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My first byline for The New York Times, which ran in early February 1988, was an opinion piece that I wish I’d never had to write.
Yet, as I retire after 21 years as the chief classical music critic at The Times, I see how much that column prefigured my subsequent career.
At the time, I was a freelance classical music critic for The Boston Globe. A close friend from my class at Yale, Bob Walden, was declining fast from AIDS, and I went to visit him in New York.