(Olga Samaroff was one of the first American musicians to ...)
Olga Samaroff was one of the first American musicians to earn an international reputation and career, but she retired early to become a very successful teacher. All of her surviving recordings are here. Most of them were made by the acoustical process, resulting in very limited fidelity. But since Samaroff insisted on a grand piano, we can still hear the heroic power of her Chopin Third Sonata finale and the amazing Hutchinson transcription of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. Four electrical sides, including a sly and sexy Lecuona Malagneña, give us a better idea of her luminous tone. This disc is a limited but precious souvenir of a great artist. --Leslie Gerber
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Olga Samaroff was an American pianist, music critic, and teacher.
Background
Samaroff was born Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper on August 8, 1882, in San Antonio, Texas, United States. She the first daughter of Carlos Hickenlooper and Jane (Grunewald) Hickenlooper, and was christened Lucie Mary Olga Agnes. Her maternal grandmother, Lucie Palmer, the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana planter-physician, who moved south from Stonington, Connecticut, in the 1840's, was raised a Catholic even though the family was of Protestant stock.
Education
Lucie received her first musical training from her mother and grandmother, both of whom taught when the family moved to Galveston, Tex. At the age of twelve she was taken to Paris, over some family objections, by her grandmother. After a year of studying the piano with Antoine Marmontel, Charles Marie Widor, and Ludovic Breitner, she was in 1896 the first American girl to win a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. For the next two years she was subjected to a difficult and taxing schedule, acquiring artistic and intellectual self-discipline.
Her grandmother then took her to Berlin, where she studied piano with Ernst Jedliczka and Ernest Hutcheson as well as organ with Hugo Riemann and composition with Otis Boise.
Samaroff was awarded honorary doctor of music degrees by the University of Pennsylvania (1931) and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (1943).
Career
Upon her return, her family, which had suffered financial reverses because of the Galveston flood in 1900, spent their savings to hire Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra for her debut. On the advice of manager Henry Wolfson, she took the name of a remote Slavic ancestor and made her first public appearance as Olga Samaroff in Carnegie Hall on Jan. 18, 1905.
Despite mixed reviews, however, she made enough contacts to launch a career. She was introduced to the eminent Boston impresario Charles A. Ellis, who added her to the artists under his management, and her reputation grew through European and American tours.
Although she had forsaken her concert career upon her second marriage, she gradually resumed concert appearances and did pioneer recording work for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
In 1925 she succeeded Ernest Newman as music critic for the New York Evening Post, a position which she held for two years. She had already joined the piano faculty of the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in New York City in 1925, and in 1928 she added piano classes at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music to her teaching duties. Preferring not to resume concert work, Samaroff continued teaching and devoted her time to such causes as the organization of the Schubert Memorial in 1928.
Two years later she was a judge at the Concours Eugune Y. in Brussels, a contest similar to the Schubert Memorial, organized by Belgium's Queen Elisabeth. Her autobiography, An American Musician's Story (1939), and her other writings present her as modest yet articulate, concerned with the creation, performance, and reception of music.
She died of natural causes in her New York City apartment on May 7, 1948.
She strove through influence and example to remove for others the obstacles that she had been forced to overcome in her own career, most notably the lack of instructional and performance opportunities for native Americans and the discrimination against women musicians.
Interests
Artists
She said that the best pianist she ever taught was the New Zealander Richard Farrell.
Connections
Her debut recital was postponed by her marriage at the age of eighteen to a Russian engineer, Boris Loutsky. On Apr. 24, 1911, she married Leopold Stokowski, and the following year they moved to Philadelphia, where he became famous as the conductor of that city's orchestra. A daughter, Sonya Marie, was born to the Stokowskis before their divorce in 1923.