Olga Samaroff

Olga Samaroff (August 8, 1880 – May 17, 1948) was a pianist, music critic, and teacher. Her second husband was conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Samaroff was born Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Galveston, where her family owned a business later wiped out in the Great 1900 Galveston hurricane. There being then no great teachers in the United States, after her talent for the piano was discovered she was sent to Europe to study, first with Antoine François Marmontel at the Conservatoire de Paris, and later with Ernst Jedliczka in Berlin, where she married, very briefly, Russian engineer Boris Loutzky. After her divorce from Loutzky, and the disaster which claimed her family's business, she returned to the United States and tried to carve out a career as a pianist but soon discovered she was hampered both by her rather awkward name and her American origins. An agent suggested a change and her professional name was taken from a remote relative.

As Olga Samaroff, she self-produced her New York debut at Carnegie Hall in 1905 (the first woman ever to do so), hiring the hall, the orchestra and the conductor Walter Damrosch, and making an overwhelming impression with her performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. She played extensively in the United States and Europe thereafter. Samaroff discovered Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) when he was church organist at St. Bartholemew's in New York and later conductor of the Cincinnati Orchestra. She played Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto under Stokowski's direction when he made his official conducting debut in Paris with the Colonne Orchestra on 12 May 1909. At that time much more famous than he, Samaroff lobbied her distinguished contacts to get him appointed (in 1912) to the vacant conductor's post at the famed Philadelphia Orchestra, launching his international career. She married Stokowski in 1911 and their daughter Sonya was born in 1921. Samaroff made a number of recordings in the early 1920s for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

In 1923, Samaroff and Stokowski divorced; the reasons included Stokowski's infidelity, from which she never recovered. She took refuge in her friends, among whom were George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Parker, and Cary Grant. In 1925 Samaroff fell in her New York apartment, suffering an injury to her shoulder which forced her to retire from performing. She worked primarily as a critic and teacher from then on. She wrote for the New York Evening Post until 1928, and gave guest lectures throughout the 1930s. Samaroff developed a course of music study for laymen and was the first music teacher to be broadcast on NBC television. She taught at the Philadelphia Conservatory and in 1924 was invited to join the faculty of the newly formed Juilliard School in New York. She taught at both schools for the rest of her life. Called "Madam" by her students, she was a tireless advocate for them, supplying many of her Depression-era charges with everything from concert clothes to food, and pressing officials at Juilliard to build a dormitory - a project that was not realized for decades after her death.

Her most famous pupil was concert pianist William Kapell who was killed in a 1953 plane crash at age 31. She herself said that the best pianist she ever taught was the New Zealander Richard Farrell, who also died at age 31, in a motor vehicle accident in England in 1958.

Olga Samaroff published an autobiography, An American Musician's Story, in 1939. Teacher to the end, she died of a heart attack at her home in New York on the evening of May 17, 1948 after giving several lessons that day.

Notable pupils

• Joseph Battista
• Isabelle Yalkovsky Byman
• Richard Farrell
• Stewart L. Gordon
• Natalie Hinderas
• Bruce Hungerford
• Jaime Ingram
• William Kapell
• Raymond Lewenthal
• Eugene List
• Jerome Lowenthal
• Margaret Saunders Ott
• Vincent Persichetti
• Joseph Running
• Natalie Ryshna
• Thomas Schippers
• Claudette Sorel
• Alfred Teltschik
• Rosalyn Tureck
• Alexis Weissenberg

External links

• Samaroff collection at the University of Maryland library

http://olgasamaroff.com

Persondata
Name	Samaroff, Olga
Alternative names
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Date of birth	1880
Place of birth
Date of death	1948
Place of death