French conductor.

Monteux was born in Paris in 1875. In 1884, at age 9, he entered the Paris Conservatory of Music, studying harmony and composition. His first conducting experience was at age 12, and he also studied violin and viola. He was engaged as a violist in the Paris Opera Comique in 1890 at the age of 15, and attended the Paris conservatory at the collegiate level from 1892-1896.

Monteux's career as a conductor is a long and distinguished one. He conducted, among others, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes orchestra (1911-1914), the Paris Opera (1913-1914), the Metropolitan Opera, New York (1917-1919), the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1919-1924), the Nederland Concertgebouw (1924-1934), the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (1936-1952), and was appointed Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1961, at the age of 86. In addition to these appointments, Monteux was a guest conductor at the annual Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, from 1937-1962, the longest tenure of any Ravinia Festival conductor. During his residency with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Monteux coached Robert Shaw and Andre Previn in Conducting and Leon Fleisher and Samuel Lipman in the piano concerti repertoire. In 1943, he founded a school of conducting in Hancock, Maine. Among his students were Erich Kunzel, Neville Marriner, Werner Torkanowsky, and David Zinman.

Monteux died on July 1, 1964, at his home in Maine. He and his wife, Doris Hodgkins Monteux (who was 20 years his junior and who died 20 years later), are buried in Hancock's Riverside Cemetery.

American percussionist and conductor.

Gordon Benes Peters, who donated this collection, studied with Monteux every summer from 1952 to 1963, and received the Monteux Discipleship, one of 11 special awards bestowed by Pierre Monteux. Peters was the Principal Percussionist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1959 to 2001, and also the Conductor / Administrator of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (the training school of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) from 1965 to 1987.