Therese Schnabel

Therese Schnabel (née Behr; September 14, 1876 – January 30, 1959) was a German contralto. She was best known for her interpretations of Lieder. She married pianist Artur Schnabel in 1905.

Therese Behr was born to interior designer Carl Behr and his wife Lina Behr (née Zenegg) in Stuttgart on September 14, 1876. In 1881, the family moved to Mainz. Therese Behr's brother, the conductor and violinist Hermann Behr, arranged for her to have music lessons in nearby Frankfurt am Main, with ; she studied with Stockhausen from 1893-95, and then continued in Cologne with Franz Wüllner.

She moved to Berlin in 1898 to study with Etelka Gerster. In 1900, the then-unknown pianist Artur Schnabel was hired to accompany Behr, who already had a successful international career, on a concert tour in East Prussia. The two married in 1905. They frequently performed together, and it was Behr's fame as a singer of Lieder—and her insistence that her husband accompany her—that drew the public's attention to Schnabel's ability as a pianist. The Schnabels' twelve-room apartment on Wielandstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg soon became a meeting point for Berlin music circles. Behr also taught voice lessons in their home.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Behr and Schnabel left Berlin, as Schnabel very clearly foresaw the political troubles that were to come. For the next few years, they spent summers in Tremezzo, Lake Como, and winters in London. Summers in Tremezzo, for these years, were also an opportunity for Behr, Schnabel, and their son Karl Ulrich Schnabel to teach summer courses. The family relocated to New York in 1939, where Behr continued teaching.

Behr returned to Europe for the first time in 1946, after the war. Thereafter, she spent summers in Switzerland and Italy. After Schnabel's death in 1951, she moved back to Tremezzo permanently, and remained there until her death in Lugano on January 30, 1959. Therese Behr's papers are held at the Music Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.

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