No longer overlooked: Miriam Solovieff, acclaimed violinist who suffered a tragedy

This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.

On February 23, 1940, Miriam Solovieff gave a recital at City Hall in Manhattan. She was 18 and widely known as a child prodigy on the violin, having toured much of the United States, Canada and Europe. It was no surprise that the recital, which presented works by Mozart, Vivaldi and Alexander Glazunov, would receive positive reviews.

What was surprising was the timing of the concert. Just six weeks earlier, Solovieff’s mother and younger sister – her entire family – were murdered by their estranged father.

Solovieff had kept watch over her mother as she lay dying of gunshot wounds in a hospital bed. And in the end, she heeded her mother’s insistence not to cancel the recital (it would only be postponed by two weeks).

The shootings became a tragedy so unspeakable that after the first news reports, it was only talked about in quiet circles. For Solovieff, it opened a chasm between the promise of her childhood, spent in the company of her beloved mother and sister, and an extraordinary adulthood, albeit one that came with enormous emotional consequences.

Miriam Soloveff – the “i” was later added to the surname – was born in San Francisco on November 4, 1921, the son of 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 five. By this time, Miriam had already demonstrated an aptitude for the piano, although piano playing would eventually become Vivian’s specialty.

When Miriam was seven, she attended a debut concert by Ruggiero Ricci, one of the many young violin prodigies emerging in San Francisco, most notably Yehudi Menuhin. Miriam was so impressed by ten-year-old Ricci’s playing that she tried to imitate it on the piano, before becoming adamant that she too should take up the violin. Her parents agreed, on the condition that she would spend the same amount of time on the piano. (That arrangement lasted about a year.)

First she studied with Robert Pollak, who would also teach Isaac Stern, a lifelong friend of Solovieff. When Pollack moved to Tokyo the following year, Miriam studied with Kathleen Parlow. She made her local concert debut at the age of 10. “As the years go by,” music critic Alexander Fried wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle, “she will become an exceptionally good violinist.”

The accolades continued to pile up. She performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1933, conducted by Artur Rodziński, and at the Hollywood Bowl the following year. Thanks to generous funding from wealthy San Francisco patrons, she was able to move to New York, where she studied with Louis Persinger, following in the footsteps of Ricci and Menuhin. Her mother and sister accompanied her; her father, then assistant cantor at the Temple Beth Israel congregation in San Francisco, stayed behind.

The New York Times gave a mixed review of Soloveff’s New York City debut on January 3, 1937 at City Hall, but noted, “Her playing possessed sufficient warmth, vitality and technical charisma to elicit a smooth and strenuous response from her many audience members to call up. .”

Later that year she embarked on a tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and England with her mother and sister, who studied piano and was considered a child prodigy in her own right, but with the outbreak of World War II she was forced to return to New York. They moved to a two-room apartment in Hotel Master Rivieroeverlaan 310near 103rd Street, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

On the afternoon of December 28, 1939, Miriam was practicing on a borrowed Stradivarius before a dinner party with her neighbor and friend J. Christopher Herold, an author and editor, while 12-year-old Vivian lay in bed tending to a nurse. cold. The day had gotten off to a tumultuous start when a surprise visitor appeared: their father, fresh from a cross-country flight. He was determined to reconcile with his family after a five-year estrangement so total that friends of the Soloveffs had assumed Aaron Soloveff was dead.

He had sent several threatening letters to no avail, and his personal pleas that morning were also rejected. He promised to find separate accommodation, and did so. But he returned to the Hotel Master at 5:20 p.m. – this time with a .38-caliber pistol. For the next hour he continued to demand reconciliation from his wife and Miriam. Both said no again.

He then fired two shots in Miriam’s direction. She bent down, grabbed her instrument and ran screaming from the apartment to her neighbor’s house. He turned to Elizabeth and shot her twice in the chest, then entered Vivian’s bedroom and shot her in the chest and neck. He fled the apartment, rested in the hallway for a few minutes and then shot himself. He left suicide notes in English and Yiddish.

Vivian, who was initially expected to be alive, was taken to Harlem Hospital. Elizabeth Wash rushed to Convent Hospital, where Miriam was keeping watch. Vivian died early the next morning from the ensuing shock and hemorrhage. Elizabeth died two and a half hours later. Miriam was now completely alone, the violin her only emotional and financial means of coping.

Miriam Solovieff performed steadily throughout the 1940s. She introduced audiences to new works for solo violin by Aaron Copland and Vissarion Shebalin, while perfecting her approach to traditional dishes, including Bach’s Chaconne, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and the sonata ‘Devil’s Trill’ by Giuseppe Tartini.

In 1944, she married William Reuben, an Army infantryman in World War II who later became known as a journalist for his work. to research in the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss espionage cases. The marriage was over within a few years, although the couple did not officially divorce until 1964. Solovieff never remarried.

In the summer of 1945, singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, a family friend, invited her to the first racially integrated tour of the United Service Organizations (USO), which made 32 stops, including at the liberated Auschwitz concentration camps and Birkenau.

Solovieff had a taste for glamor that became even greater after she moved to Paris in 1949. There she favored Hermès scarves and elegant fashion lines, visiting couturiers so often that they gave her generous lines of credit. “She looked exactly like Lauren Bacall and looked just like Maria Callas,” Ellen Singer, a retired therapist and executor of Solovieff’s estate, said in a telephone interview.

Valentine Viannay, a San Diego artist who knew Solovieff as a child, still owns a hand-fringed silk Lanvin scarf that Solovieff gave her as a gift. “She would love to see your eyes widen with excitement and surprise, knowing she did well, and smile with joy,” Viannay said in a text message.

Solovieff continued to perform, largely in Europe, although she returned to the United States for an extended period in 1968, where she had her first Carnegie Hall recital in twenty years. (Among those present was the violinist Itzhak Perlman, a close friend who named one of his daughters, the concert pianist Navah Miriam Perlman, in part after her.) The New York Times music critic Donal Henahan praised Solovieff’s “first-rate” technique, calling her Brahms Sonata No. 2 “gracefully formulated, sensitively balanced and rich in restrained sentiment.”

She was less successful with commercial recordings, very few of which have survived. She was the soloist on Mario Rossi’s 1956 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” which is still in circulation today and showcases the broad tonal and emotional spectrum of her playing. Her portrayal of Édouard Lalo Violin Concerto in Freleased four years earlier, is also a highlight.

But plans to record Brahms violin sonatas with pianist Julius Katchen, a frequent duet partner, fell through after Soloveff collapsed during a recording session. (Two live recordings of Solovieff playing these sonatas, one with Katchen and one with Christian Ivaldi, are available through the independent label Meloclassics.)

It wasn’t her first breakdown and it wouldn’t be her last. Singer, who lived with her for four years starting in 1968, said Solovieff had slept with the lights on but refused to see a therapist or take medication, fearing it would hinder her musical abilities.

In the early 1970s, her solo career was effectively over and she turned to teaching.

Solovieff remained in Paris for the rest of her life. She died on October 3, 2003 at the age of 81 in a hospital there after a long illness. Like the journalist Jacqueline Müller wrote in a rating LeMonde, “Miriam Solovieff left as she had lived: quietly, humbly, inhabited by her talent that she kept secret deep in her heart, like a child that you carry within you forever.”

Just four months after her triumphant 1940 concert at City Hall, and about six months after the destruction of her family, Soloveff, in an interview with The Jewish News of Northern California, reflected on how World War II had not kept people from attending live music to desire. . “Maybe,” she said, “that’s the function we can fulfill as musicians – with our music. We may be able to help improve morale – and at least for a while, divert people’s attention from the terrible suffering in the world.”