Teresa Carreño

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Teresa Carreño was a celebrated Venezuelan composer, mezzo-soprano and, most notoriously, pianist, who was known for playing with great power and spirit.

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Teresa Carreño (born Dec. 22, 1853, Caracas, Venezuela - died June 12, 1917, New York City)

Listen to her Elegia (Elegy), as recorded by Clara Rodríguez: 



Teresa Carreño was given her first piano lessons by her father, Manuel Antonio Carreño, a politician and talented amateur pianist. Exiled because of a revolution, the family settled in New York in 1862; there Carreño studied with Louis Moreau Gottschalk. After this, she spent four in Paris as a pupil of Georges Mathias and Anton Rubinstein, after which she embarked on a long and highly successful concert career. In addition to being a virtuoso pianist, she developed a mezzo-soprano voice of sufficient calibre to enable her to appear as an opera singer. With the second of her four husbands (the baritone Giovanni Tagliapietra), she organised and directed an opera company in Caracas (also the city where the pianist of today's DHM recording studied at the conservatoire). The last of her husbands (married 1902) was Arturo Tagliapietra, a brother of her second husband. 

Carreño recorded over forty compositions for the reproducing piano between 1905 and 1908. A reproducing piano (also known as a player piano or pianola) is a self-playing piano, containing a  mechanism that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper or metallic rolls. These were released primarily by Welte-Mignon. 

See a piano roll recording of her own composition here: 



We hope you enjoyed today's Daily Hit of Music. See you tomorrow...

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia

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