Photo by Caroyln Fabricant
Even though he escaped Nazi-occupied Austria and came to the U.S. without knowing one word of English, Hans Fantel became one of the most influential consumer electronics journalists and a champion of classical music and audiophile equipment. He was a founding editor of Stereo Review, the bible of stereophile publications, and wrote a column on audio and video technology for The New York Times that was known for transforming technical jargon into concise prose.
Fantel was born March 1, 1922, in Vienna, and was named after Hans Sachs, the character in Wagner's "Meistersinger von Nürnberg." His father, Fritz, owned the company which made the first home radio receivers in Austria, and sang in the Vienna Court Opera Chorus under Mahler.
One Christmas, his father gave Fantel a complete set of Beethoven's symphonies, igniting the youngster's love of classical music. In January 1938, two months before the Nazis occupied Austria, 16-year-old Fantel was taken by his father to a performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter, a performance he later reminisced about in a column in The Times when the recorded performances came out on CD in 1989.
Later in 1938, after the Anschluss, Fantel's father was arrested by the Nazis for opposing Germany's rearmament and was later executed. Authorities discovered that Fantel's mother was Jewish and he was expelled from school. He escaped to Czechoslovakia, served in the underground there and hid in a remote village in the Tatra Mountains, then made his way to Tunis. The American consul, a fellow classical music lover, helped Fantel emigrate to the U.S. on a Red Cross ship in 1941.
Fantel learned English by listening to radio broadcasts while working at a picture frame factory. He earned a biology degree from the University of Missouri, worked as a technical translator for the Air Force in Ohio and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He moved to New York in the early 1950s where he met his wife, Shirley "Shea" Smith, a senior copy editor for Seventeen magazine, in Greenwich Village.
Capitalizing on his love of classical music, Fantel, who spoke with a strong Austrian accent, was one of the founding editors of Stereo Review, which started life as Hi-Fi and Music Review, in February 1958. The magazine went through numerous name changes until settling on Stereo Review from 1968 to 1999 when the magazine was merged with Video Magazine and became Sound & Vision.
Fantel started writing for The New York Times in 1961, and wrote two columns, one on audio and one on home video electronics, from 1977 to 1994. He was adamant about writing for a mainstream consumer publication rather than for audiophiles. In an interview he explained, "What I need to do for The Times is to alert people to the existence of good equipment. Most of them don't know that it even exists — if they discover good, they can then discover better."
During his career Fantel wrote articles and books on a variety of subjects, electronics-related and not. He was the author of William Penn: Apostle of Dissent, The Waltz Kings, about the Strauss family, and several books on music and high-fidelity stereo equipment.
In 1998, the government of Austria and city of Salzburg awarded Fantel medals of appreciation for his efforts at building goodwill between Austria and the U.S. Following his death in May 2006, his papers were donated to the University of Missouri in January 2007.