Obit watch: September 9, 2025.

Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor and a good Cleveland boy.

A German of Hungarian extraction, Mr. Dohnanyi (pronounced DOKH-nahn-yee) served as Cleveland’s music director from 1984 to 2002, during which time the orchestra was widely described as one of the foremost in the world. At his death, he was the ensemble’s music director laureate.

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Mr. Dohnanyi was esteemed for his meticulous, unfussy interpretations; fealty to composers’ intent; and broad historical compass. He was associated in particular with the music of Germanic composers — his Brahms was especially admired — and he was also an ardent champion of 20th-century repertoire, a notoriously hard sell for contemporary American audiences.

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Founded in 1918, the Cleveland Orchestra is the youngest of the so-called Big Five — the cohort of high-wattage American ensembles that also includes the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Dohnanyi was only the sixth music director to serve in Cleveland, succeeding Lorin Maazel, who had in turn succeeded Szell, whose masterful, iron-fisted quarter-century tenure was considered chiefly responsible for the orchestra’s impeccable sheen, precision and transparency.
Mr. Dohnanyi was widely credited with having restored that sheen, which many reviewers described as having coarsened during the Maazel years. He was also lauded for his tightly disciplined yet strikingly democratic control of the orchestra’s musicians, among the most skilled in the world: “this Rolls-Royce of orchestras,” he called the ensemble.
Under his stewardship, the Cleveland Orchestra attracted younger audience members, recorded prolifically and commissioned new works from the German composer Matthias Pintscher, the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg and the American Philip Glass, among many others.

Rick Davies, of Supertramp.

Mark Volman, of the Turtles.

Tom Shipley, of Brewer & Shipley.

Ruth Paine, historical footnote. She rented her home in suburban Dallas to Marina Oswald and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Dr. David Baltimore, Nobel prize winning biologist.

Dr. Baltimore was only 37 when he made his Nobel-winning discovery, upending what was called the central dogma, which stated that information in cells flowed in only one direction — from DNA to RNA to the synthesis of proteins. Dr. Baltimore showed that information can also flow in the reverse direction, from RNA to DNA. The key was finding a viral enzyme, called a transcriptase, that reversed the process.
The discovery led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including H.I.V., that use this enzyme. Today, gene therapies with disabled retroviruses are used to insert good genes into patients’ DNA to correct genetic diseases.

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…a decade after his Nobel, Dr. Baltimore found himself ensnared in a scandal and the subject of attacks that tested his resolve and resilience.
It began when a postdoctoral fellow, Margot O’Toole, accused a researcher, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, of misreporting data in a paper that was published in the journal Cell. Dr. Baltimore was an author of that paper, although the work was not done in his lab.
The case escalated, with investigations by the National Institutes of Health and the Secret Service, which conducted a forensic study of Dr. Imanishi-Kari’s notebooks. There were also contentious hearings led by the Michigan Democrat John Dingell Jr., who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. As a Nobel laureate, Dr. Baltimore became fodder for the case; he held his ground, standing up to Mr. Dingell in hearings and insisting that there had been no fraud…
Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Imanishi-Kari were finally vindicated in 1996, when an appeals panel found the accusations of fraud unfounded. But, Dr. Baltimore said, the case had taken its toll.
“I will never be able to forget it,” he said in an interview at the time. He said he had kept all the front-page New York Times articles about the accusations in his basement, unread, hoping someday to have the stomach to look at them.

Jacques Charrier. I want to make an argument that he was the luckiest man in the world. He was a huge movie star in France in the late 1950s.

…Mr. Charrier gained custody of their son, and the onetime movie idol began a slow slide into obscurity. He acted in over a dozen films through the 1960s and ’70s, including several directed by Claude Chabrol and one by Jean-Luc Godard (“Anticipation, ou l’Amour en l’An 2000,” 1967). But he quit the movie business after a 1975 film he produced (but did not act in) — “Il Pleut sur Santiago,” centered on the 1973 coup in Chile — bombed. (The film, which starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, was spoiled by its “didacticism,” Le Monde wrote.)

So why was he lucky? He married Brigitte Bardot. Then again, he may not have been that lucky: Ms. Bardot does not come across well in the obituary.

Their unhappiness was intensified by Ms. Bardot’s pregnancy — “nine nightmarish months,” she wrote in her 1996 memoir, “Initiales B.B.” She made it clear then and afterward that the birth of her only child, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, was deeply unwelcome. She would have preferred “giving birth to a dog,” she wrote.

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Mr. Charrier had been discreetly out of the public eye for nearly three decades when Ms. Bardot published her memoirs, which included a section viciously attacking him as a bourgeois loser, a freeloader and an egotist. As for her son, she wrote, when he was presented to her at his birth, “I started to cry, begging that he be taken off of me.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2025 at 12:28 pm and is filed under History, Movies, Music, Obits, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Obit watch: September 9, 2025.”

  1. Bones says:
    September 9, 2025 at 9:18 pm

    You didn’t mention this, which I find significant:

    From Wikipedia, (but accurate, I believe),

    Dohnányi was born on 8 September 1929 in Berlin to Hans von Dohnanyi, a German jurist of Hungarian ancestry, and Christine Bonhoeffer. His uncle on his mother’s side, and also his godfather, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian/ethicist. His grandfather was the pianist and composer Ernst von Dohnányi. His father, uncle and other family members participated in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, and were arrested and detained in several Nazi concentration camps before being executed in 1945, when Christoph was 15 years old.”

    May they all rest in His peace.