A concert pianist who escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna as a teenager has died aged 95.

Walter Hautzig fled the Austrian capital thanks to a fellowship from the Jerusalem Conservatory, which he auditioned for in 1938.

Born in 1921, Mr Hautzig studied at the Vienna Academy of Music until the German annexation of Austria. When the academy was seized by German soldiers, he continued to play at home but later responded to an advert in a Jewish newspaper for an audition with Emil Hauser, director of the Jerusalem Conservatory and a founder of the Budapest String Quartet.

In a documentary filmed by his granddaughter Molly DeVries in later years, Mr Hautzig said that Mr Hauser was not just offering fellowships, but exit visas too.

He said at the time: “When I finished playing… he exclaimed, ‘No matter what it takes, I will make sure that you come to Jerusalem’.”

A month later he arrived in the then Palestine, where he studied under Josef Tal and Alfred Schroeder and performed as a soloist with the Jerusalem Academy Orchestra, according to the New York Times.

Within two years he managed to join his parents and sister, who had also fled Austria via Switzerland, in New York.

Aged just 21 he made his American debut at Town Hall in New York with an ambitious program of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. Years later, he recalled: “My father said I should be a doctor or a lawyer, but after Town Hall, he never left the house without the New York Times review in his pocket.”

Mr Hautzig was later a professor of piano at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, from 1960 to 1988, where he continued to perform until just several years ago. He died last week at his home in Manhattan from congenitive heart failure. He is survived by a daughter, son and three grandchildren.

He spent three decades performing around the world as a cultural ambassador for America. But it was on US soil that he was once again confronted by prejudice and bigotry, when asked to play to a racially segregated audience in Alabama.

Speaking at his funeral last week, Mr Hautzig’s daughter said: “He told the concert manager, ‘You’re as bad as the Nazis!’ They said, ‘Go back where you came from.’”