William Finn, winning composer of Tony for “Falsettos”, dies at 73

William Finn, a spiritual, cerebral and psychologically insightful musical theater writer who won two Tony Awards for “Falsettos” and had a lasting success with “the 25th Spelling Bee annual by Putnam County”, died on Monday in Bennington, VT. He was 73 years old.

His longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore, said that the cause of death in a hospital was pulmonary fibrosis, after the years when Mr. Finn had supported neurological problems. He had houses in Williamstown, Mass., And in the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

Mr. Finn was widely admired for his intelligent and complex words and for the poignant honesty with which he explored the character. He was gay and Jewish, and some of his most important work concerned these communities; In the 1990s, with “Falsettos”, he was among the first artists to musicize the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, and his musical “A New Brain” was inspired by his own deadly experience with an arteriovenous malformation.

“In the pantheon of the great composers-Lyrictes, Bill was himself idiosyncratic-there was nobody who sounded him,” said André Bishop, productive artistic director of Lincoln Center Theatre. He presented seven of Mr. Finn’s shows, starting at Playwrights Horizons in the late 1970s and continuing at Lincoln Center.

“He became known as this Wordsmith Wordsmith which wrote many complicated songs dealing with things with which people did not deal with Song at that time,” added Mr. Bishop, “but what he really had was this huge heart – his shows are popular because his talent was beautiful and accessible and warm.”

Mr. Finn has played variable roles throughout his career, as a composer, lyricist and a librettist. His songs often present “a verbous introspective urbanity”, as Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times in 2003. In “A New Brain”, Mr. Finn seemed to distill his passion for art, by writing: “the heart and the music keep us all alive”.