This Swedish family of musicians emigrated to the Chicago area in 1891. I haven’t found anything on ancestry.com about the previous generation but there are a couple photographs of Zedelers identified as musicians on europeana.org from the Society for Swedish Literature of Finland. Violinist Nicoline Zedeler b. 1845 and violinist Nicoline Zedeler b. 1888 must have been related.
Franz Zedeler (1859-1934)
- b. Stockholm 4.10.1859
- Married Johanna Jansson (1845-1925); he was 24 and she was 38. They had two children, Nicolai and Nicoline. They emigrated to the US 1891.
- AKA Frank, became a well known violin teacher in the Chicago area, teaching at the Augustana Conservatory of Music.
- Violinist in the Minneapolis Symphony, 1904-19.
Nicolai Zedeler (1885-1966)
- b. Stockholm 14.7.1885.
- Studied with his father, then with cellists Bruno Steindel and Hermann Diestel of the CSO.
- Taught at the Chicago Lyceum in the 1910s.
- Cellist in the Stockholm Symphony, 1918-1925.
- Cellist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 40 years, from 1925-65.
- There was a Zedeler Symphonic Quintette: Harry Parsons, first violin; Salvador Sala second violin, Nicolai Zedeler, cello, Miriam Zedeler, piano and organ.
Nicoline Zedeler (1888-1961)
- b. Stockholm 3.3.1888.
- Studied with Theodore Spiering at the Chicago Musical College in 1905 and accompanied him and his family to Berlin that year.
- Appeared as a soloist in Germany in 1907.
- Taught in Berlin, with one of her young pupils being Leopold Godowsky’s son Leo, who became a professional violinist who played in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
- Was the violin soloist for John Philip Sousa’s Band from 1910-1912, toured all over the world. When she was back in Chicago in 1913, a newspaper article claimed that during the tour she received marriage proposals in a dozen languages; she “refused an Italian villa, an Australian ranch, a chateau in Blois, a Moscow palace, and a Russian prince in a breath, an English estate and the attendant peer, a Zulu kingdom and the scepter of a South African cannibal kraal, including the heart and hand that went with them.”1
- After her return she was solo violinist with similar band shows, such as Arthur Pryor’s.
- She married the violinist Emil Mix (1882-1954), who played in the New York Symphony in the 1920s and had three children. They lived 391 Central Park West in New York City thereafter, performing and teaching into the 1950s.
- Edmonton Journal, March 26, 1913, p. 5, downloaded July 1, 2020 from newspapers.com. [↩]
