Marilyn Neely

A child prodigy who began performing before age 10, Marilyn Neely proved her mettle in 1962 when Glenn Gould fell ill two days before he was to appear as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Musical director Zubin Mehta phoned the then 25-year-old Neeley at home. The day before she was to perform the Schumann concerto as a soloist, she spent 12 hours practicing the piece.

Her remarkable early career earned her a Times Woman of the Year award in 1963. Neeley was born on December 26, 1937. Her father, William B. Neeley, was a Superior Court judge. Her mother, Vivian, taught piano. Neeley showed talent at 3 and began private music lessons at 5. She graduated from USC as a music student and earned a master’s degree in theology there. In 1968, the year that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Neeley taught piano to African-American high school students at a Methodist mission school in Camden, S.C.

She joined the faculty of Ohio State University, where she met her future husband, violinist Robert Gerle. Together they performed the complete Beethoven violin and piano sonatas, which aired on television and won an Emmy in 1970. They married the same year. The couple had one child, Andrew, a composer and pianist. Her husband died in 2005.

Neeley and her family moved to Baltimore in the early 1970s, and she and Gerle joined the music faculty of the University of Maryland. They also toured and performed together in concert. She continued to teach and perform. Neeley was chairwoman of the piano faculty at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Neeley died aged 69 on May 30, 2007, of pneumonia at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md., while getting treatment for bone cancer.

Source: Los Angeles Times