Katja Andy

Katja Andy (* May 23, 1907 in Mönchengladbach when Kate Aschaffenburg, † December 30, 2013 ) was an American pianist and piano teacher of German origin.

Life

The daughter of a cloth manufacturer came early into contact with classical music and began with three years to play the piano. The mother was a grandson pupil of Clara Schumann. In parents' house lived the soloists of the orchestra concerts in Aschaffenburg, including famous musicians such as Adolf Busch, Joseph Szigeti, Eugen d' Albert and Walter Gieseking. The pianist Edwin Fischer became a friend of the family. 1924 Kate Aschaffenburg Berlin pupil of Edwin Fischer and Michael Wittels and was also visited frequently the teaching of Artur Schnabel.

From 1927 she performed as a duo with Agi Jambor. From 1930 she often played with Edwin Fischer Chamber Orchestra and was his partner in the Double Concerto by Mozart and the concertos for multiple pianos by Bach, where also their fellow student and friend Grete Sultan participated. The beginning of a promising career as a pianist - for come duck season were already scheduled 60 concerts - was thwarted by the power of the National Socialists. After she was banned from teaching "Aryan" students, they fled in April 1933 to Paris, where she was not allowed to work officially and lived by illegal payments fisherman and small private income by coaching. In 1937 she was who called herself since her escape Katja Andy, reported after a denunciation from France because of this prohibited activity. They drove back to Germany in order to gain official exit papers, what you succeeded with the help of her seamstress, a friend of Hermann Goering, 1937.

Katja Andy traveled to the USA and accompanied there initially for one year the dancer Lotte Goslar on tour. In 1938 she settled in Detroit. In 1945, she received the American nationality. In 1948 she accepted a teaching position at DePaul University in Chicago. In 1958 she met the pianist Alfred Brendel in Lucerne, with whom they remained lifelong friends. In 1960 she moved to New York in 1964 to Boston, where she first taught then until the 1980s the New England Conservatory in Boston Conservatory, and was awarded an honorary doctorate. Your retirement years spent Andy from 1991 in New York City. In December 2013 she died at the age of 106 years.