Tchaikowsky

André Tchaikowsky (also Andrzej Czajkowski; born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer; November 1, 1935 – June 26, 1982) was a Polish composer and pianist.

Robert Andrzej Krauthammer was born in Warsaw in 1935. He had shown musical talent from an early age, and his mother, an amateur pianist, was teaching him the piano when he was four years old. His family was Jewish; when the Second World War broke out, they were moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. Krauthammer remained here until 1942, when he was smuggled out and provided with forged identity papers that renamed him Andrzej Czajkowski; he then went into hiding with his grandmother, Celina. The pair remained hidden until 1944, when they were caught up in the Warsaw Uprising, and they were then sent to Pruszków transit camp as ordinary Polish citizens, from which they were released in 1945. Tchaikowsky's father, Karl Krauthammer, also survived the war, and remarried, producing a daughter, Katherine Krauthammer-Vogt; Tchaikowsky's mother, Felicja Krauthammer (née Rappaport) was rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, and perished in Treblinka.

Andrzej Czajkowski, as he then was (he later adopted the spelling André Tchaikowsky), resumed his lessons at age 9 in Lodz State School, under the tuition of Emma Altberg (herself once a student of Wanda Landowska); from here, he proceeded to Paris, where Lazare Lévy took over his education, and where he would also break off relations with his father for many years after an argument.

After his return to Poland (1950), he studied at the State Music Academy in Sopot under Prof. Olga Iliwicka-Dąbrowska, and later at the State Music Academy in Warszawa under Prof. Stanisław Szpinalski. Already during his studies he began developing his concert career, displaying his showmanship through public performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 and providing listeners with improvisations on any given theme. From 1951, he took composition classes with Prof. Kazimierz Sikorski.

...
Wikipedia