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Dana Suesse gave her first concert recital on the piano when she was only 8 years old. The child prodigy, who grew up in Kansas City, learned to play the pipe organ, sing, and even write poetry — some of which was published in the Kansas City Star. From an early age, Suesse dreamed of being a composer.
“I started out as one of those very unfortunate things: a child prodigy,” she said with a laugh during a 1974 interview with Voice of America. “Let nobody with any children wish them to be child prodigies.”
After composing and performing in Kansas City for most of her youth, Suesse moved to New York at 17 hoping to find a larger audience for her classical works. When that proved to be a struggle, she wrote popular songs for film and theater instead.
These pop tunes became her most enduring works, and were performed by some of America’s most sought-after stars, such as Doris Day, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra.
During this period, she composed her first hit and gained notice from the film and television industry with “Syncopated Love Song.” Her 1934 song “You Oughta Be In Pictures“ was picked up by Warner Brothers and used in a 1940 Looney Tunes cartoon by the same name. “My Silent Love” was used in the 1954 film “Sabrina,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn.
“When Dana heard Bing Crosby sing ‘My Silent Love’ in 1933, she felt as if she had truly arrived,” says American pianist Peter Mintun, who discovered Suesse’s work when he was a teenager.
After hearing her music in film scores, Mintun began corresponding with her, sending letters and homemade recordings of her music back and forth.
He says Suesse played for him at her house in Connecticut — entire Broadway musical scores, unpublished piano pieces and symphonic works.
“I was a good audience,” Mintun says, “I would love to try to promote these things and get people interested in (her) music because (her) music is beautiful and needs to be heard.”
Suesse moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1936. There she wrote another music sensation, “The Night is Young and You Are So Beautiful,” which American singer Everett Marshall performed nightly at the Casa Mañana Theatre, on the world's largest revolving stage.
Suesse studied under Rubin Goldmark (who later taught George Gershwin) and Alexander Siloti, a student of Peter Tchaikovsky. On the recommendation of her tennis partner, the famed Kansas City composer Robert Russell Bennet, she also worked with Nadia Boulanger, an esteemed composition teacher of the 20th century.
Frederick Fennell, the legendary conductor and a friend to Susse, led a performance of her symphonic works at Carnegie Hall in 1974.
The New Yorker magazine first dubbed her “the girl Gershwin” in 1933 — because Gershwin and Suesse were “good at both Tin Pan Alley and symphonic stuff,” the author wrote. To her chagrin, the name stuck.
“Dana did not like that, because people tended to drop that phrase a little too often,” says Mintun. “They’d say ‘Oh, you’re the girl Gershwin!’ But in a way, I’m sure she was very proud that, of all people to be compared to, that was the right one.”
Suesse said in her 1974 interview that there were some advantages to being a young woman in a male-dominated field.
“I was lucky because I didn’t really have much competition in that sense — nobody else was doing it,” she said. “To have these different facets rolled into one: female, young, composer and performer. This was good copy, you see.”
Even though she spent most of her adult life in New York, Mintun said Suesse always remembered where she came from.
“When people asked her about Kansas City, she would brag about it and say, ‘Well, they had the finest performers playing at those theaters,’” Mintun remembers.
Suesse died in October 1987. In her will, she left Mintun the rest of her concertos, books, letters and even her piano. He later donated the collection to the University of Missouri-Kansas City LaBudde Special Collections and the Library of Congress.
Mintun has continued to advocate for her music, and has sent letters to musicians around the world inviting them to play her music.
Pianist Sara Davis Buechner was the first to play Suesse’s music in Japan, and Buechner released in 2009 an album of 20 of her songs, called “The Collected Piano Music of Dana Suesse.”
Buechner says she was captivated by recordings of Suesse’s piano pieces, and she collected most of her sheet music with Mintun’s help.
“It was a labor of love and a joy to do it, and after I made that CD I saw that more people were paying attention to her concert music,” Buechner says. “A lot more pianists are putting her music on their concert programs, which is great.”
Mintun and Buechner highlighted her “Cocktail Suite,” a four-movement piano solo full of variety and based on Suesse’s favorite cocktails.
Buechner often toys with the idea of lining up the drinks on her piano while she plays.
“I would have one as I complete each piece and see if I can make it to the end,” she said with a laugh. “Four cocktails, can you play the piano? Probably not, but I love the whole idea of the cocktail suite. It is so very of-its-time and sophisticated.”
Buechner is proud to perform and champion the music of underrepresented composers like Suesse.
“Variety is the spice of life and the spice of music itself,” she says. “So I’ll be playing a lot of Dana Suesse until the day they take me to the concert hall in the sky.”
“That’s where she is in my pantheon of musicians,” Buechner says.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported by Lilah Manning, hosted by Mackenzie Martin, and produced by Olivia Hewitt, with editing by Luke Martin and Suzanne Hogan. Mix by Olivia Hewitt and Mackenzie Martin.
