Home > Egon Petri

Petri's family was Dutch, but he was born in Hanover in Germany and was brought up in Dresden. His father was a professional violinist who taught his son that instrument. Egon played in the Dresden Court Orchestra while still a teenager.

From an early age, Petri had also taken piano lessons and he eventually concentrated on that instrument. He studied with Ferruccio Busoni, who proved to be a big influence on him. Thanks to him, Petri focused on the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Liszt, composers that, along with Busoni himself, remained at the centre of his repertoire.

Petri moved with Busoni to SwitzerlandThe Swiss Confederation or Switzerland is a landlocked federal state in central Europe, with neighbours Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein. The country has a strong tradition of political and military neutrality, but also of international c during World War IWorld War I (also known as the First World War , the Great War the War of the Nations and the "War to End All Wars") was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers, or involved so many in the field of where he assisted him in editing Bach's keyboard works. In the 1920s Petri taught in BerlinBerlin [ bɛrˈliːn ] is the national capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,387,404 inhabitants (as of September 2004); down from 4. 5 million before World War II. Berlin is located on the rivers Spree and Havel in the northea, Victor BorgeVictor Borge ( January 3, 1909 December 23, 2000) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark as Borge Rosenbaum and died in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA. Affectionately known as the Clown Prince of Denmark and the Great Dane he was a humorist, entertainer and world-c among his pupils. In 1923 he became the first non-Soviet soloist to play in the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1. In 1927 he moved to ZakopaneZakopane (pronounce: Media:Zakopane. ogg|[zako'pan]]]) is a town in southern Poland with approximately 30,000 inhabitants (1995), situated in the Lesser Poland Voivodship since 1999 (it was previously in Nowy Sacz Voivodship from 1975-1998). The town call in PolandThe Republic of Poland a country in Central Europe, lies between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia (in the form of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave) t. From 1929 he made a number of recordings.

With the outbreak of World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough, Petri moved to the United States where he worked first at Cornell University and later at Mills College in Oakland, California. Earl Wild was among his American students.

Petri died in 1962 in Berkeley, California.