Egon Petri

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Egon Petri (March 23, 1881 - May 27, 1962) was a classical pianist.

Petri's family was Dutch, but he was born in Hanover in Germany and was brought up in Dresden. His father was a professional violinist who taught his son that instrument. Egon played in the Dresden Court Orchestra while still a teenager.

From an early age, Petri had also taken piano lessons and he eventually concentrated on that instrument. He studied with Ferruccio Busoni, who proved to be a big influence on him. Thanks to him, Petri focused on the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Liszt, composers that, along with Busoni himself, remained at the centre of his repertoire.

Petri moved with Busoni to Switzerland during World War I where he assisted him in editing Bach's keyboard works. In the 1920s Petri taught in Berlin, Victor Borge, Gunnar Johansen and Vitya Vronsky being among his students. In 1923 he became the first non-Soviet soloist to play in the Soviet Union. In 1927 he moved to Zakopane in Poland where he conducted summer and early fall sessions and master-classes to a group of pre-selected piano students until the outbreak of World War II 1939. From 1929 he made a number of recordings for several labels including Columbia Records.

With the outbreak of World War II, Petri moved to the United States where he worked first at Cornell University and later at Mills College in Oakland, California. He was an influential figure among many pianists of the middle 20th century. Earl Wild, Ozan Marsh and John Ogdon were among his international students. A big man, Petri had a superb technique and a powerful sonority, and was a superlative exponent of the larger works of Beethoven, Liszt and Brahms.^[1] Petri's students included Newman Powell, Leonard Klein, Alexander Libermann, Lois Maer, Phillip Morgan, Robert Sheldon, John Sweeney, John Moriarty, Terry Wohl, Alice Ray, Ruth Orr, Ruth Preusser and Forrest Robinson.