Patrick Giles, who died October 13 at 48, was an arts journalist of distinctive enthusiasms for The New York Sun, Opera News, Interview, and other publications.

“Bart Simpson was as important to him as Berlioz,” his brother, Mark Giles, said. He described his brother’s apartment as “Augean,” a morass of books, CDs, records, videos – fodder for a voracious mind.

Giles grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended Nazareth High School and spent his free time taking in Broadway shows. The writing bug hit him early, and he taught himself to type with an instructional manual he found in a used bookstore.

He bounced around various colleges, finally not graduating at all, but working on student newspapers and performing in student productions. Like many aspiring writers, he supported himself through a mixture of proofreading and freelance writing, often on gay issues. He was also a client representative at Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

Giles had an avid interest in, and a wealth of opinions about all aspects of the culture, from old movies to new novels. But it was classical music – and particularly opera – that he was most passionate about.

“The recital is something he covered in a wonderful way for us, which is something not a lot of people have a flair for,” Brian Kellow, features editor for Opera News, said.”That is what I really loved about working with him – he had that rabid enthusiasm. He would hold forth on everything from Renata Tebaldi to ‘Imitation of Life.’ He didn’t have a halfway opinion on anything.”

Giles first wrote for The New York Sun in the fall of 2004, not long after he had been diagnosed with the lymphoma that would kill him just a year later. His first article was a preview – a “curtain-raiser” in newsroom argot – of the soprano Renee Fleming. A little more than a month later, he returned to our pages in a less than charitable mood for the Christmas season: “But am I the only music lover in town who’s over the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ the twinkling star in the east, and the shepherds tending their flocks by night – tired (well … sometimes) of even the most radiant diva rendition of ‘I Know that My Redeemer Liveth’?”

If the yuletide stampede brought out the Giles Grinch, lesser trod events were his glory. A “Before the Code” film festival at Film Forum sent him into reveries, and Stephen Sondheim’s 75th birthday brought forth great gobs of praise for the musical master whose “work can sound as genuine as Gershwin, even as schmaltzy as Rodgers. But something bigger than Broadway separated Mr. Sondheim from those great forebears – the bloody middle of the 20th century.”

Giles occasionally contributed to the Sun’s obituary page, too, and it was in appreciation of Tebaldi that he wrote the following, pure Giles for its mixture of sharp humor and reverie:

Tebaldi was a religious woman sometimes observed lighting candles in church on her way to a performance (those high notes didn’t always come easily). And her art had something devotional about it: Beneath the thundering chords of the orchestra and the soaring high notes, she caught opera’s instructional, comforting aspect.

Operas can be musical lessons in how to live, or at least aids to get through living. Tebaldi’s singing not only took part in those lessons – they embodied them. You simply couldn’t believe human beings are, at heart, hopeless, when one of us could sing like that.

Patrick Giles

Born September 17, 1957, in Brooklyn; died October 13 of complications of lymphoma; survived by his brother, Mark, and his sisters, Susan Ferruza and Meg Kerlin.