EGN NEWS DESK
This article is a part of Overlooked, a collection of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
On Feb. 23, 1940, Miriam Solovieff gave a recital at Town Hall in Manhattan. She was 18 and broadly often known as a violin prodigy, having toured a lot of the United States, Canada and Europe. It was no shock, then, that the recital, presenting work by Mozart, Vivaldi and Alexander Glazunov, would obtain optimistic evaluations.
What was shocking was the live performance’s timing. Just six weeks earlier, Solovieff’s mom and youthful sister — her total household — have been murdered by their estranged father.
Solovieff had saved vigil by her mom as she lay dying from gunshot wounds in a hospital mattress. And she finally heeded her mom’s urging that she not cancel the recital (it will be postponed a mere two weeks).
The shootings turned a tragedy so unspeakable that after the preliminary information experiences, it was mentioned solely in hushed circles. For Solovieff, it opened a chasm between childhood promise, spent within the firm of her cherished mom and sister, and a unprecedented maturity, albeit one which bore great emotional repercussions.
Miriam Soloveff — the “i” was added to the surname later — was born on Nov. 4, 1921, in San Francisco to Elizabeth (Homsky) and Aaron Soloveff, immigrants from Russia. Her father was a cantor with an Orthodox Jewish background. Miriam’s sister, Vivian Ruth, arrived in 1927, when Miriam was 5. By then Miriam had already displayed a flair for the piano, although piano enjoying would finally grow to be Vivian’s specialty.
When Miriam was 7, she attended a debut live performance given by Ruggiero Ricci, considered one of a number of younger violin prodigies rising in San Francisco, most notably Yehudi Menuhin. Miriam was so taken with the 10-year-old Ricci’s enjoying that she tried to emulate it on the piano, earlier than rising adamant that she, too, should take up the violin. Her mother and father acquiesced — on the situation that she commit equal time to the piano. (That association lasted a few yr.)
First she studied with Robert Pollak, who would additionally educate Isaac Stern, a lifelong good friend of Solovieff’s. When Pollak moved to Tokyo the following yr, Miriam studied with Kathleen Parlow. She made her native live performance debut at age 10. “With the passing of years,” the music critic Alexander Fried wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle, “she is going to grow to be an exceptionally tremendous violinist.”
The accolades continued to build up. She appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1933, beneath the course of Artur Rodziński, and on the Hollywood Bowl the following yr. Generous funding from rich San Francisco patrons enabled her to maneuver to New York, the place she studied with Louis Persinger, following within the footsteps of Ricci and Menuhin. Her mom and sister accompanied her; her father, then assistant cantor for the Temple Beth Israel congregation in San Francisco, stayed behind.
The New York Times gave a combined evaluation of Solovieff’s New York City debut at Town Hall on Jan. 3, 1937, however famous, “Her enjoying possessed enough heat, vitality, and technical handle to evoke a prepared and strenuous response from her many hearers.”
Later that yr, she started a tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and England along with her mom and sister, who was learning piano and thought of a prodigy in her personal proper, solely to be compelled again to New York with the onset of World War II. They moved right into a two-room condominium on the Hotel Master at 310 Riverside Drive, close to 103rd Street, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
On the afternoon of Dec. 28, 1939, Miriam was training on a borrowed Stradivarius upfront of a dinner date along with her neighbor and good friend J. Christopher Herold, an creator and editor, whereas 12-year-old Vivian was in mattress nursing a chilly. The day had begun tumultuously when a shock customer appeared: their father, recent off a cross-country flight. He was decided to reconcile along with his household after a five-year estrangement so complete that pals of the Solovieffs had assumed that Aaron Soloveff was dead.
He had despatched a number of threatening letters to no avail, and his in-person pleas that morning have been additionally rebuffed. He promised to search out separate lodgings, and did so. But he returned to the Hotel Master at 5:20 p.m. — this time with a .38-caliber pistol. Over the following hour he continued to demand reconciliation from his spouse and Miriam. Both once more mentioned no.
Then he fired two photographs in Miriam’s course. Ducking, she clutched her instrument and ran out of the condominium, screaming, to her next-door neighbor’s. He turned to Elizabeth and shot her twice within the chest, then went into Vivian’s bed room and shot her within the chest and neck. Bolting out of the condominium, he rested within the hall for a couple of minutes, then shot himself. He left behind suicide notes in English and Yiddish.
Vivian, who was at first anticipated to reside, was taken to Harlem Hospital. Elizabeth wash rushed to Convent Hospital, the place Miriam saved vigil. Vivian died first, of subsequent shock and hemorrhage, early the following morning. Elizabeth died two and a half hours later. Miriam was now on their lonesome, the violin her single emotional and monetary technique of coping.
Miriam Solovieff carried out steadily all through the Forties. She launched audiences to new works for solo violin by Aaron Copland and Vissarion Shebalin whereas perfecting her approaches to conventional fare, together with Bach’s Chaconne, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Giuseppe Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” sonata.
In 1944, she married William Reuben, an Army infantryman in World War II who was later often known as a journalist for his investigations into the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss spy circumstances. The marriage was over inside just a few years, although the couple didn’t formally divorce till 1964. Solovieff by no means remarried.
In the summer season of 1945, the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, a household good friend, invited her on the primary racially built-in tour by the United Service Organizations, or U.S.O., making 32 stops, together with on the liberated Auschwitz and Birkenau focus camps.
Solovieff had a penchant for glamour that intensified after she moved to Paris in 1949. There, she favored Hermès scarves and chic vogue traces, frequenting couturiers so typically that they gave her beneficiant traces of credit score. “She regarded precisely like Lauren Bacall and had the bearing of Maria Callas,” Ellen Singer, a retired therapist and the executor of Solovieff’s property, mentioned in a cellphone interview.
Valentine Viannay, a San Diego-based artist who knew Solovieff as a baby, nonetheless owns a hand-hemmed silk Lanvin scarf that Solovieff gave her as a gift. “She would get a kick out of seeing your eyes develop with enthusiasm and shock, understanding she did good, and snicker with pleasure,” Viannay mentioned in a textual content message.
Solovieff continued to carry out, largely in Europe, although she did return to the United States for an prolonged interval in 1968, throughout which she had her first Carnegie Hall recital in 20 years. (Among these in attendance was the violinist Itzhak Perlman, a detailed good friend who named considered one of his daughters, the live performance pianist Navah Miriam Perlman, partially after her.) The New York Times music critic Donal Henahan exclaimed over Solovieff’s “first fee” method and singled out her Brahms Sonata No. 2 as “gracefully phrased, sensitively balanced, and wealthy in understated sentiment.”
She was much less profitable with business recordings, of which there are scant few surviving. She was the soloist on the Mario Rossi-conducted 1956 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” which stays in circulation immediately showcasing the extensive tonal and emotional spectrum of her enjoying. Her rendition of Édouard Lalo’s Violin Concerto in F, launched 4 years earlier, can also be a spotlight.
But plans to document Brahms violin sonatas with the pianist Julius Katchen, a frequent duet accomplice, fell by after Solovieff suffered a breakdown throughout a recording session. (Two reside recordings of Solovieff enjoying these sonatas, one with Katchen and one other with Christian Ivaldi, can be found by the impartial label Meloclassics.)
It was not her first breakdown, nor wouldn’t it be her final. Singer, who lived along with her for 4 years starting in 1968, mentioned Solovieff had slept with the lights on however refused to see a therapist or take treatment, fearing it will impede her musical capacity.
By the early Seventies, her soloist profession was successfully over, and she or he turned to instructing.
Solovieff stayed in Paris for the rest of her life. She died at 81 on Oct. 3, 2003, in a hospital there after a protracted sickness. As the journalist Jacqueline Muller wrote in an appreciation in Le Monde, “Miriam Solovieff left as she had lived, quietly, humble, inhabited by her expertise that she saved secret deep in her coronary heart, like a baby that you simply carry inside you perpetually.”
Just 4 months after her triumphant 1940 live performance at Town Hall, and about six months after the destruction of her household, Solovieff, in an interview with The Jewish News of Northern California, mirrored on how World War II had not stopped individuals from craving reside music. “Perhaps,” she mentioned, “that’s the operate we musicians can carry out — with our music. We could possibly assist morale — and for a time, at the least, take individuals’s minds away from the horrible struggling on the planet.”
