Marguerite Melville Liszniewska
1879-1935

Born in Brooklyn, Marguerite Melville showed an early talent for the piano. By the time she was ten she was also writing music. So impressive were her talents that she came to the attention of the piano manufacturer William Steinway, who paid her expenses for further musical training in Europe. Young Marguerite began at once to draw attention to herself as a pianist. At the same time, however, sho also began to develop as a composer. Her opus 1, a Romanza for violin and piano was composed in 1896 and received high praise from Maud Powell, the eminent American violinist, who declared it "remarkable." Her next major work, the Sonata in G minor , for violin and piano won a major prize. The Piano Quintet in the collection of the Gorno Memorial Music Library caused one critic to write the "I consider this ... piano quintet of Margaret Melville in every way the finest and grandest chamber music composition that has been written since Brahms." Unfortunately, there were few works to follow, as she began to devote nearly all of her energies from that point to performing and teaching. In 1908 she married Karol Liszniewski in Vienna where she was teaching piano and serving as Theodor Leschetizky's assistant at the Vienna Conservatory. In 1917 she received an offer from the Cincinnati Conservatory for a teaching position and accepted. She made an ideal addition to the faculty. An experienced and multi-talented artist-teacher, she brought to her students the sort of training and musical outlook for which they might otherwise have had to travel to Europe. Despite her heavy teaching schedule, she continued to concertize widely. She died just one month before what would have been her fifty-sixth birthday, in Cincinnati.