Erika Morini
Erika Morini (born January 5, 1904 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died October 31, 1995 in New York City ) was an Austrian-American violinist.
Life
Erika Morini received her first lessons from her father Oscar Morini, a student of Jakob Grün and Joseph Joachim . Her father came from Trieste and had met her mother Malka Weissmann, who worked as a piano teacher, in Chernivtsi , from where they moved to Vienna and opened a music school in the second district . Erika Morini had five siblings who also took up musical professions: Alice studied piano; Stella violin; Haydee became a dancer; Frank became an art dealer and Albert a concert agent.
After taking lessons from her father, Erika Morini continued her training with Otakar Ševčík at the Vienna Music Academy at the age of eight and also received lessons from Rosa Hochmann-Rosenfeld . The parents manipulated the daughter's age in order to emphasize the special nature of the musical child prodigy . Morini could also at the Viennese court the Emperor Franz Joseph audition. She made her concert debuts as a child prodigy in Vienna in 1916, with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1918, and with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Arthur Nikisch in 1919 . Her first appearance in the United States took place on January 26, 1921 in New York at Carnegie Hall with Artur Bodanzky . Hugo Knepler organized her concerts in Vienna.
In 1932 she married the jeweler Felice Siracusano from Messina . The marriage remained childless. She emigrated with him to New York in 1938 in order to escape the anti-Semitic terror in Germany and Austria. In New York she continued her concert career and gave violin lessons at the private Mannes Music School . In 1943 she received US citizenship. In 1949, after a twelve-year hiatus, she played again in her native Vienna.
She also included Louis Spohr's violin concertos in her broad repertoire and helped them gain new popularity through performances. She recorded the great violin concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky on record. In 1976 she withdrew from concert life.
Erika Morini received an honorary doctorate from Smith College , Massachusetts , in 1955 , and from the New England Conservatory of Music , Boston in 1963 .
Morini played the Guadagnini violin by Maud Powell and the Davidoff (named after Karl Dawidow ), a Stradivari violin from 1727 that her father bought in Paris in 1924 for $ 10,000.
Shortly before her death, when she was hospitalized at the age of 91, her Stradivarius was stolen from her apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in October 1995 , along with paintings, letters, and valuable sheet music. The Stradivarius was then valued at $ 3.5 million, but Morini had insured it for only $ 800,000. She could no longer be told of the theft. The stolen property has since disappeared, and the FBI ranks the violin in the top ten stolen art objects. According to Morini's will, the violin was to be auctioned and the proceeds donated to three Jewish non-profit organizations.
A play by American playwright Willy Holtzman entitled The Morini Strad premiered in Pittsburgh in 2010.
literature
- Vera Baur: Morini, Erica. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 132 f. ( Digitized version ).
- Helga Dudman: Who stole my Aunt Erica's fabulous Stradivarius? The Morini family & other musical mysteries , Carta Jerusalem, Jerusalem 2004.
- Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Kraus Reprint, Nendeln 1979, ISBN 3-262-01204-1 , Volume 7, p. 330.
- Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 / International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Vol II, 2, Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 832 .
Web links
- Birgit Saak: Article “Erica Morini” . In: MUGI. Music education and gender research: Lexicon and multimedia presentations , ed. by Beatrix Borchard and Nina Noeske, University of Music and Theater Hamburg, 2003ff. As of April 9, 2009.
- Literature by and about Erika Morini in the catalog of the German National Library
- Elena Ostleitner: Erika Morini at Jewish Women's Archive
- Interview with Erica Morini on June 27, 1956 (3:25 min.), Österreichische Mediathek
Individual evidence
- ^ Morini, Erica In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997.
- ↑ Erica Morini, 91, Subtle Violinist Who Explored Concerto Range . Obituary in the New York Times, November 3, 1995
- ↑ a b Beloved Stradivarius Stolen While Owner Was Dying . The New York Times , November 3, 1995
- ^ A b c Elena Ostleitner: Erika Morini at Jewish Women's Archive
- ↑ FBI Top Ten Art Crimes fbi.gov
- ↑ 'The Morini Strad' plays on modest, artful thoughts, review of the premiere, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 19, 2010.
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Morini, Erika |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Morini, Erica |
SHORT DESCRIPTION | Austrian-American violinist |
DATE OF BIRTH | January 5, 1904 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |
DATE OF DEATH | October 31, 1995 |
Place of death | New York City |