The cause was complications of congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Roie Opperman.
Mr. Opperman began his professional career playing for ballet and Broadway, but it was his relentless pursuit of musical perfection and highly personal teaching methods that drew generations of students to his studio.
“He was the elder statesman of the clarinet," said Stanley Drucker, who was the longtime principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic until his retirement last year.
In his quest for excellence, Mr. Opperman became an expert in the mechanics of the instrument and often fabricated tuning barrels and mouthpieces, but only for his students. He wrote a series of widely used technical studies and the first authoritative guide to making and adjusting clarinet reeds.
Perhaps his best-known pupil is the international soloist Richard Stoltzman, who had just completed a masters degree at Yale in 1967 when he sought out Mr. Opperman for instruction on reeds the two-and-a-half-inch-long pieces of cane that are the obsession of most players, a passionate fraternity of tinkerers.
I came to him with a sense of entitlement, to take my place in the music establishment. He had me play a little. Then he said, “Yeah, well, you don't really know where the holes are on the clarinet yet." It was then that I realized I would be a lifelong student.
Richard Stoltzman
Mr. Opperman was single-minded about extracting the most from those he taught. To that end, Mr. Stoltzman said, he composed wry epigrams and taped them to the walls of his studio, which gradually expanded to fill much of his apartment on West 67th Street in Manhattan. Among them were, “Everyone discovers their own way of destroying themselves, and some people choose the clarinet."
Larry Guy, a symphonic player, teacher and author of books on reeds and embouchure development the taut formation of the lips around the mouthpiece and reed was already an established player when he went to Mr. Opperman to correct problems with his right hand.
Instead, Mr. Opperman identified embouchure problems. Over three years, Mr. Guys embouchure was restored, and the hand problem vanished.
People went to him to clean out all the clutter and the dust in their playing. He saw things that other people didn't see. And he had great ears. This made him a great diagnostician.
Larry Guy
