Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramattéaus modern

Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté (* 25 December 1898 in Moscow; † 2 December 1974 in Stuttgart) was a Russian-German-Canadian piano and violin virtuoso and composer.

Life

From 1908, she studied violin at the Conservatoire in Paris with Alfred Brun and Guillaume Rémy, piano with Sophie Chéné and composition with Vincent d’Indy and Camille Chevillard and performed her own works on concert tours through Western Europe. In 1914, she moved to Berlin, where she continued her studies with Bronisław Huberman in 1918. In 1920, she married the painter Walter Gramatté in Berlin. The couple moved to Barcelona for a time (1924-1926). She continued to go on tour, including with the pianist Edwin Fischer in 1925.

After the death of her husband in February 1929, she made her debut in the USA in November of the same year. Under the conductors Leopold Stokowski and Frederick Stock, she performed her own compositions there, including concert works for piano and violin. In 1934, she married the journalist and art historian Ferdinand Eckhardt. From 1935, she devoted herself exclusively to composition and took further composition lessons with Max Trapp in Berlin from 1936. In 1939, she moved to Vienna with Eckhardt. There she produced further works and premiered her first string quartet (1939) and her first symphony (1942). After 1945, she became involved in the International Society for New Music and won several composition prizes. The couple lived in Winnipeg/Canada from 1953. In 1970, she received a doctorate from Brandon University in Manitoba and the title of professor from the Austrian Ministry of Education.

Sophie Eckhardt-Gramatté died in 1974 in Stuttgart as the result of an accident. She is buried together with Ferdinand Eckhardt and Walter Gramatté in the Evangelical Cemetery Rahnsdorf-Wilhelmshagen (Section C, Row 9) in Berlin. The grave is dedicated to the city of Berlin as a grave of honour.

Her estate is preserved by the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation.

Eckhardt-Gramatté composed two symphonies, an orchestral concerto, a triple concerto for trumpet, clarinet, bassoon, strings and timpani, three piano and two violin concertos, a piece for two pianos and orchestra, a bassoon concerto, chamber music works and pieces for piano and solo violin.

Her musical style developed over several creative phases, in which she moved from late Romanticism to modern compositional techniques such as atonality and neoclassicism. Her early works, especially the first piano sonatas and violin compositions, reflect a virtuoso and expressive style that is strongly characterised by the Romantic tradition and reveals influences from composers such as Liszt and Rachmaninov. The second piano sonata, which was written in Spain, shows influences from the local musical tradition and contains a ‘Spanish dance’ that takes up the rhythmic and melodic diversity of Spanish music.

In the late 1940s, Eckhardt-Gramatté turned to a reduced, structurally strict aesthetic that integrated elements of neoclassicism. This is particularly evident in works such as her Piano Sonata No. 5, which is sparse in texture and economical in its thematic resources, marking a departure from the lush sound world of her early works. In the 1950s, she began experimenting with atonal and serial techniques, as can be seen in her Triple Concerto and Symphony Concerto for piano and orchestra. These compositions are of high structural complexity and require exceptional technical skill from the performers, which made them of interest to the contemporary music scene.

Eckhardt-Gramatté’s oeuvre encompasses a wide range of genres, including solo works, chamber music and orchestral works. Particularly noteworthy are her ten Caprices for violin, which are inspired by the virtuosity of Paganini and explore the technical possibilities of the instrument. Her works are characterised by a dense harmonic texture and an unusual rhythmic vitality, which shape her unique style and make her an important representative of 20th century Canadian music.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Carmen_Eckhardt-Gramatté