Richard Taruskin has died

Prominent musicologist and author Richard Taruskin has died.  The New York Times obituary (I take the Times, so I can get you behind the paywall) notes his prominence in writing about Russian music and discusses some of the controversies he took sides in:

"His words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called 'Shostakovich Wars' by critiquing the veracity of Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception 'the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed'.”