Walter Bricht
Austrian-American composer, pianist and teacher Walter Bricht was born in Vienna on 21 September 1904 into a musical family, and he was initially taught from the age of four by his singer/pianist mother. At twelve he was writing piano pieces and songs. Later he studied composition, conducting and piano at the Vienna Academy for Music.
Teaching in Vienna, he also began to have his music composed, but in 1938, when the Nazi regime discovered that his grandparents had been Jewish-born, he emigrated to the USA and settled in New York City.
Later he became a professor at the Indiana University School of Music, where a 1967 recital was devoted to his compositions, which are largely in the German late romantic style.
He was diagnosed with emphysema in the 1960s, and died from this on 20 March 1970, aged sixty-five.