Zachary woolfe biography

Zachary Woolfe is an American music critic who specializes in classical music.
He played the cello as his passion for opera grew, then studied literature at Princeton University and worked at the publishing house Farrar.
New York Times writer and editor Zachary Woolfe explains the role of music critics and the part they play in classical music.

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NY Times puffs up a defence of its chief classical music critic

News

norman lebrecht

February 07, 2024

Days after Zachary Woolfe devoted the closing paragraphs of his Boston Symphony review to a hostile briefing against its music director Andris Nelsons, the New York Times has devoted a full feature to his working methods.

Under the sub-head ‘Zachary Woolfe, the classical music critic for The New York Times, shared how he endeavors to make his writing accessible to both neophytes and experts’, we read such vital insights as:

– “I think what people are interested in is passion,” Mr. Woolfe said. “Even if you didn’t understand every word, my goal is for you to be drawn into my pieces because you can tell that I really care about what I’m writing about.”

– It’s a constant work in progress: how to make everyone feel like an article was written with them in mind. You want experts to be able to glean something, and for the neophytes to feel challenged, but not left in the dark or talked down to. And that comes down to choices about how to describe t

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By Zachary Woolfe

He is truly one of the great singers of our time, in an intentionally wide-ranging repertory. Whether in Tosca and Traviata at La Scala, Werther in Paris, or Lohengrin at Bayreuth, Kaufmann is king.
The pirated footage is shaky, the image tilted, the supertitles half-obscured. A handsome, lightly scruffy man with curly, shoulder-length hair is sitting on a chair, wearing a grey T-shirt. Lit from below, he looks up and sings his aria with otherworldly sadness and focus. The sound seems to float effortlessly, but with stability, a core. His tone is dark and burnished, but the high notes are clear and soaring. The phrases build and recede; the climax is hair-raising.
It is “In fernem land,” the “grail narrative” near the end of Wagner’s Lohengrin. The clip is video of a live feed that was shown in front of Munich’s Bavarian State Opera on July 5, 2009. The singer is the tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Amazingly, this commanding, sensitive performance was the first time he had ever sung the title role.
In May 2011 Kaufman
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A musicologist gently castigates NY Times music chief
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norman lebrecht
August 10, 2016
Zachary Woolfe, classical music editor of the New York Times, wrote a heated review last month of a Mozart opera at a festival in France. The article provoked a noted Mozart authority, Professor Ralph P. Locke, to send a dissenting letter to the Times, questioning the extent of Woolfe’s knowledge of Mozart. The Times did not publish it.
So Professor Locke has circulated the letter, none too privately. He makes several good points. Not fit to print in the Times, apparently.

To the Editor of the Arts Section (New York Times):
Zachary Woolfe (Sunday, July 17, Can a Tool of Power Bring Change?) proposes that operas from earlier eras were a “tool of [elite] power.” An opera house today, he feels, is morally bound to alter works substantially—or to replace them with new works—in order to “make reparations” for the damage that those works have done over the centuries. His examples include operas by Mozart.
The Abduction from the Seraglio—Woolfe claims—“makes come