David Diamond, a prolific composer known for his lyrical sensibilities and feisty temperament, died of congestive heart failure on June 13 in his native Rochester, N.Y. He was 89.

David Diamond was a composition faculty member from 1973 to 1997. (Photo by Louis Ouzer)

Over the course of a career spanning seven decades, Diamond composed 11 symphonies, 10 string quartets, and myriad vocal and instrumental works. His music was marked by an emotional directness and eloquent lyricism that made it easily accessible to audiences. He shunned serialism and the shift away from tonality that marked much American music in the mid- to late 20th century. "I hated all that avant-garde stuff," he once told an interviewer. "It was all wrong."

The son of Austrian and Polish immigrants, David Leo Diamond was born in Rochester on July 9, 1915. He attended the Eastman School of Music there and later studied composition with Roger Sessions in New York and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. It was there that he mingled with the likes of Stravinsky, Picasso, Milhaud, and Ravel, who was both an admirer of, and influence on, Diamond's music. Returning to the United States in 1939, he worked as a night clerk at a soda counter in New York City, and did a two-year stint as a violinist in the "Hit Parade" radio orchestra. His career as a composer burgeoned in the 1940s when he received several significant commissions and was championed by conductors such as Stokowski, Koussevitzky, and Mitropoulos. His First Symphony had a successful premiere with the New York Philharmonic in 1941, and in 1944 his Second Symphony was premiered in Boston.

But shifting trends in American music in the 1950s and '60s caused Diamond to be branded old-fashioned, and his compositions began to lose favor. His openly gay lifestyle and leftist political views—he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era—also made him a target for attack. He moved to Italy in 1951, where he taught and worked in Rome and Florence, but returned to the United States in 1965. He served as chair of the composition department at the Manhattan School of Music from 1966 to 1967, and in 1973 joined Juilliard's composition faculty, where he taught until 1997.

Diamond had a famously volatile personality. There is the celebrated Rodzinski incident of 1943: Diamond, whose Second Symphony was being rehearsed at Carnegie Hall by the young Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, was being so difficult that the orchestra's music director Artur Rodzinski banned him from the hall. The composer stormed out, walked down the block to the Russian Tea Room, and started drinking. By the time Bernstein and Rodzinski came in, the 5-foot-7 Diamond was in such a fury that he punched the taller Rodzinski on the nose!

Diamond received numerous awards and honors during his lifetime, including several Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, the Prix de Rome (1942), a National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant (1944), the William Schuman Award (1985), the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1991), an Edward MacDowell Award (1991), and President William Clinton's National Medal of Arts (1995). His music enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s and '90s, when a younger generation of conductors brought Diamond's works to new audiences. One of them, Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz, a Juilliard alumnus who studied with Diamond, said of his teacher's music: "At times it was as elegant and expressive as music can be, and at times extremely driven." (A review of Diamond's works on CD is here.)

Read a tribute to David Diamond.

Just three weeks before he died, Diamond was honored with the Juilliard Medal at the 100th commencement ceremony of The Juilliard School, which had previously awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree in 1998. At that ceremony, President Joseph W. Polisi said in a citation: "From 1973 until 1997 you offered your Juilliard students guidance, constructive criticism and the wisdom of your experience. Your students are now following in your footsteps by receiving commissions and winning numerous awards."

Diamond's views about his art can best be summed up in his own words: "Our society needs consonance; it was always a must, because of the communicative power of that kind of music," he said in an interview with The Seattle Times just a month before he died. "If music doesn't communicate, it has no chance of survival. The need for beautiful music is stronger now than ever."