LONG BIOGRAPHY

Anne Midgette was the classical music critic of The Washington Post for 12 years, from 2008 through 2019. Before that, she was for seven years a regular contributor of classical music and theater reviews to The New York Times. She has also written about music, the visual arts, dance, theater and film for The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, The Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and many other publications, reviewing and interviewing everyone from Spike Lee through Marina Abramovic to Luciano Pavarotti. At the Post, she oversaw every aspect of classical music coverage, offset her music writing with occasional visual art reviews, expanded the reach of the beat on social media as The Classical Beat, and ultimately became known for her work on #MeToo in classical music, an issue on which she has continued to focus. 

A graduate of Yale University, where she majored in Classical Civilization, she lived in Germany for 11 years, writing for a range of publications about music, the visual arts, theater, dance and film; editing a monthly magazine; working as a translator; and writing several travel guidebooks. 

She is co-author of The King and I, a candid and controversial book written with Luciano Pavarotti’s former manager, Herbert Breslin, about his 36 years working with the temperamental tenor (Doubleday, 2004); and of My Nine Lives, the memoir of the pianist Leon Fleisher, who reinvented himself after losing the use of two fingers on his right hand, only to regain their use some 30 years later (Doubleday, 2010). She is currently working on a historical novel about the woman who built pianos for Beethoven.