{"id":57736,"date":"2018-12-30T16:39:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T21:39:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/?p=57736"},"modified":"2018-12-30T16:39:35","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T21:39:35","slug":"in-memoriam-legendary-canadian-music-critic-claude-gingras-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2018\/12\/30\/in-memoriam-legendary-canadian-music-critic-claude-gingras-has-died\/","title":{"rendered":"IN MEMORIAM |\u00a0Legendary Canadian Music Critic Claude Gingras Has Died"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Claude
Caroline Rodgers shares her personal memories of one of the most important music critics in Canadian history, Claude Gingras.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I read on CBC news today that my former colleague,\u00a0Claude Gingras<\/a>, died this morning at 87 years old, my hands shook.<\/p>\n

You will certainly read more detailed biographies of Claude in other media, but I prefer to testify here about what I knew of him, for better or for worse.
\nWe had known things had not been well for some time, because his cancer had returned.\u00a0I was told that, with his usual stubbornness, he had refused to go to the hospital.\u00a0“They will kill me,” he said.<\/p>\n

Claude began working for La Presse in 1953 as a general journalist.\u00a0He became the classical music critic shortly thereafter, and would soon become the most feared, and by some, the most hated. Either way, he was the most respected.<\/p>\n

We know it: in his apartment at the Carr\u00e9 St-Louis, he had a huge collection of more than 100,000 records, some of which were such rarities he would have sold for nothing in the world, he said.<\/p>\n

Throughout his long career, Claude has published hundreds of reviews.\u00a0He covered everything: major orchestras, chamber music and sometimes the recitals by unknown ensembles and musicians that he helped launch.\u00a0Some musicians, whom he followed from the beginning, owe him a lot.\u00a0Not a week went by without his attending at least three concerts. Evenings, weekends,\u00a0he never stopped.<\/p>\n

He reluctantly retired from La Presse in 2015, signing his final article, a review of Elektra at the Op\u00e9ra de Montr\u00e9al.<\/p>\n

That was following a two-year stint working part-time.\u00a0He would be seen arriving on a Monday afternoon in the newsroom (where I had an office as an arts writer throughout 2014).\u00a0He was preparing his column for the next day, his list of concerts for the week, and was still reviewing a concert or two a week.\u00a0I must confess that I sometimes dreaded his visits, as he would plant himself in front of my desk, and could be ruthless with his commentary on my articles.<\/p>\n

Memories<\/h3>\n

Over the years, Claude and I had a courteous relationship, which got a bit cloudy towards the end.\u00a0For seven years, he was respectful, and his comments were regarding small details that mattered to him.<\/p>\n

I will never forget the first time I saw him walk in the office;\u00a0it must have been in 2009, when I was a freelancer for the Business section.\u00a0Without a permanent position, I took up residence in a corner of the room where my presence was tolerated.<\/p>\n

As I had a music degree, I was entrusted with a few classical music articles.\u00a0I had an interview with Manon Feubel.\u00a0A few days later, Claude arrived, with his newspaper folded under his arm, brandish me with the comment, “Aida doesn’t take umlauts on the i!\u00a0When you put umlauts, it means that the opera is sung in French!\u00a0”<\/p>\n

A few years later, he phoned me at home.\u00a0He had liked\u00a0my review of the OSM concert at the Olympic Park.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is as if we at the concert with you,\u201d he said.\u00a0I was very proud.<\/p>\n

And so it was, for seven years, with ups and downs, Claude was my own critic.\u00a0He had a lot of flaws, but he was the most rigorous journalist I have ever known.\u00a0He did not let one thing go by. Not a typo, not one inconsistency.\u00a0He would stand up during a press conference to address faults in a statement, shaming PR staff.<\/p>\n

What I learned from him, or rather thanks to him, is to check everything, double-check and cross-check.\u00a0Making a mistake in my articles became a phobia because I feared Claude’s reprimands. I must also admit: when I was unsure of a factual piece of information, I often went to “googling” Claude’s old articles, to check.\u00a0I knew that if he had written something, it could be trusted.<\/p>\n

In 2015, La Presse management told him it was time to leave.\u00a0He retired to his house and we never saw him at a concert again. He was rediscovering television, which he had hardly ever watched during his 60-year career.\u00a0He loved Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.\u00a0She made him think of his mother.<\/p>\n

I have had mixed feelings towards Claude during all these years, and although he made me cry once or twice, I respected him no less.\u00a0Claude has sometimes told me terrible things that I can not repeat here.\u00a0But I always told myself “he’s old, we should not blame him”.<\/p>\n

Once, after his retirement, I met him on the street.\u00a0He wore a big hat, and seemed to be in a good mood.\u00a0He spoke to me as if we had never had the slightest disagreement, and it is this memory that I want to keep.<\/p>\n

Regardless of anyone’s thoughts or words regarding him, he loved music and put himself at its service.\u00a0He was the guardian of a certain tradition.\u00a0It was his mission in life to demand from the musical world a high standard of quality, representing an endangered species, a brand of music critics that we will no longer see.<\/p>\n

It is said that his collection of archives will become a kind of museum.\u00a0I hope it’s true because Claude was not only the privileged witness of Montreal’s musical life for decades, but also, in his own way, he was a monument.<\/p>\n

+++<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in French on Ludwig van Montr\u00e9al<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caroline Rodgers shares her personal memories of one of the most important music critics in Canadian history, Claude Gingras.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":57738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14761,39,41],"tags":[814],"yst_prominent_words":[12346,10392,6715,11803,25550,7202,14438,25552,23358,12796,11646,11977,25544,25551,6616,25549,25546,11034,10395,12533],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/12\/Claude-Gingras-cover-LVT.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-f1e","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57736"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57736"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57739,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57736\/revisions\/57739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57736"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=57736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}