Dana Suesse gave her first piano concert when she was only 8 years old. Growing up in Kansas City, the child prodigy learned to play the organ, sing, and even write poetry—some of which was published in the Kansas City Star. From a young age, Suesse dreamed of becoming a composer.

“I started out as one of those very unfortunate things: a child prodigy,” she said with a laugh in a 1974 interview with Voice of America. “No one who has children should wish that they become child prodigies.”

After spending most of her youth composing and performing in Kansas City, Suesse moved to New York at 17 in hopes of finding a larger audience for her classical works. When that proved difficult, she wrote popular songs for film and theater instead.

These pop songs became her most enduring work and were performed by some of America’s most sought-after stars, including Doris Day, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra.

During this time, she composed her first hit and gained attention in 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 Looney Tunes cartoon of the same name in 1940. “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 like she had truly arrived,” says American pianist Peter Mintun, who discovered Suesse’s work as a teenager.

After hearing her music in film soundtracks, Mintun began corresponding with her, sending letters and homemade recordings of her music back and forth.

He says Suesse played for him in her home in Connecticut – complete Broadway scores, unpublished piano pieces and symphonic works.

“I was a good audience,” says Mintun, “I would like to try to promote these things and get people interested in (their) music, because (their) music is beautiful and needs to be heard.”

Suesse moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1936. There she wrote another musical sensation: “The Night is Young and You Are So Beautiful,” which the American singer Everett Marshall performed every night at the Casa Mañana Theater on the largest revolving stage in the world.

Suesse studied with Rubin Goldmark (who later taught George Gershwin) and Alexander Siloti, a student of Peter Tchaikovsky. On the recommendation of her tennis partner, the famous Kansas City composer Robert Russell Bennet, she also worked with Nadia Boulanger, a respected 20th-century composition teacher.

Frederick Fennell, the legendary conductor and friend of Susse, led a performance of her symphonic works at Carnegie Hall in 1974.

The New Yorker The magazine first called her “the Gershwin girl” in 1933 – because Gershwin and Suesse “were good in Tin Pan Alley as well as in symphonic pieces,” wrote the author. To her chagrin, the name stuck.

“Dana didn’t like that because people tended to drop that phrase a little too often,” says Mintun. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re that girl, Gershwin!’ But in a way, I’m sure she was very proud to be compared to that person.”

Suesse said in her 1974 interview that there were some advantages to being a young woman working in a male-dominated field.

“I was lucky because I didn’t really have much competition in that respect – nobody else was doing it,” she said. “To have these different facets combined in one: female, young, composer and performer. That was a good template, you know.”

Although 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 always brag and say, ‘These theaters had the best artists,'” Mintun recalls.

Suesse died in October 1987. In her will, she left the rest of her concertos, books, letters, and even her piano to Mintun. He later donated the collection to the LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Library of Congress.

Mintun continues 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 an album of 20 of her songs in 2009 entitled The Collected Piano Music of Dana Suesse.

Buechner says she was fascinated by the recordings of Süßen’s piano pieces and collected most of her sheet music with Mintun’s help.

“It was a labor of love and joy, and after making this CD, I noticed that more people were paying attention to her concert music,” says Buechner. “Many more pianists are including her music in their concert programs, which is great.”

Mintun and Buechner highlighted their “Cocktail Suite,” a varied piano solo in four movements based on Suesse’s favorite cocktails.

Buechner often thinks about lining up drinks on her piano while she plays.

“I would always treat myself to one when I finished each piece and see if I could make it to the end,” she said, laughing. “Four cocktails, can you play the piano? Probably not, but I love the whole idea of ​​the cocktail suite. It’s so contemporary and sophisticated.”

Buechner is proud to perform and promote the music of underrepresented composers like Suesse.

“Variety is the spice of life and the spice of music itself,” she says. “So I’m going to play a lot of Dana Suesse until one day they take me to the concert hall in heaven.”

“This is her highest place in my pantheon of musicians,” says Buechner.