Hortense Monath

Hortense Husserl was born in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of Siegfried Husserl and Clara Gotthelf Husserl.^[2] Her mother was an American music teacher and pianist trained under Leschetizky,^[3] and her father was a physician from Austria.^[4] She studied piano with her mother, Ernest Hutcheson^[5] and Artur Schnabel.^[6]

Husserl made her professional debut in Hamburg. "Miss Husserl is without doubt the most promising young pianist heard so far this season," said a reviewer in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, after her New York debut at Town Hall in 1930. "She brings to her instrument a highly cultivated technique, marked individuality and a truly remarkable innate rhythmic sense".^[7] She was a soloist who played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra,^[8] and the New York Philharmonic.^[9] She made several recordings,^[10] and performed on radio programs.^[11]

Though she was based in the New York area,^[12] Monath toured in the United States. She performed in Iowa^[5] and California^[13] in 1936, in Missouri in 1939 and 1943,^[14][15] and in Texas in 1940.^[16] In 1938 she was soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, in a concert marking the 20th anniversary of the end of World War I.^[17]

Monath was a co-founder and program director of New Friends of Music,^[18] a subscription chamber music concert series^[19] that ran for sixteen seasons, from 1936^[20] to 1953.^[6] The unconventional series was based at Town Hall, and scheduled for Sunday evenings, 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm. Monath instructed that audiences should not applaud, and there were no intermissions^[21] and no encores in the program; the names of musicians and the works to be performed were not announced in advance.^[15] The concerts were broadcast, and sometimes recorded.^[22]

Monath was considered an important early proponent of Arnold Schoenberg, after playing his works at a recital in the early 1930s,^[23] inviting him to conduct his own works for the New Friends of Music series in 1940, and sponsoring the world premiere of his Second Chamber Symphony.^[20] She also debuted works by Schoenberg's student, Alban Berg.^[24][25] Monath opined on musical topics, including a strong distaste for musical prodigies, declaring them "a menace to musical education, a menace to proper music appreciation, and a menace mostly to their own futures as musicians and human beings".^[26] She was described as a stylish beauty in some publicity, with her beauty regimen, hairstyles, and fashion preferences detailed in newspaper profiles.^[27]

She married and divorced twice. Her first husband was Paul E. Monath; they married in 1926 and had a son, Peter, born in Vienna in 1927; they divorced in 1934. In 1937, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia officiated when she married her second husband, businessman Ira A. Hirschmann.^[28][29] They divorced in 1952. Monath died in 1956, at the age of 52. Pianist Seymour Bernstein, a student of her mother's, described Monath's final years as complicated by mental illness and financial struggles.^[4][6] Some of the New Friends of Music papers are in the Ira Arthur Hirschmann collection at the New York Public Library.^[30]

In the novel Fifty-Seventh Street (1971), by Joseph Machlis, the pianist character "Judith Conrad" is partly based on Monath in her later years.^[31]