Piano Books

Maud Powell (August 22, 1867 January 8, 1920) IMHO the best American violinist. MAUD POWELL – A Pioneer’s Legacy by Karen A. Shaffer (edited to fit) Maud Powell was born on August 22, 1867, in Peru, Illinois, on the western frontier in the American heartland. Her grandparents had been Methodist missionaries in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois before the Civil War. Her father William Bramwell Powell was an innovative educator; superintendent of the public schools in Peru, then Aurora, IL, and finally Washington, DC Her mother Minnie Paul Powell was a pianist and composer whose gender precluded a career. Minnie and Bramwell’s sisters were active in the woman’s suffrage movement. Maud’s uncle John Wesley Powell, Civil War hero and explorer of the Grand Canyon, organized the scientific study of the western lands and the native Indians as the powerful director of the US Geological Survey and Bureau of Ethnology and founder of the National Geographic Society. A prodigy, Powell began violin and piano study in Aurora, Illinois, then studied violin four years with William Lewis in Chicago, to whom she “owed the most.” She completed her training with Europe’s greatest masters — Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles Dancla in Paris, and Joseph Joachim in Berlin. Returning to the United States knowing that “girl violinists were looked upon with suspicion,” Powell boldly walked into a rehearsal of the all-male New York Philharmonic in Steinway Hall and demanded a hearing from Theodore …

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