Maynard Solomon

American music executive and musicologist (1930–2020)
Maynard Elliott Solomon (January 5, 1930 – September 28, 2020) was an American music executive and musicologist, a co founder of Vanguard Records as well as a music producer. Later, he became known for his biographical studies of Viennese Classical composers, specifically Beethoven (writing an influential biography and an award winning collection of essays), Mozart (biography), and Schubert. Solomon was the first to propose the highly disputed theory of Schubert's homosexuality in a scholarly publication.

Having attended New York's High School of Music & Art, Solomon graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brooklyn College, CUNY, with a BA in 1950, subsequently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University from 1950 to 1952. In 1979 he became adjunct associate professor at the Graduate School, CUNY, and between 1988 and 1994 held visiting professorships at SUNY Stony Brook, Columbia University, Harvard University and Yale University, joining the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School of Music in 1998.

Maynard Solomon founded Vanguard Records jointly with his brother Seymour Solomon in 1950. They started the business with a $10,000 loan from their father, Seymour becoming company president and Maynard, the younger brother, vice president. The label was one of the prime movers in the folk and blues boom for the next fifteen years. As well as producing many albums, Solomon was a prolific writer of liner notes. His nascent venture's first disc was of J. S. Bach's 21st cantata, "Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21" ("I had much grief"), with Jonathan Sternberg conducting Hugues Cuénod and other soloists, chorus and orchestra. "What speaks for the Solomons' steadfastness in their taste and their task", wrote a Billboard journalist in November 1966, "is that this record is still alive in the catalogue (SC 501). As Seymour says, it was a good performance, not easy to top. Of the whole Vanguard/Bach Guild catalogue, numbering about 480 issues, 30 are Bach records "

Solomon's concentration on the life and work of Beethoven resulted in close collaboration with German scholars; in 1996 he was made a scholarly adviser to the Beethoven Archiv in Bonn, in addition to becoming a member of the editorial committee for the Neue Ausgabe Beethovens Briefe (the New Edition of Beethoven's letters, Munich, 1996–1998).