Mary Oleskiewicz

Mary Oleskiewicz, known internationally not only as a flute player and music historian but also as a dancer and teacher of Argentine tango, died on June 26, 2025 at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth, Mass., near her home in Carver. She was 59 and had been fighting cancer for several years.

Described by a reviewer as "one of the greatest baroque flutists of our time," Mary was the world's leading authority on the eighteenth-century German composer Johann Joachim Quantz. She also edited and wrote about music of the Bach family.

As a flutist, it was natural that Mary should have devoted much of her career to Quantz, whose name is well known to flute players, albeit for a single frequently performed concerto. Through three decades of work on unpublished music manuscripts, mostly in Germany, Mary settled issues of attribution and established a chronology for Quantz's hundreds of flute sonatas and concertos. She also showed, through first editions and recordings, that Quantz's works reveal a variety and an evolving compositional style worthy of comparison to those of his more famous contemporaries. Mary traveled the world to identify the eight or nine surviving instruments made by Quantz, which, as she demonstrated, differ subtly from one another while manifesting important developments in flute design and playing technique.

Mary recorded all of J. S. Bach's chamber music for the flute. She also edited the flute solos of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, second son of Johann Sebastian. In her dissertation and subsequent publications she revealed influences and relationships between Quantz and members of the Bach family. She also published ground-breaking findings about the music of Quantz's long-time employer King Frederick "the Great" of Prussia, who was a gifted amateur flutist and composer. Mary showed that previous scholars had seriously underestimated the flutes and flute music of Quantz and had failed to recognize C. P. E. Bach's privileged place in the royal Prussian musical establishment.

Mary was professor in the Performing Arts department at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 2001. Previously she served as curator and professor at the National Music Museum on the campus of the University of South Dakota. A fluent German speaker, she also taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Among her awards and honors were research fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) as well as first prizes in the National Flute Association's Baroque Flute Artist and Doctoral Dissertation competitions.

An Ohio native, Mary received her undergraduate degree at Youngstown State University, where she studied flute with Walter Mayhall. She earned her Master's degree at Case Western Reserve University, working with baroque flutist Sandra Miller, and her Ph.D. at Duke University, where her dissertation adviser was Peter Williams.

Although few in number, Mary's recordings are among the most exquisite examples of eighteenth-century flute playing. They include two CDs of sonatas by Quantz, another of Quantz's flute concertos, and seven sonatas by King Frederick, recorded in the music room of his famous royal palace of Sanssouci. Nearly all of these are first recordings.

Mary's most notable recording may be that of Quantz's quartets for flute and strings—six previously unknown works which she discovered in a Berlin archive. It was typical of Mary's persistence as a researcher that, having found clues to the existence of such pieces, she sifted through hundreds of manuscripts to find the quartets, which she then recorded and published in a scholarly edition. Similar persistence led to her investigation of twenty-five of Quantz's concertos, also considered lost, in a Russian library, two of which she later recorded.

During her student years Mary performed professionally not only as a classical flutist in the Cleveland area but on tour with the Australian popular singer Debbie Byrne. Her international career later took her to China, Germany, Mexico, and elsewhere; in Boston she performed with the Handel and Haydn Society, Newton Baroque, and other area groups. Videos of some of her performances can be seen on YouTube, including a 2024 concert featuring the three quartets by C. P. E. Bach as well as a previously misattributed sonata by Quantz.

In addition to her activities as a classical musician, Mary was known internationally as a teacher of Argentine tango, which she performed and taught for over twenty years not only as a dancer but as a player of the bandoneón. She was also a prize-winning photographer whose work was displayed at the Plymouth Center for the Arts and other regional galleries.

A consummate scholar, musician, and teacher, Oleskiewicz drove herself to complete even the most difficult tasks as thoroughly as possible. She amassed a collection of scans and facsimiles not only of all Quantz's five hundred compositions—most of them in multiple copies—but also many obscure works by his contemporaries. As a teacher, when faced with the challenge of offering courses on Latin American music and dance, she traveled to Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Cuba to study tango and learn to play indigenous flutes. Her recordings, elegant and expressive, reveal her insistence on precise intonation and fidelity to what we know of historical

instruments and practices—much of it gained through her own research.

Mary's magisterial paper on Quantz sources will appear in the proceedings of a 2023 Berlin conference at which she was keynote speaker. Not yet commercially released are her recordings of J. S. Bach's chamber music with flute. An edition of Quantz's concertos and other compositions was in progress at her death, as was a book on Quantz's music; these projects will be carried on by colleagues.

David Schulenberg

August 4, 2025