Sergius Kagen

Sergius Kagen (August 22, 1909 – March 1, 1964) was an American pianist, composer, music editor and voice teacher.

He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the third son of wealthy, intellectual Jewish parents, his father Isaiah Kagen, a newspaperman, and his mother Vera Lipshitz, a writer and educator. His older brother was studying to be a pianist, but he died in the Russian Revolution. Sergius then began his own piano study at the age of nine and soon entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory. But in 1920 his family fled the Revolution, moving to Berlin, and a year later he studied with Leonid Kreutzer and Paul Juon at the Hochschule für Musik.

He and his family moved again, to the United States in 1925, and in 1930 he entered the Juilliard School in New York city, studying with piano with Carl Friedberg, composition with Rubin Goldmark and singing with Marcella Sembrich, and earned his diploma in 1934. After Sembrich's death in 1935, he took over the training of many of her students, and he formally joined the faculty at Juilliard in 1940. There he taught singing and vocal literature from 1940 to 1964, and at the Union Theological Seminary, from 1957 also until his death. He married soprano Genevieve Greer in 1937. He became an American citizen in 1930.

He became influential and important to the field of singing and voice pedagogy through his own teaching, as well as his writings and editions of a wide variety of vocal works. One of his students at Juilliard was the important American mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani.

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