William Foster Apthorp (October 24 1848 in Boston–February 19 1913 in Vevey, Switzerland)[1] was a musician.
He was born in 1848 and graduated from Harvard College, where he studied piano, harmony, and counterpoint with the institution’s first professor of music, the composer John Knowles Paine. As a child, he had been taken by his parents to study art in Dresden, Berlin, and Rome, and he developed into an accomplished linguist who could speak “all the leading languages of Europe.” He began his career as a critic writing for the Atlantic Monthly, Dwight's Journal of Music, the Boston Courier, and the Boston Evening Traveller, and went on to help shape Boston’s musical tastes as reviewer for one of Boston’s premier urban newspapers, the Boston Evening Transcript, and as program essayist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Apthorp also served at various times on the faculties of the National College of Music in Boston (harmony), the New England Conservatory of Music (piano, harmony, counterpoint, and theory), and the College of Music of Boston University (aesthetics and music history). He co-edited, with John Champlin, Scribner’s Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1888–1890). His books include Hector Berlioz: Selections from His Letters, and Aesthetic, Humorous, and Satirical Writings (1879), Musicians and Music Lovers, and Other Essays (1894), By the Way (1898), The Opera, Past and Present: An Historical Sketch (1901), and a translation of several of Emile Zola’s stories (1895). He also published editions of the songs of Robert Franz and Adolf Jensen.