Teresa Carreño (1853 — 1917) was a celebrated Venezuelan pianist and composer who was a musician of great power and spirit, known to her public as the “Valkyrie of the piano”! She was given her first piano lessons by her father, Manuel Antonio Carreño, a politician and talented amateur pianist. Exiled for political reasons, the family settled in New York in 1862. She next spent four years in Paris as a pupil of Georges Mathias and Anton Rubinstein, after which she embarked upon a long and highly successful concert career.

At various times she composed works for the piano as well as a string quartet and the Petite Danse Tsigane for orchestra. She developed a mezzo-soprano voice of sufficient calibre to enable her to appear as an opera singer; and, with the second of her four husbands, Giovanni Tagliapietra, a baritone, organized and directed an opera company in Caracas.