Teresa Carreño (1853–1917)

Born in Caracas in 1853, Teresa Carreño learned the piano with her father. Her family moved to New York in 1862, where the child prodigy gave her first concerts and received advice from the pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. In 1863, aged nine, she played at the White House for Abraham Lincoln.

That same year she composed a waltz in homage to her teacher, the Gottschalk Waltz. She then went to Europe, where she met Rossini and Liszt, and pursued an international concert career for more than fifty years.

Nicknamed “the Valkyrie of the piano” for the power of her playing, she was also an opera singer and, on occasion, a conductor. Among her husbands was the pianist Eugen d’Albert. She composed piano pieces, a string quartet and a Hymn to Bolívar.

She died in New York in 1917. Her ashes were moved in 1977 to the National Pantheon in Caracas, and the city’s great theatre bears her name.