ZZeisler, Fannie Bloomfield1863╨1927pianistBorn on July 16, 1863, in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia, Fannie Blumenfeld came with her mother and brothers to the United States in 1867 and joined her father, who had preceded them, in Appleton, Wisconsin. From 1869 she grew up in Chicago. She is said to have taken her first piano lessons from her brother Maurice (later a well known philologist and Sanskritist); later she studied with Bernhard Ziehn and from 1874 with Carl Wolfsohn. She made her public performing debut in February 1875 in one of Wolfsohn╒s Beethoven Society concerts. With the encouragement of the Russian pianist Annette Essipoff, who heard her in Chicago in 1877, she traveled to Vienna in 1878 to study under Theodor Leschetizky. She returned to Chicago in 1883, by which time she had anglicized her name to Bloomfield. She gave her first full concert there in April 1884 and in January 1885 made her New York debut. From 1884 she was on the faculty of the School of Lyric and Dramatic Art in Chicago. In October 1885 she married Sigmund Zeisler, a lawyer; their home became a center of cultural and intellectual life in Chicago. While caring for her family and overseeing the work of her students she slowly built her concert career. During 1888╨1889 she again studied with Leschetizky in Vienna. Her first European tour took place in 1893, when she appeared in Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and Vienna before illness forced her to return home. She toured Germany and Austria again in the fall of 1894, and by the end of that tour she was acknowledged one of the foremost concert pianists in the world. She combined flawless technique with a fiery and powerful expressiveness that enabled her to render the classical and Romantic masterworks with entire authority. Subsequent European tours occurred in 1898, when she appeared mainly in England, in 1902, when she appeared in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and Paris (she was a great success at the Concerts Lamoureux, where her playing of the Saint-Saæns C-minor concerto won over an initially hostile claque), in 1911╨1912, when she toured most of western Europe, and in 1914. She toured the United States annually, except for the 1905╨1906 season, when illness kept her home, and from 1891 she appeared with Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra annually for 19 seasons. Her final public performance took place in February 1925 in Chicago, when she marked 50 years on the concert stage by playing the little Beethoven Andante Favori she had begun with in 1875 and concertos by Chopin and Schumann. She died in Chicago on August 20, 1927. «styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ % 5¬ . !I N 5¬ O !I 5¬ !I link `
