by Sue Corbett
Next they pioneered the use of vast arenas for ballet with seasons at the Empress Hall and at Harringay; these were followed by long tours with a supporting group as a forerunner of Festival Ballet which they founded in 1950. Injuries forced Markova to leave the company in 1952 and subsequently she worked entirely as a guest artist and in concert performances, continuing however to take on new roles including Bournonville’s La Sylphide which she danced with the de Cuevas company. Among her wide-ranging appearances at this time were programmes with the Indian dancer Ram Gopal, others with Pilar Lopez and her Spanish company, an Italian opera season at Drury Lane, and Ruth Page’s ballets The Merry Widow and Revanche (based on Il Trovatore) in Chicago.
Her last stage appearance was in 1962, but even she did not realise that until, interviewed at Heathrow on January 1, 1963, en route for New York while recovering from a tonsillectomy, she said without premeditation that her new year resolution would be to stop dancing. After this decision, Markova became from 1963 to 1970 director of ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, and subsequently lectured at the University of Cincinnati. Even in later retirement she still staged ballets (especially Les Sylphides, which she had studied with its choreographer, Fokine) and coached dancers in some of the roles specially associated with her. Her enthusiasm remained undimmed, especially for the many activities she undertook to help the progress of young pupils.
She was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1963. Her book Giselle and I, published in 1960, records her thoughts and experiences of her most famous parts, and her reminiscences Markova Remembers (published 1986) provide a remarkably frank, informal account of her career, written with a lively humour surprising to those who knew her only in more formal circumstances. Her oft-time partner Dolin also interrupted his own stream of autobiographies for a book on her: Markova, Her Life and Work.
A dancer’s work is ephemeral and no worthy record of Markova’s dancing remains on film, although some of her masterclasses were shown on television. But her performances all over the world brought pleasure to innumerable spectators, and her example fired many young dancers to follow the career she herself irradiated with such lustre.
Dame Alicia Markova, DBE, ballerina, was born on December 1, 1910. She died on December 2, 2004, aged 94
DAME MIRIAM ROTHSCHILD
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REVERED NATURALIST WITH A LIFELONG LOVE OF CONSERVATION AND THE COUNTRYSIDE
JANUARY 22, 2005
A scientist of scholarship and distinction, Dame Miriam Rothschild was known primarily for her writings on butterflies and fleas, though she also published more than 300 highly technical papers on subjects such as bird behaviour and parasitic castration. Several of the papers concern a group of odoriferous chemicals called pyrazines which — as she noticed in 1961 — are widespread in nature and play a part in triggering brain functions such as memory and alertness.
Her major academic work was the Catalogue of the Rothschild Collection of Fleas, the six volumes of which appeared over thirty years. It was an area of research, as she wrily recognised, that was not always appreciated socially, as for instance when her children were at school. Nonetheless, her results were remarkable. She found, for instance, that the widely underestimated flea develops an acceleration of 149g when taking off — twenty times more than a Moon rocket re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. The Rothschild collection of hundreds of thousands of specimens was transferred to the Natural History Museum in 1971.
Yet Rothschild carried her erudition lightly and whimsically, as befitted a member of her remarkable family (she was sister of the 3rd Lord Rothschild). Her lyrical writing, in particular in Butterfly Cooing like a Dove, published in her eighties, is in the best tradition of authors who combine science, literature and a sense of wonder, from Sir Thomas Browne to Vladimir Nabokov. “Nobody has really thought about what is so satisfying in nature,” she once said, “but people really do benefit from contact with plants, animals, birds and butterflies. Without them we are a deprived species.”
Between 1899 and 1913, the Rothschild family won 374 awards from the Royal Horticultural Society. Each Rothschild strove to outdo the others — Alfred, for instance, planted one of every British species of tree in his garden — and altogether they created 100 gardens all over Europe, which Miriam Rothschild documented in her book The Rothschild Gardens (1997).
Miriam Rothschild’s own gardening, however, took a different turn. As a child she had her own vegetable patch, as well as a cactus collection in a miniature greenhouse, and she went on to win prizes at Chelsea for orchids. But later she returned to her childhood love of wild flowers, allowing them to reclaim much that had been artfully denatured by Edwardian garden planning. Greenhouses that were once devoted to exotic fruit were turned over to the cultivation of wayside flowers.
“One day the penny dropped,” she said, “and I realised with dismay that wild flowers had been drained, bulldozed, weedkillered and fertilised out of the fields, and that we now had a countryside reminiscent of a snooker table.” Gardeners, she proclaimed, should not battle against nature — the endless struggle to keep the weeds down — but should allow it to flourish.
She began her first meadow garden in 1970 — “John Clare’s countryside resurrected,” she called it — and eventually 150 acres were filled with wild flowers. One field was later said to contain 115 different species. The Prince of Wales listened to her ideas, and asked her to sow her “farmer’s nightmare” mixture of seeds at Highgrove, and she was delighted to find that she had started a fashion.
In her zeal she even planted a bypass with primroses and cowslips, ladies’ smocks and buttercups, to brighten the verges and encourage butterflies. In her seventies she sponsored the distribution of seeds to schools, and experimented with caterpillars which might destroy cannabis before the crop ripened.
She was a tremendous friend to the cause of conservation, which came entirely naturally to her. She pioneered humane livestock methods and campaigned against the widespread use of insecticides. The tone was set in The Butterfly Gardener, which opened with the words: “I garden purely for pleasure. I love plants and flowers and green leaves and I am incurably romantic — hankering after small stars spangling the grass.”
Entranced by the worlds she saw out of the window and through the microscope Miriam Rothschild continued her “scientific play” into her nineties. She continued to publish, too, contributing notes and papers to journals and providing passionate introductions to books on gardening and wildflowers.
Born in 1908, Miriam Louisa Rothschild reached the scientific heights despite — or, as she delighted to say, because of — having had no formal academic instruction (her eight doctorates of science were all honorary). She claimed to have been “self-non-educated”, but this understated the remarkable experience of her childhood, much of it spent at Tring Park, the Wren house at the foot of the Chilterns which was the country seat of her grandfather (the first Jewish member of the House of Lords). Such a home could not help but be an education.
Long before most people were aware of environmental issues, her father, Charles Rothschild, campaigned for a national network of nature reserves. One of the first people to realise the importance of preserving habitats as well as species, he nominated 280 potential sites, before dying in his forties in 1923. In 1997 Miriam wrote Rothschild’s Reserves with Peter Marren (she liked to have a collaborator, to focus her projects), and found that 80 years had devastated the nature reserves, with species counts falling even where the reserves themselves had not disappeared under concrete. The book concluded that nature cannot live in reserves alone, but depends on the practices that farmers adopt, guided by the incentives and restrictions of governments.
The senior Rothschild at Tring was Charles’s elder brother Walter, the 2nd Lord Rothschild, who built up a vast private museum of stuffed animals, birds, insects and reptiles (now a large part of the Natural History Museum). By any standards he was one of England’s greatest eccentrics.
He kept kangaroos, emus, cassowaries and salamanders, and once drove himself along Piccadilly and into Buckingham Palace in a buggy pulled by zebras.
A child at Tring learnt much about animals and perhaps more about humans. Large sums were spent on financing expeditions to remote places to fill gaps in the collections, and 5,000 new species were discovered. Live creatures arrived too, and giant turtles, kangaroos and wild horses roamed the grounds.
As a child Miriam Rothschild had an owl as a pet, and a quail; at the age of 4 she was Country Life’s “youngest milker”. In 1983 she honoured her uncle’s memory by publishing a highly praised biography, Dear Lord Rothschild.
Her father was given a 1,200-acre rural estate near Oundle, where he built Ashton Wold, and renewed the village of Ashton, bringing running water to the residents and organising village events. Later, Miriam Rothschild, who lived there until her death, rehabilitated the watermill to supply electricity to the house, and established the National Dragonfly Museum there.
After her home education she attended evening classes in zoology at Chelsea Polytechnic and took classes in literature during the day at Bedford College. Meanwhile, she was asked to play both cricket and squash for England. Her earliest scientific research was on marine parasitology, some of it carried out at the marine laboratory in Naples, where she won a scholarship — because, she said, “no one else applied”.
During the war she worked at the Foreign Office, and then for several years she was a visiting professor in biology at the Royal Free Hospital.
Voluble, argumentative and brimming with vivid observations, she felt that study of the variety of nature broadened the mind. “Human beings are apt to regard their own personal structure as ‘normal’ and everything that differs from it as distinctly humorous.”
Discovering an insect that urinates out of its head — and why not? — widens the realm of possibility. It was in that spirit of tolerance, during the 1950s, that Rothschild campaigned with the geneticist E. B. Ford for the legalisation of homosexual acts. She also kept a collection of art by schizophrenics, inspired by her sister Liberty (Elizabeth), who lived for some years with Miriam at Ashton Wold until her death in 1988.
She was a trustee of the Natural History Museum, and her honours included an honorary fellowship of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest award, the Victoria Medal. She was also president of the Royal Entomological Society. She was appointed CBE in 1982, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and advanced to DBE in 2000.
Disapproving of the methods of slaughter used in Britain, she did not eat meat, or use cosmetics. She also refused to wear leather shoes, and instead liked to wear white wellingtons in summer and moonboots in winter. Her wellingtons caused a considerable stir at Prince Charles’s 40th birthday ball at Buckingham Palace.
In 1943 she married Captain George Lane, and they had two sons and four daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1957 — “I don’t really like marriage”, she concluded. She is survived by a son and three daughters.
Dame Miriam Rothschild, DBE, FRS, naturalist, entomologist, gardener and conservationist, was born on August 5, 1908. She died on January 20, 2005, aged 96
DAME MOURA LYMPANY
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CONCERT PIANIST WHOSE BRITISH CAREER SURVIVED YEARS DOMICILED OVERSEAS AND BLOSSOMED AGAIN IN THE 1980S
MARCH 31, 2005
According to Sir Neville Cardus, there have been just two great English women pianists this century: Dame Myra Hess and Dame Moura Lympany. Hess died in 1965 and from then on Lympany, who had long been a favourite in the concert hall and on record, occupied a special place in the hearts and minds of British and Anglophile music lovers across the world.
Her career, which spanned seven decades, epitomised that of the international virtuoso concert pianist. Her repertoire, though broad, centred on the standard Classical and Romantic concertos, enriched with the French Impressionists, Spanish nationalists, Russian warhorses from Rachmaninov to Shostakovich, and British post-Romantics such as Delius and Ireland.
Born Mary Johnstone, she was known within her family as Moura, the Russian diminutive of Mary reflecting her mother’s love of pre-revolution St Petersburg, where she had once taught the daughters of wealthy aristocrats. The surname Lympany, an early version of her mother’s maiden name Limpenny, came at the suggestion of the conductor Basil Cameron who offered the 12-year-old prodigy her first concerto engagement at a time when it was fashionable for British artists to adopt foreign-sounding names.
That debut, with Cameron, took place in Harrogate on August 8, 1928, and her interpretation of the youthful Mendelssohn’s glittering G minor Concerto earned glowing reviews, including the headline from the Daily Express: “Two plaits and a symphony orchestra”.
At the age of 6 Lympany was sent to a convent in Tongres, Belgium, where she studied with Jules Debèfve of the Liège Conservatoire. Four years later, and enriched with Belgian culture and the French language, she moved to a convent school in Bayswater. She won an early scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where she won several awards and was equipped for further studies at the Vienna Hochschule with Paul Weingarten.
Back in London a period with Mathilde Verne, a pupil of Clara Schumann, the teacher of Solomon, and a firm believer in making a beautiful, effortless sound, preceded ten years’ work with the octogenarian Tobias Matthay, teacher of Eileen Joyce, Harriet Cohen, Clifford Curzon and Myra Hess. “Uncle Tobs”, as Lympany invariably referred to him, had a profound influence on her career. She once said: “Uncle Tobs taught me not to resist the inclination to be a virtuoso player.” He was also instrumental in teaching the beautiful phrasing that invariably characterised a Lympany recital, particularly in the music of Chopin.
In 1938 she returned to Belgium and, thanks to a dazzling rendition of Liszt’s First Concerto, came second in the Ysaÿe Competition behind Emil Gilels. The virtuoso Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, incapacitated through overpractising, was placed seventh. After the competition she lunched with Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians and recalled how, years before, she had been scheduled to play for the Queen when Her Majesty had visited Moura’s convent school. The day before the great occasion the Reverend Mother had cancelled her performance, claiming: “It might turn the head of one so young; you must be humble.”
Three weeks before war broke out in 1939, Lympany made a thrilling debut at La Scala, Milan, but the hostilities meant that her international opportunities dried up. Like her compatriot Hess, Lympany recognised the need for morale to be boosted back home, and how better than through music. She gave numerous recitals for factory workers, dockers and others involved in the war effort.
Lvmpany’s ability to learn music quickly proved beneficial in 1940, when Clifford Curzon, pleading too heavy a workload, declined the opportunity to give the first performance outside Russia of Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. The music was delivered to Lympany while she sat under the drier at the hairdressers. Conducted by Alan Bush in the Queen’s Hall, the premiere received great acclaim, and Lympany’s international standing grew enormously.
A concert in Bristol in 1944 coincided with the home leave of one of her two brothers, Joseph. He hitchhiked to the West Country to hear her play the John Ireland concerto, with its beautiful melody at the beginning of the second movement. She recalled: “When my darling brother came to see me after the concert there were tears in his eyes. ‘You played as if you were crying,’ he said, ‘and I cried too’.” Weeks later he was posted to Italy and killed in fighting on the Adriatic coast near Rimini.
After the war Moura Lympany played at the Proms in the summer of 1945, having first played the Grieg concerto there a decade earlier with Henry Wood. In Paris she collaborated with Sir Adrian Boult and L’Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in the Khachaturian and Alan Rawsthorne’s first concerto. The following year she and Boult visited the Prague Spring Festival with the John Ireland concerto, and two years later
her New York debut was a triumph. Concerts under the batons of such great conductors as Sir Adrian Boult, Rafael Kubelik, Erich Kleiber and Herbert von Karajan came thick and fast.
A marriage in 1944, to Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Defries, was dissolved in 1950. Married for a second time, to the American television producer Bennet Korn, Lympany took up residence in New York in 1951 and during the following decade was mainly active in the New World, making just occasional forays to Britain.
When this marriage, too, was dissolved and she returned to her homeland in the early 1960s Lympany discovered that she had been all but forgotten and struggled over the next 15 years or so to attract the degree of attention she had previously enjoyed.
On the advice of a doctor treating her for a constantly croaking voice, she sought solitude one summer in Rasiguères, near Perpignan in the south of France. She fell in love with the place, bought a vineyard and, in 1981, established a music and wine festival there. The villagers entitled one vintage Cuvée Moura Lympany. Every year artistic friends from all over the world flocked to Rasiguères to participate. Among the first was Victoria de los Angeles, and later visitors included Larry Adler, Cécile Ousset and Elizabeth Harwood. The Manchester Camerata made the pilgrimage each year. Sadly the festival faded out in 1993 when the local organisers fell into dispute with the mayor.
Financial problems and the difficulties of housing a piano in an affordable London flat persuaded Lympany to move to Monte Carlo in 1984. Prince Louis de Polignac, a cousin of Prince Rainier, persuaded her to help him to establish Le Festival des Sept Chapelles in seven chapels he had rescued from being sold and converted into discotheques. She was happy in Monte Carlo, enjoying her correspondence and travelling to performances.
Towards the end of the 1980s her career was blossoming once again. Her Royal Festival Hall recital in 1989, marking her 60th anniversary on the concert platform, and her BBC Prom two years later, in which she played the Mendelssohn G minor Piano Concerto, the same work as in Harrogate with Basil Cameron all those years before, were splendid occasions demonstrating the finest and most lyrical of music making. Her ability to learn new works did not diminish either, and when the opportunity came in 1992 to learn Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto for a concert at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra, she seized it with as much zest as she had the Khachaturian more than half a century earlier.
