Respected, feared, revered and resented during more than 20 years as the Bangor Daily News’ uncompromising arts and music critic, Robert Henry Newall died Sunday at a Bangor nursing facility. He was 78.

Born in Philadelphia, Jan. 20, 1924, Newall began piano lessons at the age of 4, and at 13 spent the first of 10 years at the prestigious Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, “where you either make a go of it or get out,” he once told a Maine Times interviewer. Newall got out six credits shy of graduation, deciding he would rather be “a first-rate English teacher than a second-rate pianist,” and subsequently earned a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and Western Pacific University.

His teaching career and appetite for culture took him all over the world, to England, Italy and Morocco. However, it was in the cities and hamlets of this state, where he drove to critique community theater, school recitals and symphony performances, that he earned a reputation as the most feared man in Maine. He logged an estimated 20,000 miles a year on the road.

“He was an institution in the arts community,” recalls NEWS Publisher Richard J. Warren, “a critic with strong opinions, who wielded a sharp pen that also was a lightning rod for criticism and complaint.”

Hired in 1965 as a NEWS free-lancer, Newall became a full-time critic of local arts under Managing Editor Marshall Stone, who once observed he spent half his time mediating between the critic and enraged callers and letter writers who “were asking simply for his head.” Producers of community productions, initially flattered by Newall’s attention, often were infuriated by his reviews, which were criticized for holding local, usually volunteer performers to unreasonable standards of professionalism.

He also had strong supporters. The late Vincent Hartgen, professor emeritus of art at the University of Maine, called Newall “one of the strongest champions of quality in the arts in this area, even though he has been criticized and berated for his stern and honest reviews.”

Newall, recalls Dr. Earl Booth of Orono, who in the 1970s and ’80s hosted a foreign film series at what is now University College in Bangor, “was awfully good with film. He knew when something was just perfect.” He loved the classics, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and especially Greta Garbo. Newall thought Joan Crawford wooden and overrated, and had no patience with later stars such as Meg Ryan and John Candy, whom he found not at all humorous. He reportedly found it impossible to sit through the first installment of “Star Wars.”

A volunteer at the Bangor Humane Society, Newall loved dogs, especially German shepherds, owning more than a dozen in his life. The first he purchased in the early 1950s while he taught at a Munich university. It was reputed to have come directly from Hitler’s private kennel. A shepherd who was a regular Newall traveling companion featured prominently in one of the critic’s misadventures.

Heading north one night from an arts assignment in southern Maine, Newall realized the dog had to relieve itself, so he pulled over, just outside of Waterville along I-95. After walking the dog into a ravine where it was doing its duty, Newall suddenly was horrified to hear the sound of twisted steel, followed by the sight of a flying car door: his. Getting back into his car, he hung a blanket where the driver’s side door had been, an amusing and puzzling sight to passing motorists as he made the final, cold, snowy leg of the trip back to Bangor.

In 1998, Newall donated more than 50 books, and more than 150 organ, vocal and conductor scores to the Bagaduce Library in Blue Hill. “It is a wonderful collection in wonderful condition,” Mary Cheyney Gould, the library’s music director, said at the time. “I suspect Bob used it more in his work as a reviewer than as a musician.”

Toward the end of that career as critic he was perceived to have mellowed, but he preferred “to think rather that the level of arts has risen commendably over the years. I don’t see things that make one’s stomach crawl and that you writhe and wince through.”

“He scorns one word, when two will do as well,” Managing Editor Stone once observed, but Newall was “in short, one of the BDN’s most valued and valuable properties. Just about everybody would like to get him.”

That might have included local performers who wouldn’t take the stage until he left the building. “I swear, those years of waiting for him to review me were like sweating blood. I couldn’t have been more scared if I had gone out on stage at Lincoln Center,” said one community performer in the 1979 Maine Times profile of Newall.

Uncharacteristically succinct, Newall told NEWS arts critic Alicia Anstead in 1998:

“I call ’em like I see ’em.”