Richard Dyer 1941-2024 – The Boston Musical Intelligencer

“I want to introduce you to someone, a new writer I want to use, very good and knowledgeable. You two have a few things in common: the Midwest, piano, a college degree in English. You have his Just Piece.” Boston Globe Critic Michael Steinberg was on the phone with me to discuss Richard Dyer, who died this morning at the age of 82. From that later famous article alone, a scathing, scathing critique of the fading Renata Tebaldi, delivered with effortless scholarship and style, I could tell that any introduction between us would be more like the coach calling the junior player to shake the hand of a first-team regular. Although Steinberg's call had been to assign me the 1973 Tanglewood opening (a last-minute medical emergency forced me to cancel, sigh), this other new freelance critic already seemed to be in the top tier.

Dyer was Steinberg's first string player for the next few years and did first-rate work across the entire repertoire spectrum. We met several times, otherwise kept in touch sporadically and attended the Steinbergs' famous dinner parties with famous musical personalities. I learned that Dyer had been a serious, high-caliber piano student, a rarity among music critics. Steinberg was slowly becoming unhappy about the globeworked there since 1964 and was currently on vacation, with Dyer stepping in pro temporeThis meant that Dyer had to give up his freelance work for me, now an editor at the Boston Phoenixover supper club music, a beat he loved. “Mabel Mercer was the best of them; we had a lovely lunch and then I drove her to her optician! I think I did Chris Connor, Anita O'Day, Teddi King and a Sinatra concert, but the most fun was Dory Previn. She was with me first and we had so much fun that she cancelled all her other interviews and we spent the afternoon together.” I also mention this sideline because once (and only once) I had a substitute line editor change a few paragraphs of his in one of these reviews, with my permission, but it caused a continuity problem in print. Dyer sent me an amiably hot or hotly amiable letter, which I still have, which began with something like “I'm on my high horse and riding hard…”

Richard Dyer was born in Texas and grew up in Oklahoma and Ohio. In a private letter he recalled: “My Met experience goes back a little further, to the early 1950s, when my grandparents took me to Oklahoma City every year for the Met tour: Bohemian in English with Nadine Conner, Eugene Conley (from Lynn!), Regina Resnik as Musetta, etc.; Cavalry And Tosca in different years with Milanov, which changed my life. My father got a new job in Cleveland in 1956, so we went there for the Met tour – the Met was there for a week, but we rarely went more than once or twice – Aida with Stella, Cavalry And Othello with Milanov again (in my memory that Othello with del Monaco and Warren it was also the greatest vocal performance I have ever experienced), Boccanegra (Curtis-Verna and Guarrera), Lucia with Pons and Peerce (I was totally thrilled, even though Bastianini was the best singer), butterfly with Dorothy Kirsten, who I still remember as an absolute professional….”

When Steinberg returned to the globe Months later, Dyer began making films for the globe it also led to other stylish, witty, and trenchant work. Steinberg's dissatisfaction with running the arts department only grew, and about a year later – telling me and others that he needed time to figure out what he really wanted to do and where – he shocked the classical world by moving to the BSO. Steinberg had chosen Dyer as his successor during and after his year off because he felt he had found someone he could trust. All editor Tom Winship (who always boasted that Steinberg was the best hire he ever made) wanted to know was, “Does this guy know what he's doing?” To which the answer was simple.

Over the next three decades, Dyer became increasingly successful as a music critic and reviewer. “A dean of the profession,” the New YorkersAlex Ross called him that. Dyer had his weaknesses, of course, as we all do. He could be musically provincial, preferring his favorite artists year after year. Sometimes he waxed lyrical about lesser-known artists, particularly pianists, both local and international, and while it was exciting to see their careers blossom as a result, it could seem a bit much after the fifth Boston appearance in three years, with other critics bemoaning their keyboard and musical deficiencies.

Dyer also developed a concluding, highly elegiac style that channeled the Romantic poets about Abraham Lincoln, i.e., “feelings too deep for words, words too deep for tears, … music that summons our better angels,” something like that. (Steinberg admitted, “Of course he learned from the best!”) Dyer sometimes let his modesty slip, privately: “When Michael worked with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he read everything I wrote and commented on it mercilessly, but he did not do that until after it was published and told me that I had to learn from my mistakes – and not repeat them. … Jorja (Fleezanis, Steinberg's wife, the concertmaster) was also a great support to me when I didn't really know what I was doing.”

Towards the end of his career as a daily journalist 20 years ago, Dyer wrote: “While I understood why Michael was tired of reviewing, I never got tired of music or even writing, but I was thoroughly sick of the rest: looking for parking spaces, skipping dinners, having no personal life. And when I ended up having a few years as bad or worse than what Michael had been through, with features editors from hell who were young, uninformed, rude, condescending and knew nothing – the most important of whom claimed that if he didn't care about something himself, no reader could, and he was only interested in pop music and bad films – I couldn't wait to get out of there and reshape my relationship with music. I didn't want it to be an opinion, and I vowed never to write another review, and I didn't.

“I have done a lot of concert lectures, notes, podcasts for the BSO, taught, etc.; until Covid, I was about as busy as I have ever been at globe. Then it stopped. Still, things come up (through word of mouth): program notes for small orchestras, notes for piano concerts in New York.” (Not to mention being on the jury of a piano competition, like the FCPA.)

82 is the opposite of young, but my first reaction to this sad news today was that Dick Dyer has left us far too soon in the local music world.

David Moran has been an occasional music critic in the Boston area for 55 years and has a special interest in the keyboard.