Klarinet Archive - Posting 000019.txt from 2007/12

From: "David B. Niethamer" <dnietham@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Obituary - David Oppenheim
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:21:01 -0500


Begin forwarded message:

> David Oppenheim, 85, Dean of N.Y.U. Arts, Is Dead
>
> By DENNIS HEVESI
> New York Times
> December 3, 2007
>
>
> David Oppenheim, a clarinetist at Tanglewood and a producer of
> classical
> music records and television documentaries who became the main
> architect
> of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, died in New
> York
> on Nov. 14. He was 85 and lived in Manhattan.
>
> His death was confirmed by his wife, Patricia Jaffe.
>
> Taking charge of what had been a collection of departments in offices
> and classrooms scattered throughout Lower Manhattan, Mr. Oppenheim
> transformed N.Y.U.'s arts programs into a major institution offering
> programs taught by professionals in photography, cinema, musical
> theater, dramatic acting and writing.
>
> Mr. Oppenheim was dean of the N.Y.U. School of the Arts from 1969 to
> 1991, and in 1985 he secured a donation of $7.5 million from Laurence
> A.
> Tisch and his brother, Preston Robert Tisch, billionaire businessmen
> who
> were then members of the N.Y.U. board of trustees. With that donation,
> most of the school's programs were centralized in a 12-story building
> at
> 721 Broadway as the Tisch School of the Arts.
>
> Mary Schmidt Campbell, the current dean of the Tisch School, said last
> week that under Mr. Oppenheim the school's enrollment increased to
> 3,000
> from 600 and its budget to about $50 million from $2 million. But far
> more than growth mattered to Mr. Oppenheim, Ms. Campbell said.
>
> "He made it clear that this was not going to be an academic school of
> the arts," she said, "this was going to be a school where working
> professionals teach" - among them the director Martin Scorsese, the
> actress Olympia Dukakis and the noted Broadway lighting designer Jules
> Fisher. In the 1970s, in cooperation with Leonard Bernstein, Mr.
> Oppenheim started the school's musical-theater writing program.
>
> Mr. Oppenheim also created what the school calls its studio system.
> "When our undergraduates study acting, they do so at independent
> professional studios outside of N.Y.U.," Ms. Campbell said, including
> the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute and the Stella Adler
> Acting
> Studio. The school's alumni include Mr. Scorsese, Spike Lee and Oliver
> Stone. In 1970, New York State gave approval for the school's film
> studies program to grant doctoral degrees, making it the first such
> program in the United States.
>
> "The miracle to me is that the school was founded in 1965, and within
> five years it was on the map," Ms. Campell said. "And David Oppenheim
> was the architect of that."
>
> It was music that first attracted Mr. Oppenheim. Born in Detroit on
> April 13, 1922, he was a son of Louis and Julia Nurko Oppenheim. His
> father owned a department store.
>
> Mr. Oppenheim began playing clarinet as a young boy. When he was 13,
> the
> family moved to New York. For a year, he studied at Juilliard; he then
> transferred to the Eastman School of Music, from which he graduated in
> 1943. He served as an anti-tank gunner in Germany during World War II.
>
> After the war, he received a scholarship to study at the Tanglewood
> Music Festival in Massachusetts. There, over several summers, he
> performed under famous conductors, including Toscanini, Stokowski,
> Stravinsky and Bernstein. In the late 1940s, he was first clarinetist
> for the New York Symphony Orchestra.
>
> From 1950 to 1959, Mr. Oppenheim was director of the Masterworks
> division of Columbia Records, working with artists like Eugene Ormandy,
> Dimitri Metropoulos, Bruno Walter and George Szell. With Bernstein at
> the piano, he recorded Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata. He then joined
> Robert Saudek Associates, a television production company, where he
> helped produce "Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic" and
> the
> PBS documentary series "Omnibus."
>
> From 1962 to 1967, he worked at CBS as a writer, producer and
> director.
> Among the shows he produced were "Stravinsky" and "Inside Pop: The Rock
> Revolution," the latter an attempt by Bernstein to bridge the
> generation
> gap by explaining why he liked some pop music. In 1964, Mr. Oppenheim
> wrote, produced and directed "Casals at 88," about the Spanish cellist
> Pablo Casals, which received the Prix Italia.
>
> Mr. Oppenheim married the actress Judy Holliday in 1948; they divorced
> in 1957. That year, he married Ellen Adler, the daughter of the famed
> acting teacher Stella Adler; they divorced in 1976. He married Ms.
> Jaffe
> in 1987.
>
> In addition to his wife, Mr. Oppenheim is survived by his son from his
> first marriage, Jonathan, of Manhattan; two children from his second
> marriage, Sara Oppenheim of Manhattan, and Tom, of Brooklyn; a brother,
> Stanley, of Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; four grandchildren; and six
> step-grandchildren.
>
> In an interview, Mr. Oppenheim once called the arts a "secular
> religion."
>
> "The world is chaotic," he said. "Art is an ordering of that chaos."

David B. Niethamer
dnietham@-----.edu
http://members.aol.com/dbnclar1/index.html

------------------------------------------------------------------