Harold Charles Schonberg (November 29, 1915 – July 26, 2003) was an American music critic and author. He is best known for his contributions to The New York Times, where he was chief music critic from 1960 to 1980. In 1971, he became the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

An influential critic, he is noted for his "crisp, often staccato style that gave his evaluations unequivocal clarity and directness", and his encouragement of Romantic music and of pianists like Sviatoslav Richter. He wrote several books, notably The Lives of the Great Composers. He also reviewed crime fiction under the alias Newgate Callendar and covered chess. A collection of his columns was published as Facing the Music.

Harold Charles Schonberg was born in Washington Heights, Manhattan in New York City, New York on 29 November 1915. His parents were David and Minnie (née Kirsch) Schonberg, and he had a brother (Stanley) and a sister (Edith). His aunt Alice Frisca was a former concert pianist and had studied with Leopold Godowsky. He started piano lessons with Frisca at four years old, and "discovered early on that he had a superb musical memory that allowed him to remember pieces in great detail after a single hearing".

Schonberg cited the first performance he saw at the Metropolitan Opera around age 12 as particularly formative. He recalled the performance, of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 39 years later in a piece characteristically written in the third person:

The boy remembers being awed by the auditorium. So big! So beautiful! So much what his dreams had told him it would be! He vaguely remembers other impressions. But the thing as fresh in his mind today as it was on Nov. 25, 1927, was the sound of that first C major chord when Artur Bodanzky brought down his baton...The chord rose to the dress circle, and he felt as though he could reach out, touch it, caress it. He had been to concerts before, but somehow, in this vast dark auditorium, there was a different feeling to the texture and even the organization of this chord.

Schonberg received a Bachelor of Arts at Brooklyn College (1937), during which he published his first music criticism in the Musical Advance journal. He then studied as a graduate student at New York University, receiving a Master of Arts in 1938 while studying under the composer Marion Bauer. His dissertation was Elizabethan Song Books: A Study of Their Musical and Literary Significance. He recalled: "The English department did not know how to deal with the musical elements of the thesis, and the music department did not know how to deal with the literary side. An A plus was virtually assured in advance."

In his early life, Schonberg was also interested in the visual arts, studying drawing at the Art Students League of New York and sometimes illustrating his music criticism with caricatures of the musicians they featured. In 1939, Schonberg received his first post as a music critic: he was associate editor and critic at the American Music Lover.

During World War II, Schonberg was a first lieutenant in the United States Army Airborne Signal Corps. He had hoped to enlist as a pilot, but was declared pastel-blind (he could distinguish colors but not shadings and subtleties) and was sent to London, where he was a code breaker and later a parachutist. He broke his leg on a training jump before D-Day and could not participate in the Normandy landings; every member of his platoon who jumped into France was ultimately killed. He remained in the Army until 1946.^{[citation needed]}