Lili Kraus was born in Budapest, though sources disagree on the date: 4 March 1905 is the figure usually given, while two reference works give 3 April, one of them putting the year at 1903, to a father from the Czech lands and a mother from an assimilated Jewish Hungarian family. She studied at the Franz Liszt Academy and the Budapest Conservatory, where her teachers included Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, and in the 1930s continued her training with Eduard Steuermann in Vienna and Artur Schnabel in Berlin. In 1930 she married Otto Mandl, a mining engineer and philosopher; they had two children, Ruth and Michael.

Through the 1930s she built an international career, much of it in partnership with the violinist Szymon Goldberg, touring Europe, Japan, Australia and South Africa. That career was broken by the war. On tour in Asia in 1940 she and her family were captured in Java, and from June 1943 until August 1945 they were interned by the Japanese.

After the war she settled in New Zealand and became a citizen, resuming performance and teaching. From 1967 to 1983 she was artist-in-residence at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She spent her last years in Asheville, North Carolina, where she died in 1986.

Kraus was known as a specialist in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and it is the Mozart that has lasted. She recorded cycles of the Mozart piano sonatas and concertos across several labels, among them Parlophone, Vox and Columbia, and those cycles were for many years the way listeners outside the concert hall came to the composer’s keyboard music at full length.

Her chamber playing was equally central to her reputation. The duo with Szymon Goldberg was one of the significant violin-and-piano partnerships of the 1930s and carried her repertoire across three continents before the war interrupted it.

The sixteen years at Texas Christian University gave her a long second career as a teacher in the United States, and made her a direct link between the Budapest of Bartók and Kodály, the Berlin of Schnabel, and post-war American conservatory training.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Kraus
https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Kraus-Lili.htm