Pianist Esther Hoffman Wexler, born in 1918 in Toronto, Canada, was a member of the faculty of the Mannes School of Music from about 1962 until about 1985, teaching in the Preparatory Division. She was the daughter of Annie Wiseman Hoffman and Sidney Hoffman, a violinist and one of the founding musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. She started her piano studies at an early age and began teaching when she was 12. She then studied with several leading teachers in New York and France, including Joseph Lhevinne and Karl Ulrich Schnabel, eventually moving permanently to New York where she studied at the School of Sacred Music and became music director of several synagogues. She married Gerald Wexler (1927-2011) in 1968 and was a long-time resident on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She died in 2014 at the age of 96, months after completing these interviews.

The interviews were conducted by Lawrence S. Freund, a cousin of Esther Hoffman Wexler. Mr. Freund’s mother, Edith Blinick Freund, had also migrated from Toronto to New York and the two transplanted Canadian cousins became very close over the years. Mr. Freund had interviewed Esther Hoffman Wexler for a family history (Imagine My Joy) and, with some knowledge of her career, decided to resume their conversations, now with a focus on her life in music. Mr. Freund, a former news correspondent and editor, has published two family histories and numerous articles on American history.

Hoffman was invited to join the piano faculty of the Mannes College of Music Preparatory Department by its director, Miriam Katch, and she taught there from 1962 until the mid-1980s. Hoffman joined the Mannes Extension Division piano faculty in 1966, where she taught until at least 2000. She received a Continuous Service Award from The New School in 1997 for thirty-five years of teaching. Hoffman was also a member of the secondary piano faculty of the Mannes College of Music from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.

Adapted by Jason Adamo from a biographical statement provided by the donor.