Elliott Zuckerman

(1930-2019)

Elliott Zuckerman was a musician, artist, writer, critic, and teacher. He was Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where he began teaching in 1961. Before that, he taught at Columbia and the New School. He held a B.A. in Humanities, and an M.A. and Ph.D in European Cultural History from Columbia, and an A.B. and A.M. in English from Cambridge University. He was a Kellet Fellow, sent by Columbia to Clare College, Cambridge. At St. John’s he was an Andrew W. Mellon tutor.

He held a professional certificate from the Chatham Square Music School in New York, where he studied with the revered teacher Vera Maurina Press. He played solo and chamber recitals in New York, Cambridge, and Annapolis, and lectured on musical and other subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. In the seventies he gave the Metropolitan Opera Guild lecture on a new production of Die Meistersinger. He is the author of The First Hundred Years of Wagner's Tristan (1962), and many published lectures on opera, music theory, and prosody. He composed and recorded three song cycles and published two collections of poetry.

Born in Brooklyn, his study of painting began at the High School of Music and Art in New York City, where, while continuing to study music elsewhere, he matriculated as an art student. He went on painting while at Cambridge, and participated in exhibits. On return from Europe, he did not paint for many years, but took it up again in the mid nineteen-seventies, starting out with portraits, which he had never done before. In 1980 he had a show of thirty portraits and self-portraits. By then he was also painting still-lifes and landscapes, exhibiting frequently at the Maryland Federation of Art. In 2010 he had a highly praised one-man show at the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts.

His paintings are in many private collections in Annapolis, Chicago, New York, and throughout the country, and in Europe.