Lili Kraus

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Lili Kraus (1971)

Lili Kraus (born March 4, 1905 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; † November 6, 1986 in Asheville , USA ) was a pianist .

Youth and education

Lili Kraus was born in a poor family, but learned to play the piano at the age of 6. At the age of eight she was accepted at the Royal Conservatory of Budapest. Here she had theory lessons from Zoltán Kodály and on the piano from Béla Bartók . She graduated with honors at the age of 17. In 1922 she moved to the Vienna Music Academy and perfected herself with Severin Eisenberger , student of Theodor Leschetizky , and studied contemporary music with Eduard Steuermann , one of Arnold Schoenberg's early students . She finished the three-year master class after just one year. She then became a professor at the Vienna Music Academy, but quit this position in 1930.

In Vienna she met Otto Mandl, a wealthy mining engineer and philosopher. They converted to Catholicism and married on October 31, 1930. Mandl gave up his job and devoted himself to Lili's career. In the same year they moved to Berlin so that she could attend Artur Schnabel's master class . Her two children, Ruth and Michael, were born here. In 1932 the family moved to Lake Como , to Tremezzo in Italy, where they lived until 1938. In 1933 Artur Schnabel also came to Tremezzo, where he set up a music school.

In the 1930s she went on tour, both as a soloist and as chamber music partner of the violinist Szymon Goldberg . For the British record company Parlophone they recorded the sonatas by Beethoven and Mozart in 1935 and 1937. Chopin, Haydn, Schubert and Béla Bartók also belonged to her repertoire. Before the approach of National Socialism , Kraus and Goldberg fled to London and became British citizens, but only stayed there for a year before moving on to Amsterdam. From here, Kraus went on a world tour in 1940, which began with its American debut in San Francisco in 1941 .

In Japanese captivity 1943–45

In June 1943, like Goldberg, she and her family were arrested by the Japanese in Jakarta under a pretext. Both were separated from their families and were sent to different detention centers so that they did not know about each other for over a year. Kraus shared a cell with 12 other women and was sentenced to hard physical labor. a. cleaning latrines, which caused burns to her hands. The daily ration consisted of two cups of rice and bitter herbal tea. Through the intervention of a Japanese conductor who had heard her in Tokyo in 1936, after a year she was transferred to another camp and was reunited with her family. She was also allowed to play the piano again. After another two years, they were released in August 1945. She had lost a lot of weight and her body was covered with open wounds and infections. Your personal possessions were lost. She later believed that she had learned many piano works by heart. Her hands had become stronger as a result of the hard work, but her fingers had lost sensitivity, so that she had to patiently learn to play the piano again.

In Australia she gathered new strength. In a year and a half she gave over 120 concerts in Australia and New Zealand. In recognition of her services to helping countries in need, she was given honorary citizenship of New Zealand with a passport that she used to travel with.

New beginning in 1948

In 1948 Kraus was ready for the second phase of her career. She returned to Europe and made her first record after the war. In 1949 she played successfully in New York. In the same year she moved with her family to South Africa , where she taught at the University of Cape Town from 1949 to 1950. The family then lived in Paris and Vienna until they settled in Nice , where Kraus' husband died in 1956.

In Germany in the 1950s it was difficult for Kraus to assert himself against pianists such as Wilhelm Backhaus , Edwin Fischer or Wilhelm Kempff and their styles of interpretation, for example in their view of Beethoven's piano sonatas. In France, however, she managed to attract the attention of the music public. The record company Les Discophiles français was interested in working with Kraus as early as the early 1950s, planning a complete recording of the piano and chamber music works by Mozart and Haydn, but this was not fully completed. She recorded Mozart's violin sonatas with violinist Willi Boskovsky , and the piano trios were recorded in the mid-1950s with the trio of Lili Kraus, Willi Boskowsky, and Nikolaus Hübner. A short time later, the Mozart project came to nothing.

A highlight of their appearances was the concert at the wedding banquet of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on February 12, 1951 in the Golestan Palace in Tehran . In Canterbury Cathedral , she played the first artist in a church concert. She gave concerts in the new Brazilian capital Brasília and performed with the Salzburg Chamber Orchestra at the Moroccan Mozart Festival in historic palaces and courtyards.

Kraus was a long-time juror at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas.

In the summer of 1965 she spent a few weeks with Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné and delighted him on his sick bed by playing Beethoven.

In 1968 she appointed the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth as Artist in Residence ; she taught there continuously until 1983.

For the past twenty years she lived with her daughter Ruth and son-in-law Fergus Pope in Asheville , North Carolina , where she died in 1986.

meaning

Kraus was one of the most prominent Mozart interpreters of the 20th century. Her complete recording of the piano sonatas, recorded at the end of the 1960s, is still considered exemplary today; Her recording of all piano concertos (with the Vienna Festival Orchestra under the direction of Stephen Simon ) from the years 1965/66, which appeared parallel to Géza Anda's complete recording begun in 1961, is also of great artistic value. Unlike many pianists of their time, Kraus did not prefer powerful tones, but worked on tonal and agogic details without neglecting the big line. Since she had never entered into an exclusive contract with a record company, her records were difficult to obtain for a long time. In the meantime, however, her recordings from 1933–1958 on the Parlophone, Ducretet-Thomson and Les Discophiles Français labels (including recordings of violin sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven with Goldberg) and the complete recordings of the Mozart concerts have been re-released on CD.

further reading

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ My Life and Music. The Autobiography of Artur Schnabel.
  2. Lili Kraus: The First Lady Of The Piano By Steven H. Roberson, Ph.D. (PDF; 39 kB)
  3. Madame Lili Kraus To Critique Area Pianist At Master Class , in: Big Spring Herald, November 9, 1975
  4. Haydn - L'oeuvre de Piano - by Lili Kraus ( Memento from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  5. Willi Boskowsky, violin - Lili Kraus, piano
  6. Van Cliburn International Piano Competition ( Memento from September 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive )