Marguerite Melville Liszniewska Collection

The Marguerite Melville Liszniewska Collection at IPAM houses an envelope filled with photographs of Marguerite Melville and her family, as well as a large scrapbook, containing photographs, performance files, and papers compiled by Bertha Azora Olsen Hughes, a friend of Melville from her student days in Berlin. Marguerite Melville Liszniewska Collection Marguerite Melville was an American pianist, composer, and teacher. She was born in New York to a musical family; her father, Charles Melville, was an organist, singer, and composer, and her mother, Mary Theresa Hughes Melville, was an opera singer. Melville’s brother was a multi-instrumentalist, and her paternal grandfather was a piano maker in Glasgow, Scotland. Melville studied piano and composition with Ernst Jedliczka and O.B. Boise in Berlin at the age of 15. Following the death of Jedliczka, Melville traveled to Vienna to study with and work for Theodor Leschetizky. She was a devoted student of his, and eventually became his assistant.

As a performing pianist, Melville played regularly in Europe and the United States. She debuted publicly in Berlin in 1897, and made her London debut in 1910, playing under Sir Henry Wood several times throughout her career. She gave a number of charity and aid benefit concerts, including one in Vienna in which she shared the program with Pablo Casals. Melville toured across the United States from 1915-1917, winning acclaim; she was eventually asked to perform for Calvin Coolidge at the White House in 1926.

As a composer, several of Marguerite Melville’s works still survive today, the most significant of which being the Piano Quintet in E minor, op. 8. She wrote several additional chamber pieces, including a Romance for violin and piano and a Violin Sonata. Melville also wrote several songs for voice and piano, entitled Einkehr, Die Wasserrose, and Wehmut. In 1908, Melville married Polish pianist Karol Liszniewski; the two settled in Cincinatti, Ohio, in 1920. Melville taught at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music until her death in 1935.