Martin Bernheimer was born on September 28, 1936 in Munich, Germany. He was married to Linda Winer and Lucinda Pearson. He died on September 29, 2019 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
He won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism as a classical music writer at the Los Angeles Times, a position he held from 1965 to 1996.
He studied music history and musicology at Brown University, and returned to Germany to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. Much of his early work was published in the Saturday Review, where he was a protege of Irving Kolodin.
His father was a member of a prominent family of antique dealers, and his mother was a noted artist in Weimar Germany. Most of the family was sent to the Dachau concentration camp by the Nazis. An uncle traded property in Venezuela to Germany in exchange for the family's freedom after several months. Martin and his parents moved to Massachusetts in 1939, where they acquired a chicken farm.