Lili Boulanger was born in Paris in 1893, and died in 1918 at the tender young age of 24. She was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome composition prize. She sang and played piano, cello, violin, and harp. She and her sister, Nadia, organized efforts to support French soldiers during World War I. She suffered from a case of bronchial pneumonia at age 2 that weakened her immune system, leading to intestinal tuberculosis and possibly Crohn’s disease, which ended her life at age 24. Much of Boulanger’s music reveals her own struggles with depression and loneliness caused by her long-term illness. Her music influenced the composer Arthur Honegger. The asteroid 1181 Lilith was named in her honor. The Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund was established to perpetuate the memory of her and her music, and to financially support talented musicians.
Shirley Verrett was born in New Orleans in 1931. She trained as a mezzo-soprano at the Juilliard School, and made her debut at New York City Opera in 1958. She made her first recordings and her European debut in Cologne in 1959, and in 1961, she won The Met’s Laffont Competition—previously known as the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. In 1962, she made her debut with the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and appeared in the first televised concert from Lincoln Center. In 1963, she made her debut at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow, and in 1964, began recording for RCA. She made her Covent Garden debut in 1966 at London’s Royal Opera House, and made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1968 as Carmen. That year, Verrett was named “New Artist of the Month” by Musical America. The following year, she made her La Scala debut.
In 1973, she made operatic history when she sang both roles of Cassandra and Didon in Berlioz’s epic, Les Troyens at the Met. In 1976, she achieved the rare accomplishment of adding soprano roles to her mezzo-soprano repertoire, such as Tosca and Norma, which was her favorite role. In 1996, Verrett joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. In 2003, her memoir written with Christopher Brooks, I Never Walked Alone, The Autobiography of an American Singer, was released, and became a national best seller. In it, she spoke frankly about the racism she encountered as a Black person in the American classical music world. For example, when Leopold Stokowski invited her to sing with the Houston Symphony in the early 1960s, he had to rescind the invitation because the orchestra board refused to accept a black soloist.
Verrett died at age 79 in 2010 from heart failure. She was the recipient of several honorary doctorates and numerous awards, including Commander of The Order of Arts and Letters award by the French government. The Shirley Verrett award was established at the University of Michigan in 2011.
Jacqueline du Pré was born in England in 1945 to English parents. Her mother was a pianist and piano teacher, and Jackie’s first accompanist. When Jackie was just 4 years old, she first heard the cello on a radio broadcast, and immediately said to her mom: “This is the sound I want to make.”
At age 15, she won the Queen’s Prize competition where the violinist Yehudi Menuhin first heard her. He said: “To this day I can recall the elation she brought me with the excitement of her own joy and intoxication with the music.” Jackie also went to Paris where she took master classes with Paul Tortelier, and lived for six months in Moscow, where she studied with Mstislav Rostropovich.
When she was 13, Jackie began studying Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and first performed it with at age 14 at London’s Albert Hall. She already possessed an astonishing understanding of Elgar’s music, and it was this concerto that became her specialty, and which she performed more than any other.
It is a nostalgic work, looking back at the fading past, with exhaustion after the ‘war to end all wars’. Written in 1918 and 1919, Elgar saw 1918 as the end of a civilization. It is his last important composition, and expresses personal grief and bitterness. We can hear the composer trying to seek consolation in memories of a better past.
When she was 22, Jackie met the Argentinian-Israeli pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim. They concertized and recorded both as a cello and piano team, and with the world’s leading orchestras as cellist and conductor. They fell in love and decided to marry. In June of 1967, on the eve of the Arab-Israeli Six–Day War, they traveled to Israel and played concerts for the troops. Right after the war, Jackie converted, and they were married.
Jacqueline du Pré stopped playing the cello when she was 28 years old, a victim of multiple sclerosis. She died at the age of 42 after 14 years of unremitting illness.
Fanny Mendelssohn, born in 1805, in Hamburg, Germany, was Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, and a talented composer in her own right, though her work was often overshadowed by her brother’s fame. Unfortunately, her patriarchal father refused to permit her music to be published under her name. In fact, some of her music was actually published under her brother Felix’s name. Despite society’s constraints limiting women’s roles in music, she composed over 460 works, including piano pieces, songs, and chamber music. Fanny was closely involved in her brother’s career, providing support and critique, and her salon performances were influential in the musical circles of Berlin. Here’s the ending of her String Quartet arranged for string orchestra by Malin Broman, performed by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.
Philippa Schuyler was born in Harlem in 1931. She was the only child of a prominent black journalist and a white Texan heiress. Schuyler knew the alphabet at 19 months, and was able to read and write at the age of 2. At age 4, she was playing the music of Mozart and Schumann, and began to compose. Schuyler won her first gold medal at age 4 from the National Guild of Piano Teachers. Her IQ at the age of 6 was 185. Schuyler won 8 consecutive prizes from the New York Philharmonic, and won gold medals from the Global Music Education League and from the City of New York. Schuyler’s radio concerts attracted significant press coverage and the admiration of New York’s mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who declared June 19, 1940 Philippa Duke Schuyler Day at the New York World’s Fair, where she performed two concerts.
By the age of 14, she had composed 200 compositions. and was touring constantly in the United States and overseas. At age 15, she graduated from high school and performed with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium, and then continued her studies at Manhattanville College. She became a role model for many children in the United States.
In later life, Schuyler grew disillusioned with the racial and gender prejudice she encountered in the United States, and chose a voluntary exile of performing only in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Europe. She played at the inauguration of three successive presidents of Haiti, and in Africa, she performed for several heads of state. As a writer, five of her non-fiction books were published, as well as more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles internationally. She spoke English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Although Schuyler engaged in a number of affairs, she never married.
In 1966, she traveled to Vietnam to perform for the troops and various Vietnamese groups. She returned to Vietnam in 1967 as a war correspondent, and served as a missionary when she was killed in an army helicopter crash during a mission to evacuate Vietnamese orphans. 2,000 mourners attended her funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Schuyler’s mother was profoundly affected by her death, and committed suicide a few days before the second anniversary of her daughter’s death.
Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She gave her first piano performance at the age of four, and had her first composition published at age 11. She graduated with honors from the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953.
Price was the first African-American woman whose music was played by a major orchestra. She composed over 300 works, including 4 symphonies, 4 concertos, numerous choral works, art songs, chamber music, and music for solo instruments.
Florence Price had many challenges. A single mom, at one point she and her 3 kids were nearly homeless.
Outside of the reach of her immediate circle, her music was neglected for many decades, though she repeatedly tried to interest conductors in her music. In a letter to Serge Koussevitsky, then the conductor of the Boston Symphony, she wrote: ”I have two handicaps – those of sex and race.” More than half a century after her death, in 2009, a substantial collection of her compositions and papers was found in the attic of what had once been her summer home.
The pianist Michelle Cann is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and has performed concertos with numerous orchestras throughout the world. As a faculty member of the Curtis Institute of Music, she holds the distinguished Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in piano studies. She is a champion of the music of Florence Price, a great, but neglected African–American composer of the 20th century. Michelle Cann performed the New York City premiere of the Price’s Piano Concerto in 2016, and the Philadelphia premiere in 2021.
Born in 1960, the Norwegian conductor Greta Pedersen is one of the most renowned conductors in the international choral scene. She is the founder of the Oslo Chamber Choir, and since 1990, has been Music Director of the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir, whose recordings have won several international awards.
She is in great demand as a guest conductor, and has worked with choirs and orchestras in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, and Japan. In 2023, she was appointed Artistic Director of the Carmel Bach Festival in California.
A student of Norwegian folk music, she is a pioneer in bringing folk music to new settings, and she is also an advocate for new music.
Grete Pedersen She completed her postgraduate studies in conducting at the Norwegian State Academy of Music in Oslo, where she is now a professor of conducting. In 2019, she was appointed Knight 1st Class of the Royal Norwegian St. Olavs Order, and received the distinguished Lindeman Prize to honor her significant contribution to the musical life of Norway. I have the utmost respect for her conducting, and when watching her conduct, her humility is quite unusual and moving.
Maria Callas was born in New York City in 1923. Her teacher Elvira de Hidalgo said: “She put such force, such sentiment, such wonderful interpretation into all she sang. She would want to sing all the most difficult coloraturas, scales, and trills. Even as a child, her willpower was terrific. She had a phenomenal memory, and could learn the most difficult opera in eight days”.
A friend remarked: “She practiced so hard and so intensively…that she would often spend more than ten hours a day practicing, which left her dead tired.”
Her mother recalled: “She practiced day and night and sometimes forgot to eat. Maria would refuse to leave her piano for meals, and I would bring them to her in her room. She would put the plate in her lap and go on working.”
Tulio Serafin, who had conducted her debut at the arena in Verona, hired her in Venice to sing Tristan und Isolde first, and then a year later, Die Walküre. In the midst of the series of performances of Die Walküre, the soprano who was to sing Bellini’s bel canto opera, I Puritani, became ill, and Serafin decided that Callas would replace her, despite the completely different kind of voice required for the role. Amazingly, Callas learned Puritani in just one week while she continued performing Die Walküre! This feat earned her a ton of publicity and people have been marveling at her accomplishment ever since.
Callas married a successful Italian businessman, Giovanni Battista Meneghini in 1949. He was 28 yrs older than her. Meneghini gave up his interests in his family’s business to invest in and manage her budding career full time.
Callas wanted to do dramatic justice to the roles she played, so she decided to lose weight. When Callas saw Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, she decided that that was her standard. She lost eighty pounds in less than a year. Suddenly she became glamorous!
As her career became that of a super star, she attracted the attention of the billionaire, Aristotle Onasis. They fell in love, then she left her husband of ten years, and began a widely publicized affair with Onassis, who was also married. He was 23 years her senior. The Law of Cause and Effect is very strict, because nine years later, Onassis left her and married Jackie Kennedy. Eight years before her death, Callas said to a close friend: “I started dying when I met this man and gave up music.” Not long after this, Callas’s voice deteriorated to the point where she had to stop singing in public.
Having stopped singing in public, and with no one to share her love, Callas became incredibly depressed. She became addicted to sleeping pills, and during her last years, she isolated herself, living with two servants in her Paris apartment. She could no longer sustain her interest in living. Her last public performance was in Tokyo, on the world tour with Giuseppe DiStefano. Three years later she died of a heart attack at the young age of 53.
KYUNG WHA CHUNG, born in 1948, is a South Korean violinist. She is also among the first of the women violinists, born after WW II, who have reaped benefits from the efforts of the pioneering women we have already discussed.
Chung began violin lessons at age 7, and within two years, became recognized as a prodigy after playing the Mendelssohn Concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic. As she and her talented siblings, who all (or also) played instruments, became well-known in Korea, Chung’s mother decided to move to the United States to further their musical education and careers. At age 13, Chung arrived in the United States, and was enrolled in the Juilliard School, where she studied with the eminent violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian.
In 1967, Chung and Pinchas Zuckerman were joint winners of the prestigious Leventritt Competition. This prize opened the door to several engagements with the Chicago Symphony and The New York Philharmonic, and a 1967 television debut on the Ed Sullivan Show one week before her appearance with the NY Philharmonic. In 1970, Chung substituted for Nathan Milstein at a White House performance, and later for Itzhak Perlman with the London Symphony Orchestra. These successes led to many other engagements and recording contracts. While in Europe, Chung continued music studies with the great Joseph Szigetti.
In 2007, Chung joined the faculty of the Juilliard School in both the Music and Pre-College Divisions, where she continues to develop and train future violinists. Illness and injury halted her performing career in 2008, but she continued teaching. Her most recent live performance was in London at the Royal Festival Hall in December 2014.
Martha Argerich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941 to a Catalan father and a Jewish mother. She is widely considered to be one of the greatest pianists of all time. She began kindergarten before she was three and began piano lessons at three. Argerich is an astounding virtuoso.
She speaks Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, and Portuguese, has lived in Argentina, Belgium, Switzerland, and France, and holds citizenships in Switzerland and Argentina. Argerich is the recipient of several Grammy awards, was voted into Gramophone’s Hall of Fame, and is a recipient of the Kennedy Center honors. Itzhak Perlman payed tribute to her at the Kennedy Center Honors.
Dalia Stasevska is one of the most stratospherically ascendant musicians in classical music today. Born in Ukraine in 1984, she holds the post of the Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The 2025/26 season features concerts with the New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, as well as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg, the Vienna Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Deutsches- Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Czech Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, as well as the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic orchestra.
Her recent orchestral engagements have spanned a distinguished array of ensembles, including performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Dresdner Philharmonie, and the Orchestre de Paris. She has also made notable debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Orchestra, Choir, and Children’s Voices of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and the New World Symphony, among others.
Dalia was named the “European of the Year” in 2025 by the board of European Movement Finland. In April 2024, she was featured on the cover of the Gramophone magazine, and in December of 2023, Dalia was named one of The New York Times’ “Breakout Stars of 2023”. She was also granted BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Personality of the Year’ Award in 2023, the 2022 Alfred Kordelin Prize winner, the 2020 recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Conductor Award, and had the honor of conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the Nobel Prize Ceremony in Stockholm 2018.
Dalia was bestowed the Order of Princess Olga of the III degree by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in October 2021 for her significant personal contribution to the development of international cooperation, strengthening the prestige of Ukraine internationally, and popularization of its historical and cultural heritage. Since February 2022, Dalia has been outspoken in her support of Ukraine, speaking about it publicly, while also personally delivering aid to the front lines and conducting concerts in Ukraine.
Barbra Streisand, singer, writer, producer, director, actress, composer, designer, photographer and activist. She was born to Jewish parents on April 24, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York!
In 1963, she recorded The Barbra Streisand Album, her 1st, which rose to the top 10 on the Billboard chart, and won 3 Grammy awards, resulting in her becoming the best-selling female vocalist in the country.
Streisand has spoken of being proud to be Jewish, and described herself as “a Jewess through and through, although I’m not religious.”
Her first four TV specials were televised between 1965 and 1968. Also in 1968, she won an Academy Award for best actress for her performance in the movie Funny Girl. In 1969, she starred in the movie Hello Dolly with Walter Matthau.
In 1973 Streisand, co-starred in The Way We Were with Robert Redford. Its theme song, The Way We Were, won an Academy Award, became a million-selling gold single, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Her 2nd academy award was in 1976 for best original song for her song Evergreen in the movie A Star is Born. Her 1st efforts as producer, director and star was in 1983 for the movie Yentl, which received 5 Academy Award nominations.
Streisand has recorded 50 albums. By the 70s, she was named the most successful female singer in the U.S. She’s also the highest-paid singer in history. She is the only recording artist whose albums became #1 in each of the past 6 decades. In fact, she has recorded 52 gold albums and 31 platinum albums.
Barbra Streisand is the recipient of the Israel Freedom Medal, the Scopus Award of the American Friends of the Hebrew University, honorary doctorate degrees from Brandeis University. and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, the 1st Annual Jewish Image Award, the Legion of Honor, and the Kennedy Center Honors. Billboard magazine ranked her as the top female Jewish musician of all time. The movie, Funny Girl, was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry, and the song, People, was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.
She was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Long Island Music Hall of Fame, and the National Museum of American Jewish History. She has been nominated for 43 Grammy awards, and has won 8 of them. She is also the recipient of 2 Academy Awards and 2 Oscars. She’s created 17 TV specials, and of the 19 movies she’s made, she directed 3 of them, which received 14 Oscar nominations. She is the recipient of the Grammy Legend Award and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame 4 times. She is the honorary chairwoman of the board of directors of Hadassah’s International Research Institute on Women.
MIDORI GOTO, a Japanese/American violinist known simply as Midori, was born in Osaka, Japan in 1971. Her lessons on violin began at age 3 with her mother who was a professional violinist. By the age of 6, Midori attracted attention by publicly performing one of Paganini’s Caprices. Shortly thereafter, Midori and her mother moved to New York City, and she was enrolled in the Pre-College Division of the Juilliard School of Music and began studies with the noted teacher, Dorothy Delay, who taught Itzhak Perlman. In 1982, at age 11, Midori made a surprise debut at a New Year’s Eve Gala with the New York Philharmonic, and in 1986 came her legendary Tanglewood performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade – an event that made front page headlines in the New York Times.
In 1987, after four years of study, Midori left Juilliard and embarked on a full-time career as a professional artist. As an adult, she is considered as one of the world’s preeminent violinists and has been honored as an educator for her community endeavors.
When she was 21, she established her foundation “Midori and Friends” to bring music education to young people in under-served communities in New York City and Japan, which has evolved into an organization with worldwide impact. In 2007, Midori was appointed as a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In that role, she performed in recitals and as soloist with major orchestras internationally. In 2018, Midori joined the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music, and she also is holder of the Jascha Heifetz Chair as a professor at the University of Southern California.
Midori has received many accolades and awards including: the John D. Rockefeller III Award by the Asian Cultural Council, the Avery Fischer Prize, the Kennedy Center Gold Medal in the Arts, and she was an honoree at the Kennedy Center.
For more than half a century, Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States. Ella was born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia. When she was 17, Ella won the opportunity to compete in amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Ella was shy and reserved, self-conscious about her appearance, and for a while, even doubted her abilities. On stage, Ella felt at home and had no fear. She said: “Once up there, I felt the acceptance and love from my audience. I knew I wanted to sing before people the rest of my life.”
She was only 18 when she made her very first recording: Love and Kisses. Ella always suffered from performance anxiety before going on stage, and no matter how famous and beloved she was, she always had self-doubt. Ella never turned to drugs nor alcohol to relieve stress; she turned to food. Ella gained a lot of weight, and it was a problem that she battled throughout her life, alternately dieting and going on eating binges.
The most important thing to her was music and performing. Between 1956 and 1964, Fitzgerald recorded her incredibly popular songbook series, which included songs by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and Rogers and Hart. Her legendary album, The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook, includes 53 Gershwin songs. Even though it is a 5-record set, it sold more than 100,000 copies in its first 60 days. Ira Gershwin said: “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.”
She was a favorite and frequent guest on many TV shows including the Bing Crosby Show, the Dinah Shore Show, the Frank Sinatra Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, the Tonight Show, the Nat King Cole Show, the Andy Williams Show, and the Dean Martin Show.
Two years before her death, another of her biographers, Geoffrey Fidelman, wrote: “She was a legend who is still nervous about being good enough. Ella never really accepted the fact that she was so popular, or that she was unconditionally loved from the moment she walked on stage. Humble as ever, when she received another Grammy award in 1991, she said to a friend: “They’re just giving it to me ‘cause I’m old and still around.”
Ella Fitzgerald died in her home from a stroke in 1996. She was 79. The majority of her media and memorabilia is at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. She recorded well over 200 records, and during her lifetime sold over 40 million albums. The Cole Porter songbook and the two My Fair Lady albums became the largest-selling record albums in history. She was inducted into the DownBeat Magazine Hall of Fame, and is the recipient of 13 Grammy awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Grammy Hall of Fame Award, honorary membership in the nation’s oldest and largest African-American sorority, Alpha, Kappa, Alpha, the first New York City Cultural Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, France’s Commander of Arts and Letters Award, the Peabody Medal, the UCLA Medal for Musical Achievements, the NAACP Image Award for Lifetime Achievement, the first Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award named the “Ella” in her honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, the University of Southern California Magnum Opus Award, and honorary doctorates from Talladega, Howard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale and Harvard universities.
In 1947, Ella began helping orphaned and disadvantaged children, an act of compassion that continued for the rest of her life. In her later years, her main social concern was fighting against child-abuse, for which she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through annual benefits that featured many popular entertainers. She sang for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to benefit international refugees from various wars, plagues, and political struggles. She also performed to raise money for the Retina Foundation. In 1968 she accepted the honorary chairmanship of the Martin Luther King Foundation, and in 1974, she sang with the Boston Pops and Arthur Fiedler to benefit the Retire Association.
She supported the Dream Street Foundation, that provides camping experience for children with life-threatening diseases. In 1990 at Lincoln Center, a star studded show raised money for the American Heart Association to establish the Ella Fitzgerald Research Fellowship. She also supported the City of Hope organization, dedicated to cancer research, treatment and prevention. In 1993, Fitzgerald established the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation focusing on academic opportunities for children, music education, basic care needs for the less fortunate, and medical research of diabetes, heart disease, and vision impairment.
She always did her charity work very quietly, shunning publicity. Almost no one knew of her work with inner-city youth in Los Angeles, or of her help to children everywhere. Many of her hundreds of concerts per year were sung either gratis or at greatly reduced fees to benefit children.
Ella defied the traditional expectations of a black person in a predominantly white society. She endured discrimination with dignity, and she was acknowledged as a legend in her own lifetime. She once said:
“It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.”