Sambor (present-day Ukraine), 1925 – 2021 Old Tappan, New Jersey
Margaret Steuermann, born Margarethe Steuermann on July 12, 1925, was the daughter of the pianist, music educator, and composer Eduard Steuermann and his first wife, Hilda Steuermann, née Merinsky. The collection of Margaret Steuermann’s correspondence held by the Exilarte Center constitutes a significant record of personal documentation of music in exile. The exchange of letters addressed to the Austrian pianist and music educator Anton Voigt — in which Margaret Steuermann responds to questions about her life story, and which Anton Voigt has generously made available to the archive of the Exilarte Center at the mdw — offers crucial insights into musical developments in the orbit of the Schoenberg Circle, and in particular into the work of her father, who is regarded as an important link between the musical avant-garde of the pre- and postwar periods. Margaret received her first piano lessons at the age of four from her mother, and continued her studies with Ilsa Friedensberg, a pupil of her father’s. Following her arrival in the United States on May 26, 1936, alongside her father, she appears to have developed a mysterious condition, possibly brought on by the stresses of emigration as well as by family circumstances — her parents had separated in January 1927. Emigration and the accompanying change of language hindered the further professional development of both Margaret and her mother Hilda. Margaret Steuermann spent her final years as an organist in a Baptist congregation in New Jersey. She died on November 18, 2021.
