Thunderous applause5/15/2023 ![]() At age ten, she began to learn piano from a twelve-year-old neighbor. She would eventually take back her birth name when she was twenty-two.īrico later characterized her childhood as “miserable,” full of verbal and physical abuse, but one bright spot was music. She did not know the story of her birth until she was a teenager. They settled in Oakland, California, and Antonia was renamed Wilhelmina Wolthus. When Antonia was six, the family secretly immigrated to the United States. At age two, she was placed with a foster family named Wolthus in Amsterdam, with Agnes paying a weekly stipend for her expenses. Unmarried and unable to care for the baby, her mother placed Antonia in a local convent. Her father was a traveling Italian musician. Early YearsĪntonia Louisa Brico was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on June 26, 1902, to Agnes Brico. In 1974 her most famous student, folk singer Judy Collins, made a documentary film about her, which was nominated for an Academy Award and made Brico into a feminist icon. After living in California, New York, and Europe, she spent the last forty-seven years of her life in Denver, conducting when she could and teaching piano and vocal music at her prestigious Brico Studio. ![]() ![]() Despite being told that women could not and should not be symphony conductors, she completed the rigorous conducting course at the University of Berlin and conducted many major orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Berlin Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic. Antonia Brico (1902–89) was the first woman to gain wide acceptance and recognition in the field of symphony conducting.
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