IPARA APAR@ ` YTEXT ` KSamaroff, Olga1882╨1948pianist and educatorBorn on August 8, 1882, in San Antonio, Texas, Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper grew up there and in Galveston. While attending the school of the Ursuline convent in Galveston, she took piano lessons from her mother and then from her grandmother, who had been a concert pianist of some note. At fourteen, having received encouragement from Edward MacDowell, she was taken to Paris to continue her studies, and a year later she became the first American girl to win a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. She studied there under âlie Delaborde and later in Berlin under Ernst Jedliczka and Ernest Hutcheson. During the course of an unsuccessful marriage to a Russian engineer in 1900╨1904 she abandoned music, but she resumed it in the latter year and in January 1905 made her professional debut under the name Olga Samaroff with the New York Symphony, Walter Damrosch conducting, at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Good reviews led to several private engagements, and in May she made her London debut at Steinway Hall. She subsequently was invited to play with the Boston Symphony Quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and from 1906 her concert career flourished under the management of the prominent impresario Charles A. Ellis. She again gave up performing for a time after her marriage in April 1911 to Leopold Stokowski, but she resumed gradually from 1913 and toured full time again after her divorce in 1923. A serious arm injury in 1925 prompted Samaroff to give up her performing career entirely in favor of teaching. In that year she joined the faculty of the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in New York City, with which she was associated for the rest of her life. She served also in 1926╨1927 as music critic for the New York Evening Post. In 1928 she founded the Shubert Memorial to sponsor concerts with full orchestra for deserving young artists identified through competitions conducted by the National Federation of Music Clubs. In 1929 she began teaching piano classes at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music as well. From about 1930 she enjoyed considerable success with her layman╒s music courses, which she offered at the David Mannes Music School, at Town Hall, New York, and in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and she published The Layman╒s Music Book, 1935, The Magic World of Music, 1936, and A Music Manual, 1937, for use in them. The first was later reissued as The Listener╒s Music Book, 1947, after the course was presented on radio and television. Her autobiography, An American Musician╒s Story, appeared in 1939. She was a frequent guest lecturer at universities and colleges, a delegate to the International Music Education Congress in Prague in 1936, and a judge at the Concours EugÅne Ysa╪e piano competition in Belgium in 1938. She died in New York City on May 17, 1948. ╞styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ / !I ù 5¬ ÿ !I ╩ 5¬ ╦ !I !I !I !I 2 !I : !I C !I D !I R !I ^ !I l !I ª !I ┐ !I
