GERMAINE SCHNITZER WELTE-MIGNON PIANO ROLLS CDR

 

GERMAINE SCHNITZER (PARIS, MAY 28, 1888 — NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1982)

 

 

 

 

Germaine Alice Schnitzer was born in Paris and studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris, with further training under Raoul Pugno and with Emil von Sauer at the Vienna Conservatory. She was sometimes referred to as “Viennese”, and while in Vienna won a prize for music from the Austrian government. Schnitzer was a pianist with a busy concert career in North America and Europe. She played in New York with the Russian Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, toured Holland, and toured in Russia until she sprained her ankle, all during 1908 and 1909. She played a dual recital with American violinist Francis MacMillen at Carnegie Hall in 1916. She gave a series of recitals in New York in 1920, before embarking on a European tour. The tour was cut short when she returned to New York to be with her husband during a hospitalization. She toured in Europe again in 1922. She received wide critical praise for her technique and interpretation of the romantic composers, especially Robert Schumann. In 1931, Schnitzer’s career ended when she was badly injured in a traffic accident in New York, and remained partially paralyzed. She won a judgment of $150,000 after suing the taxi company in 1934, though it is unlikely she was ever paid. In 1944 she admitted her part in a conspiracy to violate the Export Control Act, to help her brother Georges Schnitzer, a banker in Belgium, access his frozen accounts during World War II. She pleaded guilty, testified for the government, and was eventually fined $5000. Her donation to the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund in 1979 was noted by the paper, because of her advanced age. Germaine Schnitzer married Leo Buerger, a pathologist, in 1913. She sued him for divorce in 1927. She had a son, Gerald Henri Buerger (later known as Gerry Kean, an actor, playwright, and director), and a daughter, Yvonne Sarah Buerger Jones (1920-1942). Yvonne’s godmother was Schnitzer’s friend, actress Sarah Bernhardt. Yvonne’s husband at the time of her death was actor Henry Burk Jones. Germaine Schnitzer died in 1982, aged 94 years, in New York. Her gravesite is with her daughter’s, in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Theatre administrator Robert C. Schnitzer (1906-2008), also based in Connecticut, was her nephew, the son of her brother Louis Schnitzer.

 

 

TRACKLIST

 

 

895 WELTE-MIGNON LISZT – Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9, Eb “Pester Karneval”

899 WELTE-MIGNON CHOPIN – Etude, Op. 25, No. 11, a “Winter Wind”

901 WELTE-MIGNON CHOPIN – Prelude, Op. 28, No. 16, b-b

903 WELTE-MIGNON MOSZKOWSKI – Mélodie Italienne, Op. 38, No. 4, A

906 WELTE-MIGNON SAINT-SAENS – Toccata, Op. 111, No. 6, F