Biography (read more)
Magdalena Maria Yvonne Tagliaferro was born on 19 January 1893 in Petrópolis, Brazil. Her father, a voice and piano teacher in São Paulo who had himself studied with Raoul Pugno in Paris, gave her her first lessons. When she was eleven the cellist Pablo Casals heard her play and urged that she be sent abroad to study.
She entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1906 in the class of Antonin Marmontel and took the Premier Prix in 1907, afterwards studying with Alfred Cortot. Observers described the result as a combination of clarity and tenderness, inner strength and emotion, and classical balance. While she was still a student Gabriel Fauré invited her to tour with him, and she became a lifelong champion of his music.
Her career took her to more than thirty countries across Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia, appearing with major orchestras under conductors including Felix Weingartner, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Pierre Monteux. She taught at the Paris Conservatoire from 1937 to 1939 and founded schools of her own in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. She died of a heart attack in Rio de Janeiro on 9 September 1986, aged 93, having continued to perform into her final decade.
Tagliaferro was one of the principal transmitters of the French school to Brazil and back again. Trained by Marmontel and Cortot and encouraged early by Fauré, she spent seven decades carrying that repertoire and that manner of playing across two continents, and her association with Fauré’s music in particular was sustained from her student years to the end of her career.
She was also a working advocate of new music, giving first performances of pieces by Reynaldo Hahn, Gabriel Pierné and Heitor Villa-Lobos — a range that put her at the meeting point of French salon composition and Brazilian nationalism.
Her teaching had a long reach. Beyond the Paris Conservatoire she ran her own schools in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and her pupils included Jeanne Demessieux, Cristina Ortiz and James Tocco. The sheer length of her performing life, active into her nineties, made her a living connection between the world of Casals and Fauré and audiences of the 1980s.
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