Walter Hautzig Collection

Walter Hautzig was born in Vienna on September 28, 1921. He was able to escape Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 when an audition won him a fellowship grant to study at the Jerusalem Conservatory. He immigrated to the United States in 1939, where he studied at the Curtis Institute of Music. His principal teachers were Mieczyslaw Munz and Artur Schnabel. He has played concerts in more than 50 countries worldwide, earning particular acclaim in Japan, where he has also recorded extensively. In 1979 he was chosen by the State Department to be the first concert artist from the United States to perform in the People's Republic of China after the normalization of relations between the two countries. His recitals in Peking were heard by approximately 900 million people via radio and television. His playing is known to American record collectors through discs issued by Haydn Society, United Artists, Vox, Monitor, Connoisseur Society and Americus. Hautzig's extensive repertoire has emphasized the Viennese classicists as well as Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and various Russian and Latin-American composers. For many years, Hautzig was a faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory. He also formed a long-term musical partnership with cellist Paul Olefsky, with whom he has often played sonatas of Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert. Walter Hautzig died on January 30, 2017.