Music Critic Andrew Porter Dies At 86
The news came today. I worked with him a few times at The New Yorker, when I was a fact checker and he the esteemed music critic. I often disagreed with his reviews, but because I was young and therefore slightly arrogant and he was older and appreciative of the young and slightly arrogant the differences never got in our way. I was thinking about him just last night as I watched the Met Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.” As his Wikipedia entry says: ‘His most significant achievement as a scholar was his discovery of excised portions of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” in the library of the Paris Opera, which led to the restoration of the original version of the work.’ Porter was highly knowledgeable, a quality that in our Internet age is too-little prized and little seen.
