Philanthropist Paul Fromm; Wine Merchant Was Music Patron

Philanthropist Paul Fromm, a wine merchant who devoted his considerable fortune to helping nurture the creativity of nearly 200 contemporary U.S. composers, has died at 80.

Fromm, who in 1952 established a foundation at Harvard University that made him the most active private patron of modern American classical music, died Saturday at the University of Chicago’s Bernard Mitchell Hospital.

Fromm was semi-retired and was a consultant to Great Lakes Wine Co. of Chicago, a business he began as a refugee from Nazi Germany.

“We lost our leader,” said composer Ralph Shapey, director of the Contemporary Chamber Players, a new music ensemble at the University of Chicago.

The Fromm Foundation at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., focused on individual artists, works and musical events, rather than on institutions.

In addition to commissioning scores, Fromm subsidized recordings, gave awards and sponsored radio programs and seminars for composers and critics.

He was born in Kitzingen, Germany, a fifth-generation member of a family of vintners. Psychoanalyst and writer Erich Fromm was a cousin. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and was naturalized in 1944, four years after settling in Chicago.

Fromm held honorary doctor of music degrees from the University of Cincinnati and the New England Conservatory of Music.

In an interview in 1984, he said: “I always planned to support composers. I just had to wait until I could afford it.

“I do not like to think of art as a commodity. I have always thought that you cannot have any healthy musical culture without placing the composer in the center of musical life.”