Teresina Tua (c 1866-1956) was the child of an amateur violinist who became her teacher and traveling companion. Camilla Urso (1842-1902) had a flautist father who faithfully badgered the officials at the Paris Conservatoire (an institution that refused to admit girl violinists) until they agreed to hear his daughter play. Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda (c 1838-1911) was born into a family of prodigies, all, regardless of sex, taught and encouraged by a musician father. The Italian violinist Teresa Milanollo (1827-1904) had a father who, to his great credit, did not care that the violin wasn’t an instrument fit for ladies when his daughter begged him for a fiddle, he bought her one, and when she proved to be a prodigy, he traversed the Alps with her so that she might study with the finest Parisian teachers. Many of the great violin virtuosas of the nineteenth century had counselor fathers, all of whom have since faded into an even darker obscurity than their daughters. ![]() Then, once the child has achieved notoriety – if the child achieves notoriety – the supporting parent inevitably melts into invisibility, his name becoming a footnote in a dusty music history text read by no one but musicology students. Some parents drift from supporting to hectoring, then from hectoring to abusing. When the child’s successes begin to snowball, it becomes more and more tempting to push her harder, faster, to see what she is all capable of doing. Your child isn’t playing enough she will never develop into a great artist. Your child is playing too much let her rest and be a child. Curious bystanders are always on hand to criticize every decision the parent makes. It is difficult (some would say impossible) to nurture a well-adjusted prodigy who has also taken advantage of every opportunity to develop professionally. Witness to the blossoming of extraordinary talent from the beginning, he aspires to encourage it and train it, like a gardener might train a vine. Nearly every prodigy has a parent who supports the development of his child’s unique, oftentimes unnerving gifts. They said: “What a dear little child! We wish it were a genius.” … There was a man and a woman, and they had a child. And it became a tiger, and tore her to pieces. She said: “What a dear little kitten! I wish it were a tiger.” God said to her: “If you give your life’s blood to it to drink, it will become a tiger.” So the woman gave her life’s blood to it to drink. And it became an eagle, and plucked his eyes out. He said, “What a dear little canary! I wish it were an eagle.” God said to him: “If you give your heart to it to feed on, it will become an eagle.” So the man gave his heart to it to feed on. After all four are published, I will make a PDF available for printing that will include a full bibliography. (If you see anything that you feel ought to be altered, let me know.) ![]() Any errors that remain in the text are entirely mine. I’d like to thank Douglas d’Enno (Chartres’s grandson) and Vivanti expert Annie Urbancic for their generous feedback and encouragement. I would be absolutely delighted if other readers, writers, and researchers dig even deeper into their story…believe me when I say I only skimmed the surface. Hopefully it shines a small light on these two extraordinary women and their unique, symbiotic relationship. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Chartres biography publicly available in print or on the Internet. And yet for a variety of reasons her name has been largely lost to history. At the turn of the twentieth century, Vivien Chartres was often mentioned in the same breath as Bronislaw Huberman and Mischa Elman, two of the greatest prodigies in the history of violin playing. ![]() ![]() Here is a very long essay (over a year in the making) that discusses the relationship between violin prodigy Vivien Chartres and her mother, author Annie Vivanti.
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