New fonds
Fonds Irma Schoenberg Wolpe Rademacher

Pianist Irma Schoenberg Wolpe Rademacher (1902–1984) made a name for herself in the musical world as the long-time partner of composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972), whose works she performed and whose emigration from Nazi Germany she organized in good time. However, little was previously known about her independent career as a musician and piano teacher. The fonds, which is being established to complement the existing Stefan Wolpe Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, will shed more light on her own profile.

Irma Schoenberg was born in the eastern Romanian city of Galați and moved with her family to the university town of Iași in 1910, where she first took piano lessons and later studied at the music conservatory. In 1920, she began studying piano at the Royal Conservatory in Dresden while equally attending courses at the New School for Applied Rhythm in Hellerau. She pursued this combined specialization in Berlin from 1921 to 1925, then continued her studies in Paris with Alfred Cortot and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, earning a diploma from the Dalcroze Institute in Geneva in 1927. Irma Schoenberg came from an early Zionist family with ties to leading representatives of socialist Zionism. She travelled to congresses in Basel on several occasions and considered emigrating to the Mandate for Palestine as early as the 1920s. She repeatedly performed concerts there from 1924 onwards, but always returned to Europe. In her concert programs she used to include works from the classical piano repertoire alongside contemporary compositions.

In the second half of the 1920s, Irma Schoenberg met Stefan Wolpe, became his partner and a leading performer of his piano works. After the Nazis came to power, Schoenberg organized Wolpe's adventurous escape via Zurich, Vienna, and Bucharest to Jerusalem, where she took up a position as a piano teacher at the Music Academy. At the end of 1938, the couple, who had since married, emigrated to New York; once again, it was Irma, now under the name Wolpe, who secured a living, commissions, and performances thanks to her strong family and professional network. For example, she performed alongside Eduard Steuermann and taught at private and public music schools. Her expressive playing and unusual methods attracted talented students, including 18-year-old David Tudor (1926–1996), who gave up his organ studies, declaring that “when I heard her play, I immediately and spontaneously decided to become a pianist.” Even after her divorce from Wolpe (1949) and her second marriage to mathematician Hans Rademacher (1892–1969), Schoenberg remained committed to Wolpe's work and continued working as a piano teacher until late in life.

While parts of Irma Schoenberg Wolpe Rademacher's legacy had been added to the Stefan Wolpe Collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung archives in earlier years, the newly acquired fonds brings together sources from private archives held by family members in Israel and the US, primarily correspondence and text manuscripts, photos, audio recordings, program booklets, and reviews. Musicologist Nora Born organized the transfer of the materials as a donation to our organization. The Irma Schoenberg Wolpe Rademacher fonds documents the exile biography of an important musician who claimed to have “inherited the legacy of European culture as a whole”; it also allows us to supplement and refine Stefan Wolpe's biography with data and facts.

(See the documentary biography by Nora Born, Irma Schoenberg Wolpe Rademacher: “... in den Wassern meines Lebens: Es flüstert, meist rauscht es und stürmt”, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik 2024; the quotations are on pp. 14 and 138.)

(Heidy Zimmermann, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, no. 38, 2025, pp. 5–6)