Cécile Staub Genhart

Cécile Staub was born in December 1898 in Basel, Switzerland. She was the youngest of three daughters of Fannie (née Häusler) and Gottfried Staub, a piano professor at Basel Conservatory.[1][2] Her family moved to Zürich when she was 15 years old. At the Zürich Conservatory, she studied with Volkmar Andreae.[3] She was later educated at the Munich Royal Academy.[4]

She studied independently with the Swiss composer Emil Frey in Zürich,[3] and also studied with Eugen d'Albert, Edwin Fischer, and Tobias Matthay.[2] While some sources state that she studied with Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni,[5] she only visited him occasionally to discuss composition and music.[3]

Genhart's solo debut was in 1922 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1922.[6] She also made concert debuts in Munich and in Zürich with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. She met Hermann Genhart, one of her father's students in Zürich. The two married and moved to the United States.[2][3]

Genhart's husband joined the Eastman School of Music faculty in 1924. She received a full-time appointment as a member of the school's piano faculty in 1926.[5] She gave a recital on February 5, 1927, at Steinway Hall that was written up in the New York Times, which called it "a program of uncommon taste and a performance of unexpected vigor".[7] She was also responsible for the introduction of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 to Rochester, New York.[5] A Journal of the American Liszt Society review named her as one of the finest pianists in the United States.[6]

Genhart taught for over 40 years at Eastman. She headed the faculty for piano at the school from 1954 until her retirement in 1971.[8] Among her students were Robert Silverman, Ernesto Lejano, Anne Koscielny, Aiko Onishi,[3] Barry Snyder,[6] Bradford Gowen, Joseph Fennimore, John Perry, Janice Weber, and Stewart L. Gordon.[2] Gordon wrote his doctoral dissertation, "Cecile Staub Genhart; her biography and her concepts of piano playing" in 1965.[9][1] In 1974, she donated approximately $50,000 to establish a piano scholarship fund at the Eastman School of Music.[8]

Genhart died in 1983. A portrait of her hangs in the Cominsky Promenade of the Eastman School of Music.[6]

• Elder, Dean (November 1973). "Cécile Genhart Talks to Dean Elder," Clavier, 17–24; reprinted under the same title in Dean Elder, Pianists at Play: Interviews, Master Lessons, and Technical Regimes (Northfield, IL: The Instrumentalist Co., 1982; reprint, London: Kahn and Averill, 1986), 264–271.