Lily Dumont; concert pianist taught for decades at Longy
In 1937, the Gestapo summoned the pianist Lily Dumont to its Berlin headquarters.
The officers told her that while they respected her musical artistry, there were ''sensitivities" and ''security risks" because she was Jewish, so she would have to report to the authorities one week before each appearance with blueprints of all venues in which she would be playing, with exits and windows clearly marked.
''She walked out of there," her son Paul Mindus of London recalled yesterday, ''and went straight to the American Embassy, where she sent a telegram to a friend who taught at Dartmouth College, and he arranged a visa for her."
The pianist and her husband, Dr. Walter Mindus, whom she met in Berlin and married in America, eventually settled in New Bedford, where she died in her home Monday at the age of 94.
Ms. Dumont made music for most of her life. Her first recital was at the age of 6, and at 15, she made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, playing three concertos on the same program. After coming to this country, she played an important role in the musical world in Massachusetts for nearly 70 years. Her final public concert was in New Bedford's Zeiterion Theatre in 2000.
Ms. Dumont was born into a musical family in Berlin. Her father, Jakob Dymont, was a conductor and a composer of Jewish liturgical music. As late as 1934 he composed a complete Saturday-evening Sabbath service that premiered in Berlin. Ms. Dumont traveled to London in September to hear it performed again.
Ms. Dumont was a prodigy whose first studies were with her father. Later, her primary teacher was the eminent Berlin pedagogue Theodore Bertram. By the mid-'30s she had played with many prominent European orchestras and now-legendary conductors such as Leo Blech, Paul van Kempen and William Steinberg, who later became music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She also made her first recordings, a charming series of 78s for Polydor.
After leaving Germany, Ms. Dumont continued to record and appear in concerts in North and South America, but began to concentrate on teaching, balancing her musical life with raising two sons. For more than 40 years, she served on the faculty of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, and until a year or two ago was still teaching in her home. She was the founder and longtime president of the New Bedford concert series, and for many years she organized an annual summer seminar for pianists at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Her students vividly recall her insights, her supportiveness, and the luminous beauty of her tone as she illustrated her points.
Ms. Dumont was always elegant in coiffure and couture and courteous in manner, but no one was ever in any doubt about what she thought.
She regularly appeared on the radio both in New Bedford and in Boston, and four years ago, to honor her 90th birthday, her friend Raphael Hillyer, founding violist of the Juilliard Quartet, transferred some of her radio recordings and tapes of her concert appearances onto compact discs. A lucky audience at Keith Junior High School in New Bedford back in the 1960s heard a Golden Age piano recital.
Ms. Dumont's final Boston appearance was in the Longy School's Pickman Auditorium in 1998, when she appeared in an all-Mozart program with members of the Borromeo String Quartet. The Globe reported on that occasion that her playing was ''vigorous in attack and humane in imagination, decisive in gesture, lucid in structure, delightful and expressive in detail."
The father of the Borromeo's first violinist, Nicholas Kitchen, had been a piano student of Ms. Dumont's many years before. Nicholas Kitchen also participated in Ms. Dumont's last concert. In a statement yesterday, Kitchen wrote, ''To stand a few feet away from Ms. Dumont and hear the profound beauty of Bach weave between the piano and me: every finger, every note, tapping like a need into some central spring from which the beauty of music flows was a true privilege."
Hillyer, who met Ms. Dumont when she was 12 and he was 9, wrote yesterday, ''With the greatest refinement and with great intensity she performed with a radiance that lighted every work. Her range of expression was astonishing. She retained the poetry and her drive till the very end. The clarity of her Bach, the grace of Mozart, the power of Beethoven were all there, all the time."
Dr. Mindus, who served on the staff of St. Luke's Hospital in New Bedford, died in 1985.
In addition to her son Paul, Ms. Dumont leaves another son, Dr. Lester Mindus of Los Angeles, and five grandchildren.
A funeral service will be held at 1 p.m. today in Tifereth Israel Synagogue in New Bedford. Burial will be in the Jewish Cemetery in New Bedford.
