The pianist Catherine Kautsky combines music, personal family history, and the turbulent history of Jewish Vienna before and during the Nazi era. Her family's flight began after the "Anschluss" of Austria in 1938 in Vienna and eventually led to St. Louis, Missouri, where Kautsky spent most of her childhood. The fates of her relatives reflect those of many Jewish composers of the 20th century, including Arnold Schönberg, Hanns Eisler, Eric Zeisl, Gideon Klein, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. While some did not survive the Nazi extermination machinery, others managed to emigrate and start anew in the USA.

A particular focus of the evening is on Kautsky's great-grandfather Karl Kautsky, one of the most important thinkers of European social democracy. His wife Luise Kautsky, who was murdered in Auschwitz, the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, who gained international recognition in Los Angeles, as well as lesser-known family members like the doctor who secretly cared for Jewish women, the Freemason who continued to meet his members in a New York lodge, the relative who survived three concentration camps and returned to Vienna, will be mentioned.

Musically, Catherine Kautsky spans from the Vienna of Franz Schubert to works by significant Viennese exile composers such as Arnold Schönberg, Hanns Eisler, Erich Zeisl, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Selected piano pieces are placed in a lively dialogue with family history as well as the Jewish, cultural, and political history of Vienna.


Catherine Kautsky is considered one of the most renowned pianists of her generation. Praised by The New York Times as “a pianist who can play Mozart and Schubert as though their sentiments and habits of speech coincided exactly with hers … The music spoke directly to the listener, with neither obfuscation nor pretense,” Catherine Kautsky has performed on six continents and in prestigious American venues such as Carnegie Recital Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York.
Professor of Keyboard Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, her recorded interpretations of Debussy and Brahms have been acclaimed by critics for their rare intensity and sensitivity. "Debussy’s Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque" (2017) was praised for its "gorgeously written, colorful prose that… immerses the reader in… the culture that inspired Debussy".  In 2022 she completed a widely-disseminated series of 24 recorded lecture-recitals, entitled "Great Piano Works Explained", and has recently been focusing on programs related to Vienna and the Holocaust and her own family history, performing in venues such as the Casa Stefan Zweig in Petropolis, Brazil and the Holocaust Museum in St. Louis, MO.  Catherine Kautsky’s interests in social history and the other arts inform all her programming, and she is widely known for her vibrant lecture recitals and her concern with social justice.


In cooperation with the Jewish Welcome Service Vienna.