Xenia Boodberg Lee (November 28, 1927 – September 27, 2004) was an American concert pianist, based in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

Early life

Xenia Boodberg was born in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

, the only child of

Peter A. Boodberg Peter Alexis Boodberg (born Pyotr Alekseyevich Budberg; 8 April 1903 – 29 June 1972) was a Russian-American scholar, linguist, and sinologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 40 years. Boodberg was influential in 20th ...

(1903-1972) and Elena (Helen) Boodberg (1896-1980). Her father was a Russian-born

Baltic German Baltic Germans (german: Deutsch-Balten or , later ) were ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since their coerced resettlement in 1939, Baltic Germans have markedly declined ...

linguistics scholar and professor of Oriental Languages at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

in Berkeley. Her aunt Valentina A. Vernon recalled that her parents tried to raise her without speaking English as a small child, "only French and Russian".Bancroft Library, ''Russian emigré recollections: life in Russia and California : oral history transcript / 1979-1983'' (University of California Libraries 1986): Vernon 27. via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Xenia Boodberg was a creative child, publishing poems and stories in the Berkeley newspaper at age 8, and winning an essay contest on fire prevention from the Berkeley Lodge of Elks, also in 1936. She was performing at public events as a pianist before and into her early teens. She earned an associate in arts degree at the University of California in 1948. She also studied with pianist

Egon Petri Egon Petri (23 March 188127 May 1962) was a Dutch pianist. Life and career Petri's family was Dutch. He was born a Dutch citizen but in Hanover, Germany, and grew up in Dresden, where he attended the Kreuzschule. His father, a professional vio ...

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

, and with pianist Adolph Baller.

Career

Soon after college, in January 1949, she gave a program of piano music by composers

Darius Milhaud Darius Milhaud (; 4 September 1892 – 22 June 1974) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as ''The Group of Six''—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions ...

Roger Sessions Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher and musicologist. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and ...

Joaquín Nin-Culmell Joaquín María Nin-Culmell (5 September 190814 January 2004) was a Cuban-Spanish composer, internationally known concert pianist, and emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. Early life Joaquín Nin-Culmell was born ...

Béla Bartók Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as H ...

, and

Claude Debussy (Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the ...

in New York, of which ''The New York Times'' reviewer commented, "Miss Boodberg remains a pianist of unusual potentialities, especially in the field of new music". She played recitals and concerts, especially twentieth-century works, in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere, often and for many years afterwards, into the 1970s. She was a member of the San Francisco Musical Club and played with the Oakland Symphony and the Stockton Symphony.

Personal life

Before February 1950, Xenia Boodberg married Richard Henry Lee, a marine sargeant and Korean War veteran, and a descendant of American founding father

Richard Henry Lee Richard Henry Lee (January 20, 1732June 19, 1794) was an American statesman and Founding Father from Virginia, best known for the June 1776 Lee Resolution, the motion in the Second Continental Congress calling for the colonies' independence from ...

. They had two children, Richard and Julie. She died in 2004, aged 76 years.Xenia B. Lee
US Social Security Death Index, via

NewspaperArchive.com Heritage Microfilm, Inc. (est. 1997) is a preservation microfilm and microfilm digitization business located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. History The company began in 1996 when the microfilm division of Cedar Rapids-based Crest Information Technolo ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lee, Xenia Boodberg 1927 births 2004 deaths American classical pianists Musicians from Oakland, California University of California alumni 20th-century American pianists 20th-century classical pianists 20th-century American women pianists American people of Baltic German descent American women classical pianists Classical musicians from California 21st-century American women