Harold C. Schonberg, music critic and chess journalist, has died

Harold Schonberg, 87, died yesterday, July 26, at St. Luke's Hospital
in New York. Schonberg was a regular player at the Manhattan Chess
Club for decades and was a life member of the United States Chess
Federation. He was perhaps the world's most influential music critic
and he also wrote about chess.

Whenever an item of chess news was sufficiently important to make the
front page of the New York Times, it would usually be Schonberg who
would write the article, not the regular chess columnist. Even after
his official retirement, Schonberg would come out when needed to write
important articles about chess for the Times.

An example of this occurred in 1986, when the Polgar Family came from
Hungary to play in the New York Open. They entered little Judit Polgar
in the lowly unrated section, a section that nobody ever paid any
attention to, hoping to keep the secret of how strong Judit really
was. Judit swept the field. The next morning, front page headlines in
the New York Times appeared: "Nine-year-old girl wins $4,000 in chess
tournament". The article was by Harold Schonberg.

Harold Schonberg won the Pulitzer Prize as Music Critic for The Times.
Although his articles about chess are less well known, they were more
widely read and probably had bigger long-term impact than any other
articles about chess. The articles in the Times about the famous 1972
Fischer-Spassky match in Iceland were mostly written by Harold
Schonberg. It is arguably true that it was Harold Schonberg who made
Bobby Fischer the household word he became.

My ex-wife Anda is a concert pianist and accompanist. She is also the
mother of my son, Peter, who is a rated chess master. Harold Schonberg
once wrote a favorable review of Anda in the Music Section of the New
York Times. Although only one sentence long, this music review remains
Anda's proudest accomplishment. Apparently, it was not easy to get a
favorable review from Harold Schonberg.

Sam Sloan

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/ob...es/27SCHO.html

"Sam Sloan" wrote in message
...
Harold C. Schonberg, music critic and chess journalist, has died

His book, "Grandmasters of Chess," is a good survey of world champions and
other top players from Morphy through Fischer.