Harvey Sachs

Harvey Sachs, (born Cleveland, Ohio, June 8, 1946) is an American-Canadian-Swiss writer who has written many books on musical subjects.

His books include the standard biography 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.

Sachs has also written books on great musical virtuosi, a history of music in Italy during the fascist period, the definitive biography of Arthur Rubinstein, and, most recently, 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.

Sachs 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.

Harvey Sachs has written over 600 articles and other pieces for periodicals that include The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement; record companies that include Deutsche Grammophon and RCA/BMG; and many radio and television programs. His most recent job for television has been co-authoring (with director Larry Weinstein) the Ideale-Audience production, "Toscanini in His Own Words", was shown by BBC, Arte, and other major networks worldwide in 2009. He has lectured at educational and cultural institutions all over North America and Europe.

Sachs is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and during the 2011-12 season he is the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic. He also edits the online Articles & Essays column for the OREL Foundation which is dedicated to promoting music by composers who were suppressed under the Nazi and related regimes. He lived in Europe for more than 30 years, mostly in Italy but also in England and Switzerland. From 2004 to 2006 he was Artistic Director of the Societa' del Quartetto di Milano, Italy's oldest extant and most prestigious concert society. He is the father of two children: Julian (b. 1984), currently involved in cultural projects in New York City, and Lyuba (b. 1998), a middle school student in Switzerland. Harvey Sachs currently lives in New York City. His website is www.harveysachs.com.