Harold Charles Schonberg (29 November 1915 – 26 July 2003) was an American music critic and author. He is best known for his contributions in The New York Times, where he was chief music critic from 1960 to 1980. In 1971, he became the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. An influential critic, he is particularly well known for his encouragement of Romantic piano music and criticism of conductor Leonard Bernstein. He also wrote a number of books on music, and one on chess. Life and career Early life Harold Charles Schonberg was born in Washington Heights, Manhattan in New York City, New York on 29 November 1915. His parents were David and Minnie (Kirsch) Schonberg, and he had a brother (Stanley) and a sister (Edith). His aunt, Alice Frisca was an early influence and his first music teacher; she was a former concert pianist, and had studied with Leopold Godowsky. He started piano lessons with Frisca at four years old, and "discovered early on that he had a superb musical memory that allowed him to remember pieces in great detail after a single hearing". Schonberg himself cited the first performance he saw at the Metropolitan Opera around age 12 as particularly formative to his musical upbringing. A performance of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the conductor Artur Bodanzky, he would later write on the experience 39 years later, reflecting on the opera's opening chord that it "rose to the dress circle, and he felt as though he could reach out, touch it, caress it. He had been to concerts before, but somehow, in this vast dark auditorium, there was a different feeling to the texture and even the organization of this chord. It sounded warm and cozy. It covered him like a blanket." In his recounting of the event, Schonberg claimed the experience as having inaugurated his desire to be a music critic. Schonberg received a Bachelor of Arts at Brooklyn College (1937), during which he published his first music criticism in the Musical Advance journal. He then studied as a graduate student at New York University, receiving a Master of Arts in 1938 while studying under the composer Marion Bauer. His dissertation concerned Elizabethan songbooks, which he studied in both musical and literary contexts. In his early life, Schonberg was also interested in the visual arts, studying drawing at the Art Students