Harvey Sachs

Harvey Sachs, writer and music historian, has published nine books -- of which there are now more than fifty editions in fifteen languages -- including what have long been the standard biographies of Arturo Toscanini (1978) and Arthur Rubinstein (1995); a history (Music in Fascist Italy, 1988); two collections of essays on musical subjects (Virtuoso, 1982, and Reflections on Toscanini, 1991); The Letters of Arturo Toscanini (2002), which he compiled, translated, and edited; his most recent, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 (published by Random House in the US and Faber & Faber in the UK in June 2010, and with UK, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian, and Japanese editions already scheduled); and, as co-author, the memoirs of Plácido Domingo (My First Forty Years, 1983) and Sir Georg Solti (Memoirs, 1997). Sachs has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement (London), La Stampa, and dozens of other newspapers and periodicals (his published items now number over 650), as well as for the BBC, Arte, PBS, CBC (Canada), RAI (Italy), RSI (Switzerland), and other radio and television networks. He has lectured at some seventy North American and European universities and cultural institutions, including Harvard University, University of Chicago, Juilliard School, University of California at Los Angeles, Loyola University in Baltimore, McGill University, University of Toronto, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Warsaw, Universitŕ di Siena, Université de Fribourg (Switzerland), British Institute of Recorded Sound, Aldeburgh Festival, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and the Italian Cultural Institutes of New York, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Budapest, Warsaw, Copenhagen, and Tel Aviv. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and he has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for 2010-11 in order to produce a completely new biography of Toscanini that will make use of all the information that has emerged since the 1978 version was published.

Harvey Sachs was born on June 8, 1946, in Cleveland, Ohio. He received much of his musical training in his home town and he holds an honorary doctorate from the Cleveland Institute of Music, but he has lived all of his adult life elsewhere, including substantial periods in Toronto, London, Milan, Tuscany, Lugano, and New York (his home since 2006). He was active as a conductor from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s but gave up conducting to devote himself entirely to writing and other music-related pursuits. From 2004 to 2006 he was Artistic Director of Italy’s most prestigious concert organization, the Societŕ del Quartetto di Milano. In 2008 he launched a blog, "Overflow", on the Arts Journal Web site (www.ArtsJournal.com/​Overflow). He is currently on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. His son, Julian Sachs, lives and works on cultural projects in New York City, and his daughter, Lyuba Sachs, is a student in Lugano, Switzerland.