WOMEN OF THE WORLD

‘Young women do not drink or smoke to excess; they therefore tend to be in better physical condition. It is also evident that they are more patient than men.’ So said Otakar Ševík (1852–1934) of his female students, supposedly in an interview for Pall Mall Magazinein 1910, reproduced in The Amadeus Book of the Violin(1998). As one of the most famous violin teachers in Europe at the start of the 20th century, Ševík helped to launch the international careers of female soloists at a time when the violin was gradually becoming a socially acceptable instrument for women to play. Yet these women and their stories have so far received little attention from writers, in comparison with their male contemporaries.

Otakar Ševík was an advocate of female violinists

Henry Roth’s enduring book Master Violinists in Performance(1982) offers a case in point. Following eight individual chapters on famous male violinists like Heifetz and Menuhin, Roth ends the book with a single chapter titled ‘Women and the Violin’, which only briefly covers some of the better-known female violinists, the bulk of the material consisting of photographs rather than biographical detail. ˜e situation is the same with Grove Music Online, which still omits several important women – including two whom we learn more about here.

Today, in an age when many of the world’s most popular violin soloists are women, it is time to pay homage to those who forged this path. This article will consider three violinists whose careers were launched from Ševík’s studio, looking briefly at their fascinating life stories, and exploring ways in which Ševík’s teaching enabled them to carve out careers in this male-dominated sphere.

As various writers have recently noted, prevailing social attitudes in 19th-century Europe meant that only rarely did female artists make it on to the stage. In the Journal of the American Musicological Society(2018), Roger Freitas discusses the climate in which the famous 19th-century singer Adelina Patti rose to prominence, writing: ‘Patti lived in a world where feminine rectitude precluded stage performance.’ He quotes Bonnie G. Smith, who in Changing Lives(1989) wrote, ‘Women in the public sphere… sought out pleasure and were therefore outcasts from respectable, domestic society.’ In the particular case of the violin, a woman playing on ‘the devil’s instrument’ could be notably scandalous: Paula Gillett (in her book Musical Women in England, 1870–1914;published in 2000) identices an ‘informal ban’ on women playing the violin during this period.

Indeed, although the Royal Academy of Music in London was founded in 1822, female violin students were not admitted until 1872. (Previously, only the voice, the piano and the harp were considered suitable instruments for ladies.)

British violinist Marie Hall was a true international celebrity’

TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

However, the final decades of the 19th century saw attitudes begin to change, and women started to navigate their way on to the concert platform. In 1893 George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘Young ladies who can play much better than the average professional “leader” of 20 years ago are discoverable with little research in sufficient abundance nowadays’ – though he did attribute this to the fact that the violinist Wilma Neruda had proved ‘that the violin shews off.a good figure’ (quoted in Roth).The demand for violin recitals grew in early 20thcentury London, and Simon McVeigh (in his 2010 essay ‘“As the Sand on the Sea Shore”: Women Violinists in London’s Concert Life around 1900’) has shown that female violinists played a considerable part in this craze – and none more so than the ‘true international celebrity’ British violinist Marie Hall (1884–1956).

In fact, an article in the Strand Magazine(1903) reports Ševík as having proclaimed Hall ‘the most gifted pupil I have ever had’. She was the first of his female students to establish an international career as a violinist. As a talented child from a penniless family, she approached Ševík’s protege Jan Kubelík after a recital in London, asking if he would hear her play, and he agreed to hear the ambitious young girl the next morning. Immediately, Kubelík saw her potential, and sent her to Ševík in Prague (in 1901), with a letter of recommendation.

Studying with Ševík, who was famously driven, entailed 14-hour days for Hall, but when she returned to England 18 months later she could command a fee of 500 for her London debut at St James’s Hall in 1903, and such was her popularity that hundreds were turned away from her second appearance in the capital. In 1916, Hall became the first violinist to record the Elgar Violin Concerto (albeit in a much abridged version), and she was the dedicatee of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, giving the work’s first performance in 1921 with the British Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult. Hall refused to be compared with her male predecessors. Upon being told that she was a second Kubelík, she quickly retorted, ‘I am not a second anybody or anything, ’ claiming, ‘I want to be myself, with a method and style of my own.’

Australian violinist Daisy Kennedy (1893–1981) followed a path similar to Hall’s just a few years later. She tracked down Kubelík when he was playing in Australia, and asked to play to him herself, waiting outside his hotel in Adelaide for a week until he acquiesced. Like Hall, Kennedy travelled to Prague for studies with Ševík, in 1908. He agreed to take her on as a student before learning that she had come with a recommendation letter from Kubelík.

When Ševík moved to the Vienna academy in 1909, Kennedy did too. In 1911, after she had attended his studio for three years, Ševík took her to London among a cohort of six students, the fruits of whose labours he believed were now ripe for public consumption. Following her successful debut there, Kennedy settled in London and began a career that involved touring internationally, giving recitals and performing with major orchestras. She was one of the first violin soloists to embrace the medium of radio, broadcasting regularly for the BBC.

SEVCIK HIMSELF IS REPORTED TO HAVE PROCLAIMED MARIE HALLTHE MOST GIFTED PUPIL I HAVE EVER HAD

Another female student was Erica Morini (1904-95), who entered the Vienna music academy in 1911, aged seven. She studied on and off with Ševík over the coming years, before touring internationally. To escape the rabid anti-Semitism of the Nazis in Austria she emigrated to America in 1938. Her concert career coincided with the advent of electric recording technology, and she became a leading recording artist, producing records of concertos by Tchaikovsky, Brahms and many others.

How, then, did Ševík’s teaching set these violinists on the career paths they were to enjoy? To understand the ethos behind the Ševík school and how it shaped his students we have to go back to his own early struggles as a violin student in Prague. Ševík suffered from extreme nervousness, and failed the conservatoire’s entrance examination three times; he was only granted entrance on special dispensation from the director. When admitted, he found it difficult to develop following the traditional course of study, and so began working out his own experimental exercises.

The key to Ševík’s method - as all students who have worked through any of his study books can attest - is to isolate difficult passages into small components to generate effortless coordination of movements. In the Musical Timesin 1930, violinist and writer Henry Joachim described a typical lesson with Ševík. First came exercises - his own, which were sometimes invented on the spot. He would then show the pupil how to practise Ernst’s Airs hongrois variés,working on each bar ‘separately backwards and forwards with all possible combinations and permutations of rhythm, fingering, and bowing’. On one occasion, Joachim tried to play these in tempo: ‘This sort of temperamental outburst is not appreciated by Ševík, and I was immediately punished by being made to play the first double-stop variation backwards from memory!’ The painstaking, obsessive nature of Ševík’s teaching surely stems from his nerves as a student - a means of overcoming these nerves was to break down any piece or passage into its smallest components.

Morini specifically attributed her left-hand technique to her training with Ševík. In a 1972 interview, she describes beginning her practice routine by warming up the left hand with scales, then progressing on to fingered octaves. Moving on to trill exercises, she practises the trill slowly, throwing the fingers percussively on the string and getting ‘gradually faster, still knocking’, stressing the importance of a strong little finger. This echoes Ševík’s exercises in his op.7, for instance, where trills are built up slowly, using all fingers, with each one ‘to be lifted up high and let fall on the string with force and with equality’.

Yet Ševík’s influence on his violinists’ right hands can also be clearly identified. His op.2 School of Bowing Techniquewas completed as early as 1892, and a 1934 article in the Musical Timespoints to his careful differentiation between the technique behind spiccato (‘slow spring-bowing’) and sautillé (‘rapid and closer’) strokes. Morini is reported to have complained that the younger generation of violinists’ sautillé was too bouncy and scratchy; and a fine example of Hall’s bowing technique - including a truly sparkling sautillé - can be clearly heard in her recording of Ries’s Perpetuum mobile, op.34 no.5. Of the sautillé in his exercise op.16 no.33, Ševík himself later remarked in one of his study books, that bowing is executed with the middle of the bow by the relaxed wrist in circular movements by which the bow gets into elastical hopping’.

Australian violinist Daisy Kennedy toured internationally and performed with major orchestras

TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

DAISY KENNEDY WAS ONE OF THE FIRST VIOLIN SOLOISTS WHO EMBRACED THE MEDIUM OF RADIO

A further notable influence from Ševík can be heard in the violinists’ deployment of vibrato. This is most striking in the case of Morini, during whose career the ‘Kreisler’ style of continuous vibrato became almost de rigueur,yet her vibrato was generally much less obvious - narrower and sweeter. Ševík warned against the overuse of vibrato, cautioning that it impedes the technique of both hands. He advised that ‘it is only the bow that produces the tone and makes the playing expressive’. He was also emphatic that vibrato should not be used on high notes, ‘because in the high positions the measurements are so close that a vibrato would resemble a badly executed trill’ (School of Intonation,op.11; 1922). Even in her later recordings, Morini makes sparing use of vibrato in the higher registers. Likewise, other writers have noted that Hall uses little vibrato. Kennedy’s recordings, however, attest to a more continuous approach.

ERICA MORINI SPECIFICALLY ATTRIBUTED HER LEFT- HAND TECHNIQUE TO HER TRAINING WITH SEVCIK

Erica Morini became a leading recording artist

Repertoire choices also surely played their part in ensuring Hall’s success. As McVeigh notes, ‘from the very start her programming indicated that she wanted to be regarded as of a different order altogether’. Hall did much to popularise the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, helping it to be absorbed into the standard violin repertoire, and - like Kubelik - she championed Paganini’s music as it was written, without the simplifications and adaptations that most violinists of the period employed. One can imagine that these virtuoso pieces would have only been encouraged by Ševík. In addition, Hall opted not to perform in quartets, firmly promoting herself as a soloist.

All three violinists contended with certain hardships and faced criticisms that may not have been levelled at their male counterparts. Hall’s playing was sometimes chastised as emotionally wanting, for instance. As Gillett has shown, women were often damned as less capable of profound feeling than men; an 1884 issue of the Magazine of Musicclaimed that emotion in women ‘is mere nervous excitability’. Early on in her career, while she was studying with Ševík in Vienna, Morini was excluded from being awarded a state prize for which she was a clear winner, because the wording specified that it was for a man.

During a live broadcast performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto at the Proms in 1927, Kennedy missed her entry. At the end of the performance, forgetting she was live on air, she announced that she was sorry for stumbling, but explained that she had not been given the opportunity for rehearsal. This caused quite a stir, and as a result her career suffered a significant setback - perhaps compounded by the negative attitude of society at the time towards divorcees (she had divorced and remarried in 1924). Within this context one can see what all three women were up against, though no reviewer could deny their mastery of the violin, for which Ševík’s technical training must take at least some credit.

Today, we are accustomed to teaching styles that follow Ševík’s method, and are perhaps less prone to appreciate its pioneering nature. ‘We were living in the dark till Ševík appeared on the horizon, ’ another of Ševík’s female pupils, Sarah Fennings, commented in an early edition of The Strad(1905-6). In his 1923 book The Art ofViolin Playing,Carl Flesch concurred: ‘The publication of Ševík’s studies had far-reaching consequences. All violinists who use them properly can improve their technique and solve difficult technical problems. Up to that time, few violinists could accomplish this.’

Although it can be hard to identify specific features that these women took from Ševík, and, as music lecturer Robert Philip points out, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the influences of multiple teachers, there is nonetheless evidence that aspects of Ševík’s method left a lasting impression. The craze for the violin at the turn of the century coincided with stirrings for women’s suffrage, and these women pioneers demonstrated that in the face of prejudice their capacities were equal to those of men. Ševík’s method - opening up technical possibilities for violinists - was concurrent with this time of increasing opportunity for women. As such, he aided the women of his studio to forge impressive careers in a male-dominated world.