Martinus Sieveking

Martinus Sieveking (March 24, 1867 – November 26, 1950) was a Dutch virtuoso pianist, composer, teacher and inventor born in Amsterdam. Also known as Martin Sieveking, he performed as a soloist around Europe] and the United States during his active career and taught in France and the U.S. after he retired from performing. He is sometimes referred to as The Flying Dutchman due to his Dutch heritage and extremely flighty nature. At the peak of his career, he was pronounced by the New York and Boston critics as one of the four greatest living pianists of that time along with Ignace Paderewski, Moriz Rosenthal and Rafael Joseffy. He was also an inventor of both musical and non-musical devices that he had patented in various countries.

Early life Sieveking came from an old and aristocratic family, which dated its ancestry back to the fifteenth century. He grew up in a musical atmosphere, as his mother Johanna De Jong was a well-known opera singer and his father, also named Martinus, was a trained musician, choral conductor and a composer with published works in the Netherlands. He was the second in a family of four; his older sibling was named Johanna like his mother, and Martinus was followed by Charles, then Rosa.

From his early childhood he showed characteristics indicative of being a great musician. In addition to playing piano Martinus also started composing at an early age and played the organ in a church by age twelve. Eventually his family sent him to the Leipzig Conservatory.

Musical career

His first international appearance was in Paris in 1888 when, at the age of twenty-one, he heard his own composition, a suite for orchestra, played by the Lamoureux Orchestra. He resided in Paris in 1889 and became one of the number of Dutch musicians that were based in the city.

He visited England in 1890 upon the suggestion of his uncle, Sir Edward Henry Sieveking, who was well known in London and was one of the physicians of Queen Victoria.

Tour with Sandow, 1893

On June 6, 1893, he came to the United States aboard the SS Elbe. He arrived in New York City with his friend, the famous physical culturist and bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, as his accompanist for his stage performances. Sandow had met Sieveking years before during his tour of Belgium and the Netherlands. According to Sandow, Sieveking was a brilliant artist, but as a man he was a weakling. He had no powers of endurance, and it was difficult for him to remain at the piano for a long time. Upon Sandow's suggestion, Sieveking became a pupil and his guest while in America. Martinus wrote music and conducted for Sandow's vaudeville acts, when he toured New York City, Boston, and at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1893–95 Following his stint with Sandow in 1893, he stayed and established himself in Chicago as a private piano teacher, but the city was overrun with piano teachers. Around this time Willard Kimball, the former head of the Iowa Conservatory of Music (now Grinell College), was about to open a music conservatory in Lincoln, Nebraska in connection with the University of Nebraska. He was in search of a first-class piano teacher and was referred to Sieveking. Coincidentally Sieveking was low in funds and generally "down on his luck." Kimball offered him $6,000 a year, with various perquisites, and the desperate young man recklessly signed a three-year contract without even stopping to investigate the position. Sieveking started teaching in the latter part of 1893 at the university's School of Music in Lincoln, Nebraska, which then became the Conservatory of Music in 1894.

The practical, bustling west proved a prison of the dreariest description to the artist. Only the women there have time to study music, he thought. Of these, he found that few had any talent, and the eccentric, temperamental pianist frankly told them so whenever he felt inclined to do so. His nerves began to break down.

He was scheduled to return to Lincoln on September 1 of that year to resume his duties in connection with the conservatory, but Sieveking never returned to the school and returned to Europe instead, breaking his contract.

American tour, 1895 and 1896–97

He returned to the United States for a brief concert tour in the winter of 1895, arriving in New York City on October 21, 1895, aboard the La Champagne departing from Havre, Norway. He gave a celebrated concert in Boston with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on December 7, 1895, where he played again Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 2. His reception amounted to an ovation. Enthusiasm run to such a height that at the first concert, the pianist had seven recalls, and at the second, eight.

Following this success he returned in the fall of 1896 with four consecutive performances on October 21, 23, 24 and 28 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Among the other cities he performed in was Cumberland, Maryland on November 11, 1896, at the Saints Peter and Paul Church. He gave a solo piano recital at Carnegie Hall, New York City, on December 8, 1896, followed by a performance in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Grand Opera House on December 17 with violinist Maud Powell.

On February 8, 1897, he performed in Columbus, Ohio, at the newly built Southern Fireproof Theater with local soprano Lillian Miller. He gave a solo piano recital at the Academy of Music in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on March 2, 1897, and again on November 18, 1897. He was managed for his American tour by music impresario Victor Thrane of Chicago.

Vienna, 1898 After completing his tour of the U.S. Sieveking felt unsatisfied with his latest performances and felt that he still needed to improve. He traveled to Vienna, Austria, the following year and sought the help of Theodor Leschetizky regarding his repertoire. The professor took a great interest in him and out of a class of ninety, he became one of his six favorites. The other five were Mark Hambourg, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Katharine Goodson, Artur Schnabel and Ethel Newcomb.

Sieveking also met a younger woman in Austria named Therese (born April 13, 1881) who later became his wife. The couple were married in Dover, Kent, England, in June, 1899. A daughter was born to the couple in Vienna on October 15, 1900, named Senta Therese Sieveking.

American tour, 1900–01 After canceling an American tour scheduled for 1899 he did return to the US in the middle of October 1900 for another tour in the winter of 1900–1901. Some of his engagements included a performance at Washington, D.C., where he played the American premiere of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Rachmaninoff on December 16, 1900. He gave a piano recital at the Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York on January 9, 1901.

Return to France Martinus, his wife, and his daughter returned to France sometime in the following years. They had a son, Leonard, born in 1905 in St. Brio, France.

While perfecting his technique method, he retired from performing and taught in France. Many of his talented students won the Premier Prix in Paris. He was known to teach those with talent even if they were unable to pay. He also used this time to both compose and transcribe music for the piano;

After five years of retirement, he came out in 1907 for a concert in Berlin.

Return to America With the purpose of teaching and spreading the system he developed, he returned to America arriving in New York City on January 30, 1916, aboard the SS Rotterdam departing from Rotterdam. His plan included concertizing, composing and publishing his works in the United States. His original intention was to return to Paris after accomplishing his mission in the US. Martinus's wife Therese and then 13-year-old son Leonard followed arriving in New York City on June 23, 1918, aboard the S.S. Chicago from Bordeaux, France. Martinus is reported to have founded a piano school in New York for advanced-level pianists, but by the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, he was teaching at the New York Institute of Musical Art (which later became the Juilliard School of Music) as a piano professor.

Inventor

Sieveking was an imaginative thinker and mechanically adept. Besides teaching, he also devoted his time inventing apparatuses and mechanical appliances of various kinds with some submitted for patent. He also invented and devised his own improvements for the piano. In the 1930s, he improved and patented a piano-action spring (Patent No. 2,046,853 filed on July 5, 1935), which he improved two years later (No. 2,138,517 files on March 18, 1937). He even had a piano built especially for him that had wider keys and a sloped down lower octave so that his arms could utilize gravity to produce a larger sound.

He had a vast mechanical and electrical knowledge. Sieveking invented a type of an internal combustion engine, patented in the U.S. on August 14, 1917 (No. 1,252,045) and in Canada on March 15, 1918. While teaching at the New York Institute of Musical Art, he spent the summer of 1926 improving the radio of the school, getting purer production sound and greater volume from a one-tube set.

Among the other assorted collection of devices he invented and patented are: an electric motor-driven traffic signal (No. 2,135,851 filed on August 16, 1937) and mechanical mobile bird figures for Flying Eagle Co., a corporation in New York - (No. 1,419,694 filed on April 13, 1921) and (No. 1,322,364 filed on January 27, 1919)

Later life By the 1930s, Martinus and his wife Therese were still married but living apart as she was working as a governess for a wealthy family till the early 1940s. Their daughter Senta, who also had worked as a governess in New York, moved to California. She married James Joseph Vincent on June 19, 1940, in Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Martinus became an American citizen on June 2, 1941, at the age of 74 in New York. Therese moved to California in the 1940s, later followed by Martinus.

Sieveking died on November 26, 1950, in Pasadena, California, at the age of 83. He was buried at the Mountain View Mortuary and Cemetery in Altadena, California. Therese later died in Los Angeles, California, on July 12, 1961, at the age of 80. There is no record of Leonard Sieveking after the 1920 census. Senta T. Vincent died on September 6, 2000, in Los Angeles at the age of 100.

Physical characteristics

While training with Eugen Sandow, Sieveking developed an impressive physique. His improvement after three months of training, with light then heavy weight dumbbells, were mentioned in one of Sandow's books as: Height, ;#tag:ref|Another article reported that Sieveking's height was over six feet, After Sandow, he continued his dedication to physical training while in Lincoln, Nebraska where he was known as a cyclist. He converted the house he was renting into a gymnasium, ruining its furniture and walls. Sieveking had large muscular hands with a reach of 12 notes, similar in reach to Sergei Rachmaninoff's. His hands were so large that he found it hard to play on ordinary sized keyboard, since his fingers got stuck in between the black keys. He had two pianos in his home in New York, a regular piano and a specially made French piano with wider keys. For his return concert in Berlin in 1907, Steinway built him a customized piano with the keys proportionally enlarged, making the entire keyboard about one foot longer than the standard keyboard. The keyboard was also slanted like his home piano. He also transcribed some keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Chopin for violin and cello. As of 2012, his music is out-of-print, only available from libraries. Some of his more well-known compositions are:

Angelus, La, the composer's impression of Jean-François Millet's famous painting The Angelus. Abille, La (The Bee) Berceuse Cornemuse Dream of the Flowers Etude de Concert, several Introduction et Valse Lente, Op. 10 Minuet Pastorale, a pastoral study of forest sounds Praeludium, a piano transcription of a Bach prelude Serenata Espangola for violin and piano Sketch Souffrance was written when his son was very ill, expresses a father's anxiety for his stricken son. Tricoteuse, La - Etude Valse Capriccio Valse de Concert Variations et Fugue Wooing, The, a song composed by Sieveking

Recordings It is not known if any analog recordings of Sieveking's performances exist. Based on the resources of the Reproducing Piano Roll Foundation, Sieveking did not record for the reproducing piano either.

Other media Martinus Sieveking, the concert pianist, has a cameo appearance in the Prologue of the fictional novel Lost Horizon by English novelist James Hilton published in 1933.

Notes and references