An American Virtuoso on the World Stage: Olga Samaroff Stokowski

Rating:
Summary: An engaging biography
Review: This is an engaging biography of a great pianist and teacher. Olga Samaroff Stokowski was a virtuoso of world class who concertized widely in the United States and Europe from 1905 to about 1926. She was also a music critic, an author, a lecturer, a radio broadcaster, and, for nearly twenty-five years, one of the most influential piano teachers in the United States. The roster of her students sparkles with brilliant names-Rosalyn Tureck, Eugene List, Alexis Weissenberg, Raymond Lewenthal, Leah Effenbach, Maurice Hinson, Claudette Sorel, the great William Kapell, and many others.

As the first wife of Leopold Stokowski, Olga Samaroff did much to help launch his brilliant conducting career, first in Cincinnati and later in Philadelphia. After she and Stokowski were divorced in 1923, she joined the faculties of the Philadelphia Conservatory and the Juilliard School, where her musical influence became deep and wide.

Kline is particularly good at describing Samaroff's teaching methods and her indefatigable work as a spokesman and organizer for the cause of music education. She portrays her as strong and ambitious, hard-working, sophisticated, generous, and immensely talented, with an outgoing personality and great stores of enthusiasm and energy. She emerges from these pages not only as an admirable woman, but a thoroughly likable one as well.

There are some problems-passages in which the author's meaning is not clear, some factual discrepancies, and an index that does not fully reflect the text. It is unclear, for example, whether Samaroff was music critic of the New York Post for three years (p. 145) or just a year and a half (p. 140). If Stokowski was born in 1882, as Kline tells us (p. 55), how could he have been only 58 years old when he married Gloria Vanderbilt in 1945 (p. 211)? Kline describes an incident that occurred in 1917, when Samaroff was playing the second Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto with Stokowski conducting, and he stormed off the stage in the middle of the performance, leaving her alone at the piano (p. 104). Kline later refers to the "humiliation of her memory loss on stage" (pp. 105, 107), without adequately explaining how memory loss played into this bizarre episode. There are many references in the book to the distinguished Bok family of Philadelphia, who were friends of both Samaroff and Stokowski, but the index contains not a single reference to the Boks.

These (and other similar) problems should have been corrected during the editing process. But they should not prevent readers from enjoying this book about a great woman and a great musician.