Kay Dreyfus

Alma Moodie (1898-1943) was an Australian concert violinist. Once famous in Europe, she is barely remembered now. The biography by Kay Dreyfus is a welcome retrieval of the fragmentary records and fading memories of her life. Moodie’s obscurity is undeserved but explicable. Her reputation was primarily European; she performed rarely in England and she never returned to Australia. She was tainted by her association with Nazism during the 1930’s and 40’s, though many of her closest professional relationships were with Jewish musicians and composers. Most unfortunate of all for her posthumous reputation, she made no recordings

Alma Moodie was born in Mt Morgan in Queensland, the daughter of a piano teacher and an ironmonger, who died within a year of her birth. Her talent was recognised early; she played her first concert in Rockhampton in 1904. Her mother took her to Europe in 1907, where she was celebrated as a child prodigy before the first World War. After the war was over, during the 1920's and early 1930's, Moodie was ranked among the foremost European violinists for the brilliance of her technique and the strength and warmth of her tone. Stravinsky, Reger and Pfizner among other contemporary composers wrote and dedicated compositions for her to premiere. She married a philandering lawyer, Alexander Balthasar Spengler – she was the third of his five or six wives – in 1928 and had two children before returning to the concert platform. Unable to leave Germany, she maintained a punishing concert schedule during the late 1930's and early 1940's, sustained by sleeping pills and alcohol. Her technique deteriorated and she played for the last time in Cologne in March 1943. Four days after that last, poor performance she died of an overdose of champagne and pills. Her death was perhaps a suicide. Some of her friends thought so. Others doubted that she would choose to leave her children motherless. There was a formal finding of heart thrombosis.

The revelation Dreyfus promises with her titular invocation of Charles Perrault’s wife-killer Bluebeard, turns out to be a fizzer. Spengler’s second wife, did take her own life for reasons unknown. She had been Moodie’s friend and Moodie’s relationship with Spengler began in mutual commiseration, at a time when both were in need of emotional support. Dreyfus goes no further than the guarded suggestion in a concluding chapter that is ‘possible to interpret Moodie’s story by analogy with the archetypes provided by the story of Bluebeard’. The possibility is explored briefly over a couple of paragraphs but the analogies are obscure and tail off into Jungian speculation. The fragmentary documentary records of her life do not justify the slander of the title, which risks unnecessary hurt to surviving members of the Spengler family. The marriage of Alexander Spengler and Alma Moodie seems to have been happy during the early years when her children were young.. Spengler managed to keep his family in some luxury during 1930’s and 40’s doing international business for the Nazis. The relationship soured. He was frequently absent, frequently unfaithful and introduced her to cigarettes, pills and alcohol. The last decade or so of her life seems to have been a slow descent into mundane tragedy. There was no grand guignol drama and no charnel house. There was only the grinding succession of concert performances for the Nazi cultural regime, recurrent illness, the deterioration of her once brilliant talents, loneliness and constant fear that she and her children would be killed in British bombing raids on German civilian populations.

The biography is exemplary in its presentation of the few remaining documentary, anecdotal and photographic sources on Moodie’s life. The absence of any recordings of her playing the violin is compensated, to some extent, by an extensive discography listing the works by contemporary composers that were dedicated to her, premiered or performed by her. Of these the most significant, for its evocation of Moodie, is Hans Pfitzner’s Violin Concerto (op34), written for her in 1924 when she was at her brilliant best. She premiered the concerto and it was a regular part of her repertoire. It is in three sections and, after a virtuoso opening, it is remarkable for the complete silence of the solo violin during the slow, middle section. In Dreyfus’ account Pfitzner, a man of irascible temperament, cut the violin part from the second movement as a consequence of a tiff with Moodie. He is supposed to have scribbled a tart remark on the original score of the middle movement: ‘so that the young lady can rest’. Many years later she is reported to have complained to her teacher, Carl Flesch, that Pfitzner transposed the solo section originally written for her into a lower register and incorporated it in his Cello Concerto (op42). The ghostly absence of her violin from the middle section of Pfitzner’s violin concerto is her sole memorial in the auditory landscape of 20th century classical music.… (altro)