Logo
facts about olga samaroff.html

28 Facts About Olga Samaroff

facts about olga samaroff.html1.

Olga Samaroff was an American pianist, music critic, and teacher.

2.

Olga Samaroff was born Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Jane and Carlos Hickenlooper.

3.

Olga Samaroff grew up in Galveston, where her family owned a business later wiped out in the 1900 Galveston hurricane.

4.

Olga Samaroff began studying with her grandmother, and, after her talent for the piano was discovered, she was sent to Europe to study, since at that time there were no great piano teachers in the United States.

5.

Olga Samaroff was the first American woman to win entrance to the piano class at Paris' Conservatoire Nationale de Musique.

6.

Olga Samaroff first studied with Antoine Francois Marmontel and Charles-Valentin Alkan's son, Elie-Miriam Delaborde, at the Conservatoire de Paris, and later with Ernst Jedliczka in Berlin.

7.

Olga Samaroff soon discovered she was hampered by both her awkward name and her American origins.

8.

Olga Samaroff's agent suggested a professional name change, which was claimed to be taken from a remote relative.

9.

Olga Samaroff hired the hall, the orchestra, and conductor Walter Damrosch, and made an overwhelming impression with her performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1 and the Schumann Piano Concerto.

10.

Olga Samaroff played extensively in the United States and Europe thereafter.

11.

Olga Samaroff discovered Leopold Stokowski when he was church organist at St Bartholomew's in New York and later conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

12.

Olga Samaroff played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1 under Stokowski's direction when he made his official conducting debut in Paris with the Colonne Orchestra on May 12,1909.

13.

Olga Samaroff married Stokowski in 1911, and their daughter Sonya was born in 1921.

14.

At that time, Olga Samaroff was much more famous than her husband and was able to lobby her contacts to get Stokowski appointed in 1912 to the vacant conductor's post at the Philadelphia Orchestra, thus launching his international career.

15.

Olga Samaroff made a number of recordings in the early 1920s for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

16.

Olga Samaroff was the second pianist in history, after Hans von Bulow, to perform all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in public, preceding Artur Schnabel by several years.

17.

In January 1917, when the Philadelphia Art Alliance launched a new series of "sociable luncheons" to familiarize prominent men and women in the Philadelphia region with fine arts and music trends, the organization's leaders chose Olga Samaroff to be the series' first speaker.

18.

Olga Samaroff took refuge in her friends, among whom were George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Parker, and Cary Grant.

19.

In 1925, Olga Samaroff fell in her New York apartment and suffered a shoulder injury that forced her to retire from performing.

20.

Olga Samaroff wrote for the New York Evening Post until 1928 - the first woman to serve as music critic for a New York daily newspaper - and gave guest lectures throughout the 1930s.

21.

Olga Samaroff developed a course of music study for laymen and was the first music teacher to be broadcast on NBC television.

22.

Olga Samaroff taught at the Philadelphia Conservatory and in 1924 was invited to join the faculty of the newly formed Juilliard School in New York, becoming the first American-born teacher on the piano faculty.

23.

Olga Samaroff taught at both schools for the rest of her life.

24.

Olga Samaroff herself said that the best pianist she ever taught was the New Zealander Richard Farrell, who died at age 31, in a motor vehicle accident in England in 1958.

25.

Olga Samaroff published an autobiography, An American Musician's Story, in 1939.

26.

Olga Samaroff died of a heart attack at her home on 24 West 55th Street in New York on the evening of May 17,1948, after giving several lessons that day.

27.

Olga Samaroff is related to Civil War general Andrew Hickenlooper and to Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper.

28.

In John Hickenlooper's 2016 memoir, he states that the name change from Hickenlooper to Olga Samaroff was suggested by Olga Samaroff's cousin and federal judge Smith Hickenlooper.