Harvey Sachs

Harvey Sachs (born June 8, 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American-Canadian writer and music historian who has written books on musical subjects. He has been a member of the Curtis Institute of Music faculty since 2009.

Writing His books include biographies of and a book of essays on the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, plus an edited collection of Toscanini's letters. Toscanini, Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1978. Reflections on Toscanini, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, ed., New York: Knopf, 2002. Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. Ten Masterpieces of Music deals with works in ten different genres by ten different composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms, Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky; it provides descriptive analyses of the ten compositions plus commentary on and historical background to the life of each composer (Ten Masterpieces of Music, New York: Liveright, 2021). Sachs has also written books on musical virtuosi, a history of music in Italy during the fascist period, a biography of Arthur Rubinstein, and a book on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that is part cultural history, part musical description, and part personal memoir: Virtuoso, London, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1982. Music in Fascist Italy, New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Rubinstein: A Life, New York: Grove Press, 1995. The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, New York: Random House, 2010. Ten Masterpieces of Music, New York: Liveright, 2021 He has written Schoenberg: Why He Matters, an interpretive biography, which was published by Liveright, New York, in 2023. It was reviewed by composer John Adams.

Sachs also co-authored the memoirs of Plácido Domingo and Sir Georg Solti: Domingo, Plácido, My First Forty Years, New York: Knopf, 1983. Solti, Georg, Memoirs, New York: Knopf, 1997.

Sachs has written pieces for periodicals that include The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times [London] Literary Supplement, Il Sole 24 Ore, and La Stampa; and record companies that include Deutsche Grammophon and RCA/Sony Classics.

Work From 2011 to 2013, Sachs was the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic.