Lili Kraus

Lili Kraus (Hungarian: Kraus Lili, April 3, 1903 – November 6, 1986) was a Hungarian-born British pianist.

Biography

Lili Kraus was born in Budapest in 1903. Her father was from Czech Lands, and her mother from an assimilated Jewish Hungarian family.

She enrolled at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, and at the age of 17 entered the Budapest Conservatory where she studied with Artur Schnabel, Zoltán Kodály, and Béla Bartók. In the 1930s, she continued her studies with Severin Eisenberger, Eduard Steuermann and Schnabel, who focused her interest in the classical tradition.

Lili Kraus soon became known as a specialist in Mozart and Beethoven. Her early chamber music performances and recording with violinist Szymon Goldberg helped gain the critical acclaim that launched her international career. In the 1930s, she toured Europe, Japan, Australia and South Africa. In 1942, Kraus embarked on a tour of Asia where, while in Java, she and her family were captured and interned by the Japanese until the end of World War II.

After the war, she became a New Zealander (formally a British subject) and resumed her career, touring extensively and eventually settling in the United States. In the early 1950s she performed the entire Beethoven sonata cycle with violinist Henri Temianka. From 1967 to 1983, she was artist-in-residence at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She made her home in Asheville, North Carolina, where she died in 1986.

Her husband was Jewish (later converted to Catholicism) Austrian philosopher and patron Otto Mandl (b. 1889).

Links

• http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Kraus-Lili.htm Bio
• European Archive Copyright free LP recording of Lili Kraus playing two Haydn piano sonatas at the European Archive (for non-American viewers only).
• http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Kraus-Lili.htm
• http://www.naxos.com/artistinfo/lili_kraus/13511.htm

References

See also: Kraus