Olga Samaroff (August 8, 1880May 17, 1948) was an American pianist, music critic, and teacher. Among her teachers was Charles-Valentin Alkan's son, Élie-Miriam Delaborde. Her second husband was the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Samaroff was also a prominent member of the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Life and career Samaroff was born Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Jane (Loening) and Carlos Hickenlooper. She grew up in Galveston, where her family owned a business later wiped out in the 1900 Galveston hurricane. After her talent for the piano was discovered, she was sent to Europe to study, since at that time there were no great piano teachers in the United States. She first studied with Antoine François Marmontel and Charles-Valentin Alkan's son, Élie-Miriam Delaborde, at the Conservatoire de Paris, and later with Ernst Jedliczka in Berlin. While in Berlin, she was very briefly married to Russian engineer Boris Loutzky. After her divorce from Loutzky and the disaster that claimed her family's business, she returned to the United States and tried to carve out a career as a pianist. She soon discovered she was hampered by both her awkward name and her American origins. Her agent suggested a professional name change, which was taken from a remote relative. As Olga Samaroff, she self-produced her New York debut at Carnegie Hall in 1905 (the first woman ever to do so). She hired the hall, the orchestra, and conductor Walter Damrosch, and made an overwhelming impression with her performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. She played extensively in the United States and Europe thereafter. Samaroff discovered Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977) when he was church organist at St. Bartholomew's in New York and later conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. She played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 under Stokowski's direction when he made his official conducting debut in Paris with the Colonne Orchestra on May 12, 1909. She married Stokowski in 1911, and their daughter Sonya was born in 1921. At that time, Samaroff was much more famous than her husband and was able to lobby her contacts to get Stokowski appointed in 1912 to the vacant conductor's post at the Philadelphia Orchestra, thus launching his international career. Samaroff made a number of recordings in the early 1920s for the Victor Talking Machine Company. She was the second pianist in history, after Hans von Bülow, to perform all 32 Beethoven piano