Erika Morini

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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

Web links

Commons : Erika Morini  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
  • 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.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Morini, Erica In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997.
  2. ↑ Erica Morini, 91, Subtle Violinist Who Explored Concerto Range . Obituary in the New York Times, November 3, 1995
  3. ↑ a b Beloved Stradivarius Stolen While Owner Was Dying . The New York Times , November 3, 1995
  4. ^ A b c Elena Ostleitner: Erika Morini at Jewish Women's Archive
  5. ↑ FBI Top Ten Art Crimes fbi.gov
  6. ↑ '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