Talk:Lillian Fuchs

Dates
Note for anyone who is tempted (as I was) to "correct" the birth year from 1901 to 1903 based on a reference source like Grove's or The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music: the entry on Fuchs at Judith Pinnolis's "Contributions of Jewish Women to Music" (see Sources) includes the following: Born, November 18, 1901. Died, October 5, 1995. (Her birth and death dates are incorrectly listed in New Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians/ Online, Baker's Biographical, Jewish Women in America and other reference sources. Possibly one reason was incorrect information was listed in her obituary in The New York Times printed Oct. 7, 1995. The NYTimes did print a correction --the correction appeared Oct. 10, 1995. However, many researchers did not find that. The dates I give above are verified by two government sources, the US Census and the Social Security Death Index. Languagehat (talk) 13:03, 15 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I've got liner notes from the recording of the Bach cello suites that claim birth in 1903 to death in August of 1991. I don't have access to Groves at the moment, but is there a confusion there about the death date as well as the birth date?

J Lorraine (talk) 20:06, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Nevermind. I see the Grove Online claims (b New York, 18 Nov 1902; d Englewood, NJ, 5 Oct 1995). So I'm guessing the liner notes are mistaken.

74.126.230.148 (talk) 20:25, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Are Bach "firsts" accurate?
The unsourced statement that Miss Fuchs "was the first to perform... the Bach Suites for the viola" seems suspicious to me, given that Louis Svecenski, of the Kneisel Quartet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had published his transcription of the Bach suites for viola in 1916, well before she had taken up the viola. Is one to suppose that he never performed any of his transcriptions?

As for the recordings, Samuel Lifschey beat her into the recording studio, in 1941, although only to record the gavottes of the sixth suite. (If, perhaps, additional movements were recorded, the recordings were not issued.) He, too, had published a transcription of the suites, in 1936.

These are just the American performers and editors that I know about. I don't know what may have been going on in Europe around the same time.

--Gambaguru (talk) 05:55, 20 September 2018 (UTC)