Daily Grind Of Still Water

However, she still had to earn a living, so at the same time she took on a job in the orchestra at the Cambridge Theatre in London. As my mother was Polish, they reckoned I was an honorary Pole.She always felt that the experience of working with this ensemble greatly helped her musical development, but above all: “We were paid £6 10s a week! It was a fortune!”When the war ended, the quartet disbanded and Rozsa decided she needed more tuition, so she went to study with the Flesch pupil Max Rostal at the Guildhall School of Music; here she later became a distinguished professor herself and was later elected a Fellow. It was here that she first met Martin Lovett, a fellow student.Two years later, Rozsa was asked to lead the London Polish Quartet, a group sponsored by the British Council and the Polish government in exile. She said:They were all supposed to be Polish musicians, but the violinist, Frederic Herrmann, was taken ill and I was asked instead. Eventually Rozsa auditioned for Flesch and he was sufficiently impressed to reduce his fee to £4, still a vast sum to be found.

Unfortunately, her period of study with Flesch was brief, since at the outbreak of the Second World War he left for Holland.At 18, Suzanne Rozsa was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where she became a pupil of Isolde Menges, a pupil of the legendary Leopold Auer. He strongly advised her to leave the country and recommended her to go to London where Carl Flesch was then teaching.A successful application to the cultural attach?t the British Embassy brought visas for Rozsa and her mother for three months. They arrived in London with only hand baggage and her violin and their sole subsistence was one pound a week, provided by the British Committee for Jewish Refugees.In order to augment their tiny allowance, Rozsa’s mother worked as a dressmaker, but insisted that her daughter only practised the violin. Almost immediately Rozsa received a letter telling her she was not required at the forthcoming concert and Morawec – who had a Jewish wife – was sacked from the academy.

So Rozsa prepared the Bach E major Concerto for what would be the most influential performance of her young life.But the date in March 1938 was dramatically significant as it coincided with Hitler marching into Austria. It may make a terrific difference to the way they work for the whole of the next week.Suzanne Rozsa was born in Budapest in 1923, into a Jewish family who loved music. When she was six, she was given a small violin and soon taught herself to pick out folk tunes on her new toy. She was then given lessons with a local teacher and made such good progress that at 10 she was awarded a scholarship to the State Academy in Vienna, to study with Ernst Morawec, a pupil of Otakar Sevcik.At 14 she won the coveted Kreisler Prize and one of the rewards was to appear as a soloist at one of the Academy concerts. “We often go on for an hour and a half or longer,” she once told me:But what does that matter if a child needs that extra attention? If they have developed a fault that must be corrected, you can’t stop. Her students loved her because she always seemed to understand their problems and could find a solution to almost any difficulty; furthermore, her lessons never went by the clock Her enjoyment of teaching was obvious. The trio was only disbanded on the death of Fuchsova in 1980.Rozsa became one of Britain’s most respected teachers.