OLGA SAMAROFF (SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS AUGUST 8, 1880
– NEW YORK MAY 17, 1948)
Samaroff was born Lucy Mary
Olga Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Galveston, where
her family owned a business later wiped out in the 1900 Galveston hurricane.
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. She
first studied with Antoine François Marmontel and Alkan’s son, Élie-Miriam
Delaborde at the Conservatoire de Paris and later with Ernst Jedliczka in
Berlin. While in Berlin, she was very briefly married to 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. However, she soon discovered she was hampered both by her
awkward name and her American origins. Her agent suggested a professional name
change, which 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). She hired the hall, the orchestra, and conductor Walter Damrosch, and
made 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 Symphony Orchestra. She 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. She married Stokowski in 1911, and
their daughter Sonya was born in 1921. At that time, 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,
launching his international career. Samaroff made a number of recordings in the
early 1920s for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Samaroff was the second
pianist in history, after Hans von Bülow, to perform all 32 Beethoven piano
sonatas in public, preceding Artur Schnabel (who did the series first in 1927)
by several years. German pianist Walter Gieseking would also perform the
complete sonatas in public by age fifteen (circa 1910). 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 and suffered an injury to her shoulder. The injury
forced her to retire from performing. So from that point on, she worked
primarily as a critic and teacher. She also wrote for the New York Evening Post
until 1928, and she 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 an advocate for them. She supplied many of her
Depression-era charges with concert clothes and food. She also pressed
officials at Juilliard to build a dormitory – a project that was not realized
until after her death decades later. 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. Samaroff published an autobiography, An American Musician’s Story, in
1939. 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. Samaroff is related to Civil
War general Andrew Hickenlooper and to Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. In
Hickenlooper’s 2016 memoir, he states that the name change from Hickenlooper to
Samaroff was suggested by Samaroff’s cousin and Federal Judge Smith Hickenlooper.
TRACKLIST
Olga Samaroff made 10 Welte-Mignon piano rolls
1472 WELTE-MIGNON CHOPIN- Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 58, b 1st & 2nd mvts.
1473 WELTE-MIGNON CHOPIN- Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 58, b 3rd & 4th mvts.
1474 WELTE-MIGNON WAGNER-LISZT – March from the Opera “Tannhäuser”
1476 WELTE-MIGNON BRAHMS – Rhapsody, Op. 79, No. 2, g
1478 WELTE-MIGNON GRIEG – Piano Concerto, Op. 16, a 1st mvt.]
1479 WELTE-MIGNON GRIEG -”Peer Gynt” Op. 46, Nos. 1 Morning Mood; 2 Aase’s Death
1480 WELTE-MIGNON GRIEG – “Peer Gynt”,Op. 46, Nos. 3 Anitra’s Dance; 4 In the Hall Mountain King
1481 WELTE-MIGNON FAURE – Impromptu No. 2, Op. 31, f
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