Erika Morini
Erika Morini ( born January 5, 1904 in Vienna, † 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 pupil of Jacob Green and Joseph Joachim. My father came from Trieste and her mother Malka Weissmann, who worked as a piano teacher, made in Czernowitz, where they had moved to Vienna and opened a music school in the Second District. Erika had five siblings who also took artistic professions: Alice studied piano; Stella violin; Haydee became a dancer; Frank was an art dealer and Albert concert agent.
Erika Morini sat after lessons from his father was eight years old her training with Otakar Ševčík at the Vienna Music Academy, where he received instruction also from pink high man - Rosenfeld. Parents manipulated the age of the daughter in order to highlight what is special musical prodigy. Erika was allowed to play for the Emperor Franz Joseph also at the Viennese court. Her concert debut she had already contested in 1916 as a child prodigy in Vienna, in 1918 with the Berlin Philharmonic and 1919 with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Arthur Nikisch. Her first appearance in the United States took place on January 26, 1921 in New York at Carnegie Hall with Artur Bodanzky instead. Hugo Knepler organized their concerts in Vienna.
In 1932 she married the jeweler Felice Siracusano from Messina. The marriage remained childless. With him, she emigrated in 1938 to New York to escape the anti-Semitic terror in Germany and Austria. In 1949 she played after twelve years of interruption in her hometown of Vienna. In 1976 she retired from concert life. In New York, she was at the Mannes College of Music in violin lessons.
Morini played the Guadagnini violin Maud Powell and the Davidoff Stradivarius Morini (named after Karl Davydov ), a Stradivarius violin from 1727, which her father had bought in Paris in 1924.
Erika Morini was seriously ill in the hospital, when it was found that the valuables had been stolen from her apartment on Fifth Avenue, including the Stradivarius. The theft could not tell you her. The stolen property has since disappeared, and the FBI counts the violin, whose value is given with $ 3.5 million, still in the top ten of the stolen art objects. According Morinis Testament the violin should be auctioned and the proceeds are applied to charitable purposes.
Erika Morini received in 1955 an honorary doctorate of Smith College, Massachusetts, and in 1963, the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston.
The American playwright Willy Holtzman has the play The Morini Strad wrote about the subject aging a violinist and aging of a violin, which in the " 59E59 Theatre" premiered in 2012 off- Broadway with Mary Beth Peil as Erica in "Primary Stages".