Katja Andy
Katja Andy (born May 23, 1907 in Mönchengladbach as Käte Aschaffenburg ; † December 30, 2013 in New York ) was an American pianist and piano teacher of German-Jewish origin.
Life
The daughter of the Mönchengladbach cloth manufacturer Otto Aschaffenburg and his wife Clara, b. Ruben, came into contact with classical music at an early age and began playing the piano at the age of three. Her mother was a student of Clara Schumann . The soloists of the orchestral concerts in Cologne and Mönchengladbach, including famous musicians such as Adolf Busch , Joseph Szigeti , Eugen d'Albert and Walter Gieseking, lived in their parents' house . The pianist Edwin Fischer became a family friend. In 1924 Käte Aschaffenburg became a student of Edwin Fischer and Michael Wittels in Berlin and often attended Artur Schnabel's classes .
From 1927 she performed in a duo with Agi Jambor . From 1930 she played frequently with Edwin Fischer's chamber orchestra and was his partner in Mozart's double concerto and the concerts for several pianos by Bach, in which her fellow student and friend Grete Sultan also took part. The promising start of a pianist career - 60 concerts had already been scheduled for the coming season - was thwarted by the takeover of power by the National Socialists. After Käte Aschaffenburg was forbidden as a Jew from teaching “Aryan” pupils, she fled to Paris in April 1933, where she was not officially allowed to work and lived on Edwin Fischer's illegal payments and a small amount of income from coaching. In 1937 she, who called herself Katja Andy since her escape, was expelled from France after being denounced for this prohibited activity. She drove back to Germany to get official exit documents, which she managed with the help of her seamstress, a friend of Hermann Göring's .
Katja Andy fled to the USA in 1937 and initially accompanied the dancer Lotte Goslar on a tour there for a year . She settled in Detroit in 1938 and became a US citizen in 1945. In 1948 she accepted a teaching position at DePaul University in Chicago . In 1958 she met the pianist Alfred Brendel in Lucerne , with whom she remained lifelong friends. In 1960 she moved to New York in 1964 to Boston , where she started at the Boston Conservatory , then up into the 1980s at the New England Conservatory taught and honorary doctorate was appointed. Andy spent her retirement from 1991 in New York City , where she died in December 2013 at the age of 106.
literature
- Blubacher, Thomas: Is there anything better than longing? The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn . Henschel, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 (with statements from Andy's interview about her friend Eleonora von Mendelssohn )
- Bredow, Moritz von: Katja Andy in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM)
- Bredow, Moritz von: Rebellious pianist. The life of Grete Sultan between Berlin and New York . (Biography, 368 p., 60 fig.) Schott Music , Mainz, 2012. ISBN 978-3-7957-0800-9 (Contains the description of the friendship with Grete Sultan as well as a separate biographical section about Katja Andy and two photographs of the pianist )
- Brendel, Alfred: A musician of the rarest kind. On the 100th birthday of the pianist Katja Andy , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 23 May 2007
Individual evidence
- ^ Tributes.com and a Twitter message from Bruce Brubaker , January 3, 2014; exact date in another Twitter message
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Andy, Katja |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Aschaffenburg, Käte (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American pianist and piano teacher of German origin |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 23, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mönchengladbach |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 30, 2013 |
| Place of death | new York |