Robert Marcel Casadesus (7 April 1899 – 19 September 1972) was a renowned 20th-century French pianist and composer. He was the most prominent member of a distinguished musical family, being the nephew of Henri Casadesus and Marius Casadesus, husband of Gaby Casadesus, and father of Jean Casadesus. Biography Casadesus was born in Paris, and studied there at the Conservatoire with Louis Diémer, taking a Premier Prix (First Prize) in 1913 and the Prix Diémer in 1920. Robert then entered the class of Lucien Capet, who had exceptional influence. Capet had founded a famous quartet that bore his name (Capet Quartet) and in which two of Robert's uncles played: Henri and Marcel. The Quartet often rehearsed in the Casadesus home, and so it was that Robert was exposed to chamber music. The Beethoven Quartets held no secret for him—he knew them backwards and forwards. Beginning in 1922, Casadesus collaborated with the composer Maurice Ravel on a project to create piano rolls of a number of his works. Casadesus and Ravel also shared the concert platform in France, Spain and England. Casadesus toured widely as a piano soloist and often performed with his wife, the pianist Gaby (L'Hôte) Casadesus, whom he married in 1921. From 1935 Casadesus taught at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. He and his family spent the Second World War years in the United States and had a home in Princeton, New Jersey. (Among his Princeton neighbors was Albert Einstein, an amateur violinist; the two played Mozart together privately on occasion.) After the Fall of France in 1940, Robert and Gaby established the Fontainebleau School at Newport, Rhode Island. In 1942 the Fontainebleau School was moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. In 1943, he performed as part of a series of New York concerts meant to raise money for the Coordinating Council of the French Relief Societies. After the war, in 1946, Robert Casadesus, now Director of the American Conservatory, oversaw its return to Fontainebleau. His pupils included Claude Helffer, Grant Johannesen, Monique Haas, Mary Louise Boehm, Carol Lems-Dworkin, and William Eves, who appeared in the Casadesus-based Bell Telephone Hour fine arts documentary TV series "The First Family of the Piano" (1967) and was a longtime piano instructor at Bowdoin College. He continued recording and composing; his last composition, the Symphony No. 7, "Israel," was a tribute to the people of Israel and was dedicated to his