David C. Stabler, who served as The Oregonian’s classical music critic and arts reporter for nearly 30 years, died Sept. 17. He was 72.
The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, according to his brother, Martin Stabler, of Lake Oswego.
Stabler’s 2003 story on a teenage musical prodigy was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The prize committee noted “his sensitive, sometimes surprising chronicle of a teenage prodigy’s struggle with a musical talent that proved to be both a gift and a problem.”
Stabler and his brother were raised in Middletown, Connecticut, the sons of a Wesleyan University professor and a homemaker. Stabler held degrees in piano performance from the University of Western Ontario and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
He spent two years in London and Vienna, where he continued his piano studies.
Stabler started his journalism career as a music critic in 1981 at the Anchorage Daily News and in the mid 1980s, he and his wife, Judith, a gifted opera singer, moved to Portland, where Stabler worked as The Oregonian’s classical music critic.
Oregon-based conductor Jonathan Griffith recalled how Stabler traveled to New York City to report on Griffith’s debut at Carnegie Hall in the late 1980s.
“David was always kind of looking for the more unusual type of stories to present to people,” Griffith said.
Stabler chronicled the city’s vibrant classical music scene, including the legendary career of conductor James DePreist, the Oregon Symphony’s longtime music director.
In 2000, Stabler studied at Stanford University as a John S. Knight journalism fellow.
His work broadened his musical education, he wrote on his personal website.
“I listened to orchestras, singers, violinists, cellists and more pianists than I can count,” he wrote. “I interviewed composers and performers, conductors, designers and opera directors. The variety, not to mention the newspaper’s deadlines, kept me on my toes and pushed me far beyond my conservatory training.”
Stabler, known as a warm and generous colleague in the newsroom, expanded his reporting beyond music into arts and features.
In 2010, a meditation on rain captured his elegant writing style.
Down came the rain. Drip went the leak. Over came the roofer.
Again.
Portland’s Yellow Pages contain no entries for “rain,” but eight pages of roofers. One of them stood in my bedroom Wednesday morning.
Together, we regarded the leak, which started after one of those monsoonal downpours last week. We craned our necks at the ceiling. We peered into the bucket by my wife’s side of the bed. We looked up, we looked down. The cats slept on the bed.
“Wow,” I said. “A new roof?”
We can run, but we can’t stay dry.
Sandy Rowe, who served as editor of The Oregonian from 1993 until January 2010, described Stabler as “a joy to work with.”
“As a classical music reporter and critic, he shared his love of the music with Oregonian readers and traveled far outside concert halls to expand the audience,” she wrote in an email. “He was an outdoor explorer, a lover of arts and a talented writer with many interests.”
Even after his diagnosis this year, he “sent finely crafted updates to friends and former colleagues that read like poetry and were filled with hope,” she wrote.
After his retirement, Stabler led introductory classical music classes at Classic Pianos in Southeast Portland. He and his wife sang for years with the choir at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.
“He was definitely a fixture of the classical music scene,” said Martin Stabler. “He was woven into the fabric of classical music in Portland.”
An avid cyclist, Stabler took part in the RAMROD ride — Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day — in 2012 and in 2017 he and his brother biked across the country, from Astoria to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Stabler, who lived in Southeast Portland, is survived by his three children; Judith Stabler died in 2021.