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Dorothy Moulton Mayer, Lady Mayer (née Piper, 1886–1974) was an English soprano, philanthropist, peace activist and biographer.

Family

Dorothy was born in 1886 in Crouch End, London. Her father was George Piper OBE, a civil servant at the London War Office. In 1919, she married the German-born businessman and philanthropist Robert Mayer and they had a daughter and two sons. In 1939, her husband was knighted.

Career

Mayer was an opera and concert soprano. After completing her singing studies, she performed in England before becoming an internationally known professional singer in Vienna in 1923. She was then engaged in Salzburg, Budapest and America. She was an advocate for contemporary European composition, performing new works by German and Austrian composers, such Egon Wellesz, in Britain, and giving first performances of composers who were in the early stages of their musical careers. She was one of the first British singers to perform Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. For this, she was described in Musical Opinion as "something of a musical crusader."

Together with her husband, Mayer also devoted herself to promoting young musicians and in 1923 the two founded the "Orchestral Concerts for Children" together. The first series of concerts were conducted by Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent and they were later run by the BBC.

Mayer was also a peace advocate and was vice president of the British section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She attended the inaugural Zagreb Conference for Peace and International Cooperation in Yugoslavia during 1951.

Later life

When Mayer was in her fifties she began writing biographies of historic figures. Her biographies included Louise of Savoy, Marie Antoinette, Angelica Kauffman and the violin virtuoso Louis Spohr, among others.

She died in 1974.

Select publications

• The Forgotten Master. The life & times of Louis Spohr (1959)
• The Great Regent: Louise of Savoy 1476–1531 (1966)
• Marie Antoinette: The Tragic Queen (1969)
• Angelica Kauffmann, R.A., 1741–1807 (1972)

References

1. ^ Armstrong, Robert (6 January 2011) . "Mayer, Sir Robert (1879–1985), patron of music and philanthropist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31430. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
2. Potter, Tully (2024). Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician. Boydell & Brewer. p. 358. ISBN 978-0-907689-78-2.
3. Doctor, Jennifer Ruth (1999). The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation's Tastes. Cambridge University Press. p. 419. ISBN 978-0-521-66117-1.
4. ^ Mayer, Sir Robert (1970). Eternal Youth and Music: Tributes to Sir Robert Mayer on the Occasion of His Ninetieth Birthday. Smythe. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-900675-51-5.
5. The Annual Obituary. St. Martin's. 1988. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-912289-82-3.
6. ^ "Musical Opinion". Musical Opinion. Vol. 82, no. 974–984. 1958. p. 582.
7. Panter-Downes, Mollie (24 June 1979). "Letter from London". The New Yorker. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
8. Stopić, Zvonimir; Niebuhr, Robert; Pickus, David (28 October 2024). Yugoslavia, Nonalignment and Cold War Globalism: Tito's International Rise, Celebrity and Fall. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-040-19324-2.
9. Padhye, Prabhakar (1953). Yugoslavia, the Land of New Horizons. p. 55.
10. Matheson-Pollock, Helen; Paul, Joanne; Fletcher, Catherine (16 July 2018). Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe. Springer. p. 127. ISBN 978-3-319-76974-5.

External links

• Photographs of Moulton Mayer at the National Portrait Gallery

• 1886 births
• 1974 deaths
• 20th-century English biographers
• 20th-century English women singers
• 20th-century English women writers
• 20th-century women philanthropists
• Activists from London
• English founders
• English operatic sopranos
• English pacifists
• English patrons of music
• English women biographers
• English women philanthropists
• Organization founders
• People from Crouch End
• Philanthropists from London
• Singers from the London Borough of Haringey
• Wives of knights
• Women founders
• Women's International League for Peace and Freedom people
• Writers from the London Borough of Haringey