collection 07 - Alberto Guerrero fonds

Alberto Guerrero was a pianist, teacher, and composer. He was born in La Serena, Chile on February 6, 1886, and came to Canada in 1918. He died in Toronto on November 7, 1959.

In the early 1900s, his family moved to Santiago, Chile where he established himself as a composer and solo pianist. Between 1908 and 1915, he wrote music for four or five operettas and zarzuelas; contributed to the newspaper E diario ilustrado; and published a treatise La armonia moderna (1915). This treatise and his operetta scores are now lost, but some of his early chamber works and piano solos survived and are held in the University of Toronto Music Library Archives.

In 1915, he went on tour with cellist Michel Penha, travelling through Bolivia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, and Cuba, before arriving in New York in January 1916. He remained there until the fall of 1917, when he returned to Chile, before moving to Toronto in 1918, where he replaced Mark Hambourg in the Hambourg Trio and taught at the Hambourg Conservatory. In 1922, he moved to the Toronto Conservatory of Music, where he taught until his death in 1959. He also taught at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto starting in the late 1940s. His students included William Aide, John Beckwith, Helmut Blume, Gwendolyn Duchemin, Ray Dudley, Dorothy Sandler Glick, Glenn Gould, his second wife Myrtle Rose Guerrero, Stuart Hamilton, Paul Helmer, Horace Lapp, Edward Laufer, Gordana Lazarevich, Pierrette LePage, Edward Magee, Ursula Malkin, Bruce Mather, John McIntyre, Gordon McLean, Oskar Morawetz, Arthur Ozolins, George Ross, R. Murray Schafer, Oleg Telizyn, Malcolm Troup, Neil Van Allen, and Ruth Watson Henderson.