Martinus Sieveking
Martinus Sieveking (March 24, 1867 – November 26, 1950) was a Dutch virtuoso pianist, composer, teacher and inventor born in Amsterdam.
He is sometimes referred to as The Flying Dutchman due to his Dutch heritage and extremely flighty nature.
[2] 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.
[6] 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.
[16][17] 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.
[21] He arrived in New York City with his friend, the famous physical culturist and bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, as his accompanist for his stage performances.
[22] 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.
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.
[25] In the spring of 1895, Sieveking was booked for a concert tour of the principal cities of the east and left Lincoln on April 16, but not leaving the town quietly.
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.
On February 8, 1897, he performed in Columbus, Ohio, at the newly built Southern Fireproof Theater with local soprano Lillian Miller.
[3] He gave a solo piano recital at the Academy of Music in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on March 2, 1897, and again on November 18, 1897.
The other five were Mark Hambourg, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Katharine Goodson, Artur Schnabel and Ethel Newcomb.
He was arrested at Ischl in September 1898 for refusing to take off his hat while a Catholic priest, who was carrying a cross, was passing.
Sieveking stated that he was a Protestant, and, as a foreigner, had no idea that his neglecting to remove his hat would be regarded by the local Catholics as an insult to their religion.
[39][40] Sieveking also met a younger woman in Austria named Therese (born April 13, 1881) who later became his wife.
[41] A daughter was born to the couple in Vienna on October 15, 1900, named Senta Therese Sieveking.
Sieveking, as remembered by Rudge, was a collector of timepieces with several dozen clocks at his apartment, chiming to different rhythms.
[55] 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.
Besides teaching, he also devoted his time inventing apparatuses and mechanical appliances of various kinds with some submitted for patent.
[5] Sieveking invented a mechanical device for the piano to produce a peculiar vibration in the sound or notes of the instrument.
[62] 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.
[64][65] 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.
2,135,851 filed on August 16, 1937)[67] and mechanical mobile bird figures for Flying Eagle Co., a corporation in New York - (No.
1,322,364 filed on January 27, 1919)[69] 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.
[25][40] His physique was later described by Russian pianist Mark Hambourg, another student of Leschetizky, as "more of a house than a man", his hands matching his frame.
[82] 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.
[53] Though some of his many compositions are best described as salon music, Sieveking also wrote inventive serious works that are infused with powerful rhythm.
