Maria Curcio

Maria Curcio was an Italian-British pianist and outstanding music teacher. She was born in Naples, Italy, on 27 August 1918 and died in Porto, Portugal, on 30 March 2009.

Her father was Italian, and her mother, a pianist, was of Brazilian-Jewish origin. Curcio began playing the piano at the age of three. She studied with Carlo Zecchi, Alfredo Casella, and Nadia Boulanger, and also took private lessons with Artur Schnabel, whom she regarded above all as her teacher and whose tradition she considered herself to continue.

In the 1930s she began her concert career. She performed with the violinist Szymon Goldberg and accompanied the singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. She became close to Schnabel's secretary Peter Diamand, later an important music administrator, and from the second half of the 1930s she lived with him in the Netherlands. They married in 1948.

During the war, Diamand, as a Jew, was arrested by the Nazi authorities and sent to a concentration camp, from which he managed to escape before spending a long period in hiding. Because of wartime malnutrition and tuberculosis, Curcio developed a disorder affecting her mobility and was unable to walk or perform in public. As a result, she concentrated on her teaching career.

In the second half of the 1950s her health recovered, and she returned to public performance, giving her last appearance in 1963. From 1965 she lived and worked in the United Kingdom, where her husband directed the Edinburgh music festival. She was friends with the singer Peter Pears and with Benjamin Britten, who helped the couple move to London, and she often played piano four hands with Britten.

Curcio and Diamand divorced in 1971. She spent the last years of her life in Porto. According to Michael Church, music critic of The Independent, few people outside the world of classical music had heard of Maria Curcio, but within that world she was a legend: Schnabel's favorite pupil, the muse of Rafael Orozco and Radu Lupu, and an incomparable mentor and guardian of young talent.

Most of Curcio's students studied with her privately. Among them were Leon Fleisher, Barry Douglas, Rafael Orozco, Martha Argerich, Radu Lupu, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Myung-whun Chung, Marie-Josèphe Jude, Mitsuko Uchida, José Feghali, Alfredo Perl, Sergio Tiempo, Yevgeny Sudbin, and Ashley Wass. Ignat Solzhenitsyn also studied with her; according to his father Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he was enthralled by his lessons with Maria Curcio. Her work as a teacher was the subject of Douglas Ashley's 1993 book Music Beyond Sound: Maria Curcio, a Teacher of Great Pianists.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.