Cecilia Hansen

Cecilia Hansen (Portrait of Ilja Repin , 1922)

Cecilia Hansen ( Zezilija Genrichowna Gansen , Russian Цецилия Генриховна Ганзен ; born February 16, 1897 in Staniza Kamenskaja , Russian Empire ; † July 24, 1989 in London ) was a violin virtuoso of Russian origin.

Life

Growing up in Stanitsa Kamenskaja (today Kamensk-Schachtinski in the southern Russian Oblast Rostov ), she received her first violin lessons from her father, a professor of music of Danish descent. Her extraordinary musicality soon became apparent. After consulting with a famous conductor, she became a student of Leopold von Auer at the St. Petersburg Conservatory when she was ten . Until the end of her training in 1914, she was one of his preferred students alongside Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein . It is even said that Heifetz was in love with her. She made her debut in 1910. At the age of fourteen she won a gold medal for her interpretation of the Beethoven Violin Concerto . In 1914 she won first prize in a competition. Her career was, however, by the outbreak of World War I delayed.

In Saint Petersburg she met the composer Sergei Prokofjew and in 1916 her first husband, the pianist Boris Sakharov. He was considered an uncontrolled, egocentric artist who celebrated wild parties with Prokofiev. He is said to have lost the money his wife made while gambling. In 1917 their first daughter was born. She has given concerts in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 1921 the family fled the turmoil of the civil war after the Russian Revolution . In 1923/24 she toured the United States. The young Yehudi Menuhin heard her in San Francisco and remembered the statuesque, stunningly good-looking blonde woman: “She looked like an angel, dressed all in white, and played like that.” In the press she was called “The queen of the violin ”. During a tour in the Far East in 1928, her husband decided to stay in Shanghai as a teacher and is now considered the founder of Chinese piano pedagogy. The marriage later ended in divorce.

In the late 1930s, Hansen lived in London with her second husband, the Jewish lawyer, philosopher, and polymath Hermann Friedmann . Her two-year-old daughter was killed in a German bombing raid on London in 1940. During the war she gave concerts with Myra Hess , especially as part of the National Gallery Series. In 1947 she and her friend, the composer Nikolai Medtner , recorded his Sonata in B flat minor, Op. 21 on. The following year she played Johannes Brahms' violin concerto at the Royal Albert Hall . Another tour of the United States followed. When her husband accepted an honorary professorship at Heidelberg University in 1950 , she followed him to Germany. She spent the next 38 years in Heidelberg and gave violin lessons at the music college there. Only in the last years of her life did she move to live with her surviving daughter in London, where she died on July 24, 1989.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Tully Potter: The Players. First Record In: The Recorded Violin. The history of the violin on record. Pp. 18-19.