Opal Wheeler & Sybil Deutscher

I am going to part with some of my book collections. I still love them, so I'll create a virtual collection after the style of REFERENCE LIBRARY.

Opal Wheeler was born in 1898 & developed an interest in music at a very early age. She composed music to go with Mother Goose rhymes when she was only six.

She studied music at the Universities of Wisconsin & Washington, as well as Columbia University. She further studied music in Italy and France. Later she taught music to children.

She saw a need for composers' biographies written for children, and joined with Sybil Deutscher to write 20 biographies over a period of ten years, beginning in the late 1930s. Other books she wrote included an artist's series, music anthologies, a biography of Hans Christian Anderson, and even an adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.

Musicial children will enjoy playing the tunes discussed by the author, which are included in each book.

These books have regained popularity with home schooling families; I discovered today there are now companion study guides for Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Handel, Hayden, Mozart, Schubert, & Schumann. The books themselves have been reprinted in softcover editions.

The only thing I could not discover was a photograph of the author.