Maud Powell

America’s first great master of the violin, Maud Powell (1867-1920), was born in Peru, Illinois, on the western frontier of the American heartland. Her mother was a pianist and composer whose gender precluded her from a career in music. She began her violin studies in nearby Aurora before studying with William Lewis in Chicago for four years. She completed her training with the European masters: Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles Dancla in Paris, and Joseph Joachim in Berlin. At the time, classical music in America was scoffed at by Europeans, but Maud Powell became the first American-born violinist to win over European audiences. In America, appreciation for classical music was in its infancy and a female soloist was unheard-of. Maud Powell toured North America, Europe, and South Africa to great acclaim, appearing with the great orchestras of the time.

Maud Powell performed the American premieres of the Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Sibelius concerti and introduced fifteen violin concertos to the American public, including those by Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Coleridge-Taylor, Arensky, Aulin, Huss, Shelley, Conus, Bruch and Rimsky-Korsakov. Powell championed works by American composers Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Victor Herbert, Cecil Burleigh, Edwin Grasse, John Alden Carpenter, Henry Holden Huss, Henry Rowe Shelley Arthur Foote, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Grace White. She performed works by female composers and composers of color, which was unheard-of at the time. 

In a time where women rarely performed in public, Maud Powell revolutionized the violin recital. She performed concerts across the United States, including venues in the Wild West where people had never heard a formal concert before. Through innovative recital programming and by writing her own program notes, Powell strove to elevate American audiences’ appreciation for classical music. She performed special programs for children and for soldiers during World War I. Powell stated: “I do not play to them as an artist to the public, but as one human being to another.” Theodore Thomas chose Powell to represent America’s achievement in violin performance at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Powell was the only woman violin soloist. During the exposition, Powell presented a paper to the Women’s Musical Congress titled “Women and the Violin,” which encouraged young women to take up the violin seriously. 

Maud Powell had proven to the world that a woman could play the violin as well as a man, fulfilling the shared dreams of her mother and family friends, woman suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Maud Powell’s life ended in the same year that the Nineteenth Amendment granting national suffrage to women was ratified. Internationally recognized as America’s greatest violinist, she ranked with the supreme violinists of the time, including Joseph Joachim, Eugène Ysaÿe, and Fritz Kreisler. Maud Powell was missing from the history books until she was resurrected by Karen Shaffer and the Maud Powell Society. The Maud Powell Society for Music and Education has created the Maud Powell Signature, an online magazine featuring the contributions and achievements of women in classical music, to document the work and stories of other women whose stories have previously not been told. Maud Powell was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, 94 years after her death. Rachel Barton Pine writes of Maud Powell’s legacy: "It was a real revelation — not just because of how she was the greatest woman violinist in the world during her lifetime, and playing the works of black composers when white instrumentalists just didn't do that. It was the values by which she lived her life, playing concerts for communities that had never before had a classical concert, and using the recording technology as a further way to spread great music all over the place to people who had not yet had a chance to fall in love with it."

Learn more about Maud Powell at The Maud Powell Society.