obituaries:

• Tim Page, Washington Post
• Sonaiya Kelley, LA Times
• David Allen, NY Times
• Mark Swed, LA Times (an appreciation rather than obituary)
• James Jorden, Parterre Box
• Kathryn Bernheimer (his sister), Boulder Jewish News (Added January, 2023)

Note that Page and Kelley have the same anecdote about something Bernheimer wrote at age 14....but with different publications involved.