Olga Samaroff
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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 Olga Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas, United States. Her professional name was taken from a remote relative; her agent felt it would make her more competitive with the many European pianists enjoying international careers than would her maiden name. As a teenager she studied with Antoine Francois Marmontel at the Conservatoire de Paris, and later with Ernest Jedliczka in Berlin, during her first, very brief marriage, to engineer Boris Loutzky.
Samaroff made her New York debut at Carnegie Hall in 1905, with conductor Walter Damrosch, and played extensively in the United States and Europe thereafter. She was married to Stokowski from 1911 to 1923 and their daughter Sonia was born in 1921. She made a number of recordings in the early 1920s for the Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1925 she accepted a position at the Juilliard School, and taught there for the rest of her life.
In 1925 Samaroff fell in her 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, while continuing her conservatory teaching. She published an autobiography, An American Musician's Story, in 1939.
Notable pupils
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