Trivia

Music critic of the New York Times for twenty-five years

His so-called "feud" with Leonard Bernstein is famous. During Bernstein's 11-year tenure as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Schonberg would often find fault with his style of conducting and programming music. He once wrote a sharply critical piece about Bernstein's famous curtain speech to an audience, a speech in which he (Bernstein) stated that although he disagreed with pianist Glenn Gould's approach to Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, he found it fascinating and was going to go ahead and conduct it. Schonberg stated that Bernstein should have either refused to conduct, become "conveniently ill", or put his foot down and insist that Gould play the piece as Bernstein envisioned it.

His damning review of the 1976 Houston Opera's production of Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" was the only dissenting review and was highly controversial.

In 1971, he became the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

One of Schonberg's best remembered criticisms of Bernstein was written after the famous 6 April 1962, performance before which Bernstein announced that he disagreed with pianist Glenn Gould's interpretation of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 but was going to conduct it anyway because he found it fascinating. Schonberg chided Bernstein in print, suggesting that he should have either refrained from publicizing his disagreement, backed out of the concert, or imposed his own will on Gould; Schonberg called Bernstein "the Peter Pan of music".

In 1984, Schonberg taught music criticism at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

He wrote a number of books, notably The Lives of the Great Composers. He also wrote about chess and reviewed crime fiction under the alias Newgate Callendar.

Schonberg was an avid golfer, though a poor one by his own estimation. He co-authored the book How To Play Double Bogey Golf (1975) along with Hollis Alpert, founder of the National Society of Film Critics, and fellow author Ira Mothner. Schonberg, Mothner and Alpert frequently played golf together, according to the book.

Schonberg cited the first performance he saw at the Metropolitan Opera around age 12 as particularly formative.

The University of Maryland Libraries have a Harold C. Schonberg collection in their International Piano Archives at Maryland; it contains a substantial collection of correspondences between Schonberg and fellow critics, musicians and readers.