Manuela Hoelterhoff, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Wall Street Journal in 1983 "for her wide-ranging arts criticism and later wrote a trenchant book about the backstage world of opera," died May 6, the New York Times reported. She was 77.
Hoelterhoff spent more than two decades with the Journal, serving variously as a critic, arts editor, book editor, and member of the editorial board. She won the criticism Pulitzer for her writing on television, books, opera, art, and architecture. From 2004 to 2014, she was the executive editor of Muse, an arts and culture section she founded at Bloomberg News.
Her primary passion was opera. In her book Cinderella & Company: Backstage at the Opera with Cecilia Bartoli (1998), she wrote about her two years following the superstar Italian mezzo-soprano around the world. In a review, Anthony Tommasini, the classical music critic at the Times, praised it as "the most perceptive and hilariously honest book on the making and marketing of opera to come along in some time."
She earned a master's degree in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts 1975, and decided to approach the Journal with an article about a performance of Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier, the Times noted, adding that "it was Sunday and the offices were empty, so she gave the envelope to a guard."
"I was smart enough to know that all the other papers had a regular writing staff to write their reviews, but naïve enough to believe that this approach at the Journal might work," Hoelterhoff said in a 1985 interview with the reference guide Contemporary Authors.
Hoelterhoff wrote the libretto for Modern Painters, an opera about John Ruskin, the 19th-century English critic of art, architecture, and society. She was also a founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler in 1987 and of SmartMoney magazine in 1992.
In a tribute, the Journal shared excerpts from some of her columns, noting that when she won the Pulitzer for criticism--the Journal's first in that category--the editors nominating her said she combined "a keen critical eye with distinctive, lively writing," adding, "She seldom leaves the reader in any doubt where she stands."
A famous example cited by the Journal is from Hoelterhoff's 1986 column "on the Solomon R. Guggenheim's proposal to expand its iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building by erecting a rectangular tower behind the smaller of the building's two rotundas. 'And that means the smaller rotunda, which now enjoys a measure of light and freedom, will have a slab behind it,' she wrote. 'As astonished observers have not ceased pointing out, the combination of round receptacle jutting into an upright wall unmistakably resembles a huge toilet.' Her review became the talk of the town."