NYTimes Obit
Robert W. Gutman, Biographer of Wagner and Mozart, was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 1925, the son of Theodore Gutman, a lawyer, and the former Elsie Edenbaum, a legal secretary and homemaker. As a young man, he studied the piano and took instruction in music theory from Kurt Adler, a longtime conductor of the Metropolitan Opera.
His biographies of Wagner and Mozart helped upend popularly held ideas about both composers’ lives, he died on Friday, May 20, 2016 in the Bronx. He was 90.
