Rudolf Serkin

Pianist, born in Cheb, W Czech Republic (formerly Eger, Austria). He studied composition with Schoenberg in Vienna, and made his debut there in 1915. He settled in the USA in 1939, and directed the Curtis Institute, Philadelphia (1968–76). He founded the Marlboro School of Music (1949) and the Marlboro Music Festival (1950).

He began a regular concert career in 1920, living in Berlin with violinist Adolf Busch and his family, which included the then three-year-old daughter Irene whom Serkin would marry 15 years later. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Serkin performed throughout Europe both as soloist and with Busch and the Busch Quartet. With the rise of Hitler in Germany, Serkin and the Busches left Germany first for Vienna, and then after the Anschluss, for Switzerland.

In 1935 Serkin made his first United States appearance at the Coolidge Festival in Washington, DC.

Seeing the war approaching, the Serkins and Busches emigrated to the United States in 1939. Serkin took the post of Director of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he taught many of today's finest pianists until 1978, and in addition to homes there and later in New York, the extended family settled on a dairy farm in rural Guilford, Vermont. After the war, Serkin and Adolf Busch founded the Marlboro Music School and Festival near Brattleboro, Vermont, and Rudolf made many solo recordings with Columbia in the 1940s.

Serkin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and, in March 1972, he celebrated his 100th appearance with the New York Philharmonic by playing Brahms's Piano Concerto No. The orchestra also named Serkin an honorary member of the Philharmonic's Symphony Society of New York, an elite musical society that includes Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Hindemith.

Revered as a musician's musician and a father figure to a legion of younger players who came to the Marlboro Festival, he toured all over the world and continued his solo career and recording activities until illness prevented further work in 1989.

He and Irene were the parents of six children (one of whom died in infancy), including pianist Peter Serkin.