In honor of Mother's Day, we're honoring women who helped raise some of the most important musical figures. Throughout Sunday, May 8, listen to WQXR to hear hourly presentations of works inspired by these women and other matriarchal figures,
Edith Hockey Britten
Benjamin Britten's mother, an amateur singer and pianist, identified her son's early musical talent and nutured it with piano lessons. Though one biographer called Edith "suffocatingly attentive."
Justyna Chopin
One of Frederic Chopin's earliest influences was his mother, Justyna, who played piano. She is also credited with preserving much of her son's legacy. The composer requested on his deathbed that all of his unpublished compositions be destroyed, but Justyna (along with Chopin’s sisters) made sure that they were saved and published.
Sarah Mittenthal Copland
Aaron Copland most likely inherited his musical abilities from his mother, Sarah Copland, who was an amateur singer and pianist. She took immense delight in her son's successes in the concert hall.
Anna Maria Mozart
Anna Maria Mozart not only had a close personal relationship with her two children, both child prodigies, but she was intimately involved in their careers. In 1777, she even accompanied Wolfgang on a job hunt through Europe. However, she died while in Paris with her son, in 1778.
Maria Grigoryevna Prokofieva
Sergei Prokofiev's mother was his earliest music teacher and made sure that her son received the best instruction available. They remained close throughout her life, with her son even living with her in the early 1920s, while working on the opera, The Fiery Angel.
Alexandra Tchaikovskaya
Tchaikovsky doted on his mother, so he was predictably devastated when she died of cholera when he was 14 years old. The ordeal inspired him to compose a waltz in her memory, which was his first musical composition.
Johanna Rosine Pätz Wagner
Richard Wagner was unsure of his paternity — legally, his father was Carl Friedrich Wagner, but historians (and the composer himself) suggest that his eventual stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, the painter of the above portrait, was his true dad. Wagner's relationship with his mother was complicated; he wrote, "I can hardly ever remember being cuddled by her, in fact there were never any displays of tenderness in our family, whereas a certain restless, almost wild, boisterousness appeared very natural."