Know Texas better!: e.g., Mme Olga Samaroff
Sep 17th, 2007 by Paul Moor
For not years but decades I’ve intended to research the transformation into this famous pianist-teacher from li’l ol’ Lucie Hickenlooper, born in li’l ol’ San Antone Texas, and my recent stroll down Memory Lane in tribute to her Juilliard pupil William Kapell has finally, finally goosed me into doing it.
In 1958, Time-Life International sent me to Moscow to cover the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition for young violinists and pianists from all over the world, originally intending to spend the four weeks the competition lasted (only two of which TLI agreed to hold still for), but when 23-year-old Van Cliburn – “from the piney woods of East Texas”, to quote him – walked off with first prize for piano, creating an international sensation at the height of the Cold War in a competition the Russians regarded as a lead-pipe cinch for one of their own, the Luceniks had me extend my visa for three extra weeks in order to join Van (a.k.a. Vanya), David Oistrakh’s pupil Valery Klimov, and the conductor Kiril Kondrashin on their triumphal prize-winners’ tour of Leningrad, Riga, and Kiev. I had to skip Kiev, for immediately after the towering Texan walked off with first prize Time had scheduled a cover-story on Van to hit the stateside news-stands just before his replication in New York’s Carnegie Hall of his prize-winning Moscow concert, and that meant I’d have to get out to Copenhagen in time to hammer out a sixty-page file and get it to New York by that cover-story’s deadline.
To my considerable annoyance, the customary disorder here in my Berlin warren frustrates my certainty I could immediately lay hands on that issue of Time exactly where I knew I’d last happened to see it, so I’ll have to paraphrase the footnote from it I’d intended to quote verbatim. When the article it mentioned Mme Samaroff (all her pupils called her Madam), a footnote first revealed to me her San Antonio origins, so for the past forty-nine years I’ve intended to do the research I’ve only now finally got around to.
During my own time as a Juilliard student (1940/41) I never knowingly even laid eyes on the lady, but in general students there spoke of her with reverence, as they did of her colleagues, a unique assemblage that included, to name only two, Carl Friedberg, whose own teachers had included the composer Robert Schumann’s virtuosa wife Clara, and Alexander Siloti, a relative of Sergei Rachmaninoff as well as one of his teachers.
Coincidence had placed me next to Van at a welcoming lunch at Moscow’s Hotel Peking for the piano contestants soon after they arrived, and when, making politely conversation, I asked him about his teachers, he told me in the unmistakable native woodnotes wild of Kilgore, Texas, his birthplace: “Well, most o’ ma life I studied with ma motha.”
Kid, I thought to myself, you better catch the next plane back there, for you’ve definitely landed far out of you depth here. And then it transpired that Mama, née Rildia Bee O’Brien, also a native Texan, had somehow wound up her own piano studies as a pupil of Arthur Friedheim, one of Franz Liszt’s pupils. By a really wild coincidence, my own very first piano teacher, Mr. McBride in li’l ol’ El Paso, had also studied with Friedheim, so from that first meeting on Van and I had unexpectedly much in common.
Googling has answered my question about Mme Samaroff with Texas-size completeness in The Handbook of Texas Online, and you can read her complete entry there by simply clicking here. Her pupils, to name only the ones who became best known, included not only Willy Kapell but also Eugene List (eventually famous as “the Potsdam pianist” Pres. Harry Truman had play, in the Army sergeant’s uniform he temporarily wore, for Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the Allies’ triumphant conference held out in nearby Potsdam), Raymond Lewenthal, Joseph Battista, Rosalyn Tureck, and Alexis Weissenberg.
In reading that, you might want to bear in mind the laconic comment of another Samaroff pupil, my California friend Victor Wolfram, emailed to me after I laid it on him: “Obviously, Samaroff yielded to the temptation to edit some aspects of her personal life for public view….”
