Egon Petri was born a Dutch citizen at Hanover on 23 March 1881 and grew up in Dresden, where he attended the Kreuzschule; his father, a professional violinist, taught him the violin, and while still a teenager he played in the Dresden Court Orchestra and in his father’s string quartet. He studied composition and theory with Hermann Kretzschmar and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory, and on the urging of Paderewski and Busoni turned to the piano, studying with Busoni and regarding himself as his disciple rather than his pupil. He remained a Dutch citizen until he was seventy-four although he never lived in the Netherlands, and died at Berkeley, California, on 27 May 1962.

Following Busoni, he made Bach and Liszt — and Busoni’s own music and transcriptions — the centre of his repertoire, and during the First World War went with Busoni to Switzerland to help him edit Bach’s keyboard works. In 1923 he became the first non-Soviet soloist to play in the Soviet Union; from 1927 to 1939 he ran summer master classes at Zakopane in Poland, escaping the day before the German invasion and leaving behind his library and his correspondence with Busoni, which survived. He settled in the United States, teaching at Cornell and at Mills College in Oakland, refused ever to play in Germany again, and became an American citizen in 1955. His pupils included Earl Wild, John Ogdon, Gunnar Johansen, Victor Borge and Hazel Harrison.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Petri
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q728822