Great violinists: Ginette Neveu

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This article appeared in the November 2010 issue of The Strad

The most poignant surviving photograph of Ginette Neveu shows her standing beside her pianist brother Jean as she gleefully lets the boxer Marcel Cerdon hold her Stradivari, moments before all three boarded their aircraft bound for New York in 1949. Hours later the plane crashed in the Azores and all on board were killed; Neveu was just 30. Only days before and with tragic irony, Neveu and her brother had given what they termed a ‘farewell recital’ in Paris before embarking upon their latest American tour. With facts as sensational as these, it’s unsurprising that Neveu has gained something of a mythical aura.

PEDAGOGICAL BACKGROUND

Neveu was by all accounts a child prodigy and was already playing by the age of five. Her first teacher was her mother, an accomplished player in her own right. But such was the speed of the young Ginette’s progress that she was soon sent to the class of Line Talluel and aged only seven performed the Bruch First Concerto with the Colonne Orchestra at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. Two years later she won a prize from the city for a performance of the Mendelssohn E minor Concerto and went on to win the Paris Conservatoire’s violin prize after only eight months at the institution – she was still only eleven. She continued  her studies first with Enescu and then, having been talent-spotted at the Vienna International Violin Competition, spent four years studying with Carl Flesch. Neveu also studied with the revered composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and Flesch encouraged her to include her own music in recitals. 

Commenting a few months after her Paris recital debut in 1933, The Strad wrote that ‘the little girl’ (she was now 13) played music by Mozart, Brahms, Pugnani and Moskowsky, and Ravel’s Tzigane ‘in a manner which experienced performers might have envied. This gifted child should go far.’ And indeed she did. Two years later she beat David Oistrakh into second place at the first International Wieniawski Competition in Warsaw and tours of Poland and Germany followed, with a US debut in 1937. The Second World War inevitably interrupted her career and she didn’t make her London debut until March 1945. She effectively decamped to Britain for much of the 1946–7 season and also toured to North and South America in the post-war years.

TECHNIQUE AND INTERPRETATIVE STYLE

Technical mastery came with apparent ease, such that her teachers, especially Flesch, were able to concentrate on developing her interpretative talents. This had mixed results at first. While her fiery approach to Ravel’s Tzigane – which won her the Wieniawski prize – was admired for its originality, The Strad’s reviewer at her London debut, for one, complained that she played the Beethoven Concerto ‘as though it had been the Max Bruch’, though an interpretation two years later was commended for being ‘somewhat in the style of Mozart’.

SOUND

It’s not difficult to read between the lines of contemporary reviewers that what they were marvelling at was the apparent virility of tone emerging from a female violinist. Even Ida Haendel, interviewed by The Strad’s editor a year ago, used the word ‘masculine’ to describe Neveu’s sound. Added to her statuesque figure and her deep speaking voice, it’s not impossible to believe suggestions by some that she was intersex, or in older terminology, a hermaphrodite. Either way, there is no denying that her sound and playing were muscular, and a tantalising snippet of her playing the Chausson Poème on YouTube shows her well-developed bow arm and the energy she brings to its use.

STRENGTHS

This muscularity might suggest a lack of tenderness in her playing, but it wasn’t all fierce intensity. Alongside the power came an ability to ride a phrase with a sweetness that never cloyed. She always gave the impression of inhabiting the music she was playing through her whole being, which gave her such a magnetic presence on stage.

She always gave the impression of inhabiting the music she was playing through her whole being

WEAKNESSES

It’s somewhat unfair to cast judgement on a career that was only just getting into its stride when its executrix tragically died. But apart from the early interpretative immaturity mentioned above, it’s hard to find anything weak in her playing, other than where tastes – such as in Baroque repertoire – have moved on.

INSTRUMENTS AND BOWS

Early on, Neveu owned a Nicolas Lupot violin of unknown year, but in 1935 she bought a 1730 Omobono Stradivari to play at the Wieniawski Competition. She later supplemented it with a G.B. Guadagnini. Although her Hill & Sons Fleur de lys and Chardon bows were recovered in her double case after the plane crash, both instruments were presumed destroyed, though the Guadagnini’s scroll later surfaced in Paris. Legends still circulate about Neveu being found in the wreckage with the crushed Stradivari clutched in her arms, contradicted by others that claim a local Azorean fiddler was later to be heard playing on a remarkable instrument.

REPERTOIRE AND RECORDINGS

Neveu’s repertoire was wide-ranging, from Baroque masterpieces to music written especially for her. If she tended towards anything it was to the heavyweights of the concerto repertoire and away from the showy fripperies favoured by many of the previous generation. Her short life meant that she had little time to establish a recording career (she was scheduled to record the Beethoven Concerto with Karajan in 1950), and what there is can be contained on just four CDs (though currently the material is available across a number of often overlapping releases), in addition to some more recently exhumed live radio recordings. Supreme among her legacy lie her recordings of the concertos of Sibelius and Brahms made in London in 1945 and 1946, performances that bristle with steely intent. 

Neveu made a stand against the German occupation of France during the war by limiting her public performances, though one concert she did give at this time included the premiere in 1943 of Poulenc’s Violin Sonata, written especially for her, but unfortunately not recorded.

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