AustLit

'Alma Moodie is perhaps the most gifted violinist ever to have left Australia, acclaimed in Germany in her youth as a “rare apparition in the world of virtuosity”. Born in Mount Morgan, Queensland, in 1898, Moodie left Australia when she was nine for studies in Brussels with internationally renowned teachers. Through the tumultuous years of the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich she forged an exceptional career, playing with the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under conductors including Nikisch, Furtwängler and Fritz Busch. Her untimely death in 1943 suggests that she was a victim of war just as surely as those many others whose fates were less ambiguous. By all accounts a charismatic personality and a prodigious musician, she left no recordings and has slipped into an obscurity as deep as it is undeserved. In piecing together the details of Moodie’s life, Kay Dreyfus reclaims her reputation as one of the outstanding violinists of her generation and as a leading exponent of the contemporary music of her day. ' (Publication abstract)