American Virtuoso on the World Stage

Early this century, when the concert stage was ruled by men and Old World prejudices, a young Texan named Lucy Hickenlooper reinvented herself as Olga Samaroff - international concert pianist. An American Virtuoso on the World Stage traces a tumultuous career that broke new ground for American and women performers. Olga Samaroff, perhaps best known as Leopold Stokowski's first wife, was the first American woman to win entrance into the piano class at Paris's Conservatoire Nationale de Musique; the first American female pianist to make her concert debut at Carnegie Hall and to perform all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas; the first woman to serve as music critic for a New York daily newspaper; the first American-born member of the piano faculty at the Juilliard School; and among the first to make recordings for broadcast on radio and television. Samaroff was even the driving force behind her husband's career, having arranged for his first position as a conductor. Her years on the faculty of Juilliard and of the Philadelphia Conservatory launched the first generation of America-born, American-trained concert pianists.