Lukas Foss (August 15, 1922 – February 1, 2009) was a German-American composer, pianist, and conductor.
Career
Born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, Germany in 1922, Foss was soon recognized as a child prodigy. He began piano and theory lessons with Julius Goldstein [Herford] in Berlin at the age of six. His parents were Hilde (Schindler) and the philosopher and scholar Martin Foss. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler came into power, the Jewish family moved from Germany to Paris, where Lukas studied piano with Lazare Lévy, composition with Noël Gallon, orchestration with Felix Wolfes, and flute with Marcel Moyse. In 1937 he moved with his parents and brother to the United States, where his father (on advice from the Quakers who had taken the family in upon arrival in Philadelphia) changed the family name to Foss. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, with Isabelle Vengerova (piano), Rosario Scalero (composition) and Fritz Reiner (conducting).
At Curtis, Foss began a lifelong friendship with classmate Leonard Bernstein, who later described Foss as an "authentic genius." In 1961 Bernstein conducted the premiere of Foss's Time Cycle, while Foss would conduct the premiere of Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.[1]
In 1951 Foss married Cornelia Brendel, an artist and painter who was born in Berlin in 1931, the daughter of art historian Otto Brendel and Maria Weigert Brendel.[6] The couple had two children, Christopher Brendel Foss, who became a documentary filmmaker and corporate consultant on social and environmental engagement/sustainability communications, and Eliza Foss Topol, an actress. Foss and his wife were separated for almost five years from 1968 to 1972, during which Cornelia was the lover of pianist Glenn Gould and moved with the two children to Toronto, an arrangement that she later called, "a perfect triangle".[7]
Foss, who had Parkinson's disease in his final years, died at his home in Manhattan on February 1, 2009, aged 86, of a heart attack.[3]
References
^Rubin, Susan G: Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein (2011). Watertown, MA. Charlesbridge. ISBN9781580893442. Page 142-3.
^ ab"Obituary for Composer Lukas Foss". Opera News. Vol. 74, no. 1. July 2009.
^Passenger list of the S.S. Volendam, port of New York, 21 September 1939. Passenger list of the S.S. Mauretania, port of New York, 15 October 1951. Revisiting 'The Prairie', The New Yorker, July 23, 2007.
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