Director Peter Brook and musicologist Richard Taruskin were transformative figures, and fixtures, in their fields. While alive they were too unalike — separated by age, temperament and activities — to tempt us to connect them in any way. Yet their deaths a day apart at the beginning of July placed their obituaries and appreciations on the same weekend cultural news cycle. Chance, ever the illuminator, brought them together.
On the surface, they occupied opposite ends of the intellectual and philosophical spectra. One came across as a quiet, reserved, eloquent, thoughtful force of nature; the other as a boisterous, querulous, troublemaking and sometimes thoughtless and mean force of nature. One was a tidy, careful and empty-space minimalist; the other, a voracious maximalist, with something (a lot) to say about everything and ever ready with a cutting repartee.
That, anyway, was the public image each cultivated. Brook was far better known to the general public, especially for his Broadway successes and films. In his old age, he acquired a reputation as a wise, mystic elder of theater. For an academic whose subject was historic musicology, Taruskin made a considerable splash as a public intellectual who published extensively in the New York Times, the New Republic and elsewhere. He too was sage-like, however feistily so, in his later years, an éminence grise who in 2017 was awarded the Kyoto Prize, the closest a musicologist can get to a Nobel. They held court in different realms and were products of their different generations. Brook died at 97, Taruskin at 77.
