Harold C. Schonberg

Harold C. Schonberg, the ubiquitous and authoritative chief music critic of The New York Times from 1960 to 1980, whose reviews and essays influenced and chronicled vast changes in the world of opera and classical music, died Saturday at St. Luke ' s Hospital in New York City. He was 87 and lived in New York City.

Writing daily reviews and more contemplative Sunday pieces, Mr. Schonberg set the standard for critical evaluation and journalistic thoroughness. He wrote his reviews in a crisp, often staccato style that gave his evaluations unequivocal clarity and directness, attributes that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1971, the first for a music critic.

However significant his opinions and endorsements, he viewed his role simply and directly.

" I write for myself not necessarily for readers, not for musicians, " he said in a 1967 interview with Editor and Publisher. " I ' d be dead if I tried to please a particular audience. Criticism is only informed opinion. I write a piece that is a personal reaction based, hopefully, on a lot of years of study, background, scholarship and whatever intuition I have. It ' s not a critic ' s job to be right or wrong; it ' s his job to express an opinion in readable English. "

Mr. Schonberg thrived on the pressures of a daily newspaper schedule. After a concert he would go to the offices of The Times to write, often leaving his wife or a friend waiting outside in his car with the guarantee that he would write his review and return within 45 minutes.

Often he made a game of racing his colleagues, coming into the office after they had started their reviews, casually checking his mail and smoking a cigarette and then starting and finishing his own notice while they were still at work. Rarely did his copy contain a typo or crossed-over thought.

Mr. Schonberg chronicled a time of great change in the music world. When he began, the musical season lasted about seven months, with little but Tanglewood and a handful of European festivals to cover during the summer. By the time he retired as senior critic, the season was year-round, and series like the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., and symphony and opera programs across the country virtually ended the distinction between the season and the summer.

At the same time, Mr. Schonberg covered the record world as it made the transition from 78 rpm discs to LPs, and after his retirement, in his position as cultural correspondent for The Times, he reviewed compact discs as well.

He was not always impressed with technological change. Visitors to his apartment in recent years were likely to be treated to an afternoon of classic performances on 78s which he kept in pristine condition and a demonstration of how CD transfers of the same recordings often failed to capture the warmth and depth of the originals.

Mr. Schonberg was married to Rosalyn Krokover, a dance critic for the Musical Courier, from 1942 until her death in 1973. In 1975 he married Helene Cornell, who died two months ago. He is survived by his sister, Edith Filosa, of Manhattan.

Harold Charles Schonberg was born in New York on Nov. 29, 1915, and began studying the piano when he was 4 years old. One of his teachers and the one whom he regularly cited as an important influence was an aunt, Alice Frisca, who had studied with Leopold Godowsky and briefly pursued a professional performing career.

Mr. Schonberg discovered early that he had a superb musical memory that allowed him to remember pieces in great detail after a single hearing. By his own account, music was the stuff of his boyhood daydreams: When his teachers reprimanded him for not paying attention in class, it was because he was replaying his family ' s collection of records in his head.

In World War II, Mr. Schonberg was a first lieutenant in the Army Airborne Signal Corps. He had hoped to enlist as a pilot, but was declared pastel-blind (he could distinguish colors but not shadings and subtleties) and was sent to London, where he was a code breaker and later a parachutist. He remained in the Army until 1946.

After his return to New York, Mr. Schonberg became a music critic for The New York Sun, and became so fascinated with the workings of a daily newspaper that after two years as a critic he volunteered to also do legwork for the city desk, covering City Hall or the Bronx Zoo by day and concerts by night. He also contributed reviews to the Musical Courier, Musical Digest and Gramophone during the 1940s and 1950s.

Mr. Schonberg joined the staff of The New York Times in 1950 and became record editor in 1955. Five years later, when Howard Taubman succeeded Brooks Atkinson as The Times ' senior theater critic, Mr. Schonberg became senior music critic.

One of his immediate and lasting innovations was establishing a code of conduct in which friendships with performers and composers were prohibited.

" I saw too much of that at the Herald-Tribune, " he wrote, " where most of the critics were composers and some of them jockeyed shamelessly to get their music played. "

In the 1967 interview with Editor and Publisher, he said: " I refuse to believe that if a critic is friendly with a musician he can be impartial. If word gets around you are a friend of a musician, your opinion becomes suspect. "