Sergius Kagen

His three-act opera Hamlet, in a lyrical style ranging from tonal to 12-note, was first performed in Baltimore on 9 November 1962. A second opera, The Suitor (based on Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac), was never completed.

He began his work as a composer later in life, after 1949. He wrote somewhere between 50 and 70 songs, and about 20 of them were published. They are written in a chromatic idiom with careful attention to text declamation.

As a writer on singing, he published his important catalog of vocal literature Music for the Voice in 1949. A year later he wrote a second book for voice teachers, On Studying Singing. These books and musical editions are still in print and are still widely used by American singers and voice teachers today.

As a pianist, he specialized in accompanying singers, especially important artists such as Povla Frijsh, Ezio Pinza and Mack Harrell. In the late 1940s he appeared with the newly formed Bach Aria Group, an ensemble of singers and instrumentalists that presents the works of J. S. Bach.

He and his family moved again, to the United States in 1925, and in 1930 he entered the Juilliard School in New York city, studying piano with Carl Friedberg, composition with Rubin Goldmark and singing with Marcella Sembrich, and earned his diploma in 1934. After Sembrich's death in 1935, he took over the training of many of her students, and he formally joined the faculty at Juilliard in 1940. There he taught singing and vocal literature from 1940 to 1964, and at the Union Theological Seminary, from 1957 also until his death. He married soprano Genevieve Greer in 1937. He became an American citizen in 1930.

He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the third son of wealthy, intellectual Jewish parents, his father Isaiah Kagen, a newspaperman, and his mother Vera Lipshitz, a writer and educator. His older brother was studying to be a pianist, but he died in the Russian Revolution. Sergius then began his own piano study at the age of nine and soon entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory. But in 1920 his family fled the Revolution, moving to Berlin, and a year later he studied with Leonid Kreutzer and Paul Juon at the Hochschule für Musik.

Sergius Kagen (August 22, 1909 – March 1, 1964) was an American pianist, composer, music editor and voice teacher.