Music and the making of best-sellers

Steve Rubin, who died on Friday aged 81, will be obituarised as the publisher who discovered John Grisham, plucked the Da Vince Code from the reject pile and opened the floodgates on chaos in the Trump White House with ‘Fire and Fury’. He was also the careful, loyal and highly sensitive US publisher of Hilary Mantel and Sebastian Faulks.

When Steve and I met for lunch, which was very frequently over 30 years, we talked mostly music. He had the most capacious memory for voice quality and the precise vocabulary to describe it. He had heard all the greats of 70 years and was disinclined to accept second-best. In the past five years he seldom went to the Met. When he did, I sometimes persuaded him to comment, for instance here.

Steve was funny, scabrous, ferociously intelligent and an absolutely devoted friend. We argued loudly over all those years and never once came close to falling out. If one of us was in trouble or sorrow, the other responded instantly. I can’t begin to describe the fun we had, the gossip we shared, the simple pleasures of true friendship.  Another time, perhaps, in another place.

Raised in Lenny Bernstein’s New York, Steve had an insatiable apppetite for Mahler, Beethoven, Berlioz and Nielsen, as well as the more extravagant operas. He had no tolerance whatsoever for Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez and most of the baroque. He set up an institute for music ciriticism to try and keep the profession alive and actually paid newspapers in Dallas and Boston to keep a critic on their payroll. He knew this was short-term and quixotic,  but it was the right kind of quixotic.

Steve adored his wife, Cynthia, an opera PR who died in 2010. He was volubly fond of his nephews and nieces and he treasured his special friends with a discreet passion that was typically Steve. They included personalities as diverse as Marilyn Horne, Jacqueline Kennedy and Ronald  Wilford. Steve kept our confidences separate and sacrosanct.

He did good in the world.