It is not my intention to write a biography of Jorge Bolet, but I thought I would have a go at one chapter on his early years (1914-1927), especially as the material is rather scattered on this website, and confusing, too. This has enabled me to make connections with things I know now about his later life when I see what I have written on the page. Comments, corrections and additions are most welcome. UPDATE! When I say the material is rather scattered and confusing, I mean

A fellow student in the same year as Jorge Bolet (1927) was Sidney Foster (born in Florence, South Carolina, in 1917) who was aged 10, the youngest student Curtis ever took. (In 1968 Foster, a Professor at Indiana School of Music 1952-77, was to coax Bolet there from Spain as a teaching colleague.) Imelda Delgado in a book on Foster relates a shocking event in which in 1929 the young Sidney was dismissed from Curtis for being a "bad boy", though it later turned out that i

A name you don't hear in Jorge's usual biography! Jorge had begun piano lessons with sister Maria. (He said in an interview in 1943 that he was seven years old at the time.). At age four, he had been attacking the piano keys so enthusiastically that one day he literally broke a hammer. 'After that he was consigned to an imaginary keyboard—specifically, the living room sofa—and his cherished pastime was banging out scales and octaves on a slab of overstuffed mohair, supplyi