sonatas in public, preceding Artur Schnabel (who did the series in 1927) by several years. German pianist Walter Gieseking also performed the complete sonatas in public by age 15 (circa 1910). In January 1917, when the Philadelphia Art Alliance launched a new series of "sociable luncheons" to familiarize prominent men and women in the Philadelphia region with fine arts and music trends, the organization's leaders chose Samaroff to be the series' first speaker. Well known to the alliance and residents of the Philadelphia region from her work on the alliance's music committee, as well as from her performance career, she presented a lecture on "The Correlation of Music and the Fine Arts." In 1923, Samaroff and Stokowski divorced; the reasons included Stokowski's infidelity, from which she never recovered. She took refuge in her friends, among whom were George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Parker, and Cary Grant. In 1925, Samaroff fell in her New York apartment and suffered a shoulder injury that forced her to retire from performing. From that point on, she worked primarily as a critic and teacher. She wrote for the New York Evening Post until 1928 - the first woman to serve as music critic for a New York daily newspaper - and gave guest lectures throughout the 1930s. Samaroff developed a course of music study for laymen and was the first music teacher to be broadcast on NBC television. She taught at the Philadelphia Conservatory and in 1924 was invited to join the faculty of the newly formed Juilliard School in New York. She taught at both schools for the rest of her life. Called "Madam" by her students, she was an advocate for them, supplying many of her Depression-era charges with concert clothes and food. She also pressed officials at Juilliard to build a dormitory – a project that was not realized until after her death decades later. Her most famous pupil was concert pianist William Kapell, who was killed in a 1953 plane crash at age 31. She herself said that the best pianist she ever taught was the New Zealander Richard Farrell, who also died at age 31, in a motor vehicle accident in England in 1958. Samaroff published an autobiography, An American Musician's Story, in 1939. She died of a heart attack at her home on 24 West 55th Street in New York on the evening of May 17, 1948, after giving