Germaine Schnitzer
Germaine Schnitzer was a French-born pianist based in New York.
Early life
Germaine Alice Schnitzer was born in Paris and studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris, with further training under Raoul Pugno and with Emil von Sauer at the Vienna Conservatory. She was sometimes referred to as "Viennese", and while in Vienna won a prize for music from the Austrian government.Musical career
Schnitzer was a pianist with a busy concert career in North America and Europe. She played in New York with the Russian Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, toured Holland, and toured in Russia until she sprained her ankle, all during 1908 and 1909. She played a dual recital with American violinist Francis MacMillen at Carnegie Hall in 1916. She gave a series of recitals in New York in 1920, before embarking on a European tour. The tour was cut short when she returned to New York to be with her husband during a hospitalization. She toured in Europe again in 1922.She received wide critical praise for her technique and interpretation of the romantic composers, especially Robert Schumann. Another reviewer was less enthusiastic, calling her "solid and substantial" performance "massive even ponderous and lacking an emotional basis". She affirmed that technique was her emphasis: "I do not believe that a public performer is best served by giving himself up entirely to the emotional phase of his expression, since he is almost surely to fall into rhythmic and other excess which may mar the more worthy element of clarity," she told an interviewer in 1920. She was interviewed for a chapter in Harriette Moore Brower's Piano Mastery. Schnitzer recorded several piano rolls for Ampico.