Jelly D'Aranyi and the Schumann Violin Concerto

When will the film industry wake up and make a biopic of the life of Jelly D'Aranyi?

 She inspired some of the greatest violin music of the first third of the 20th century. Born in Budapest 1893, she died in Florence in 1966, but spent most of her life in Britain. Joseph Joachim was her great-uncle and Jenő Hubay her teacher. Bartók fell in love with her. The elderly Elgar adored her. Ravel’s virtuoso showpiece Tzigane is dedicated to her. Delius wrote his Double Concerto for her and her sister Adila. She worked with Pablo Casals, Dame Myra Hess and Sir Adrian Boult, among other musicians also as legendary as she was. A painting of her by Charles Geoffroy-Dechaume hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0POrTYPT80

In March 1933, Baron Erik Kule Palmstierna – Sweden’s ambassador to London and an avid psychic researcher – was hosting a séance with his intimate circle of friends. Among them were two flamboyant musicians: the succulently-named Jelly d’Arányi (violin) and her sister, Adila Fachiri, ('cello). great-nieces of the legendary Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim.

Adila was Baron Palmstierna’s medium of choice. She communicated with the departed using an ouija board with a glass as a pointer. It was placed in the centre of the table and very lightly touched by her and a couple of the other participants.

On this particular occasion, as the glass began to move, the disembodied scribe told the gathering he wanted Jelly to find and play his unpublished violin concerto. They asked his name. The reply? Robert Schumann.

Two weeks later, the group received another mysterious communication, directing them towards the noted music scholar, Sir Donald Francis Tovey. He had seen the work mentioned in Joachim’s biography – a Violin Concerto that had remained hidden away and mostly unheard of for eight decades.

Schumann wrote the Concerto for Joachim between 11 September and 3 October 1853. By then the mentally disturbed composer was suffering serious delusions, saying the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn were dictating music to him. After Schumann’s death in 1856, Joachim told the composer’s wife Clara that the Violin Concerto was the inferior product of an unstable mind. It possessed 'a certain exhaustion,' the violinist wrote, 'which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy'.

With Clara's blessing, Joachim refused to publicly perform the work and kept a tight rein on it for the rest of his life. After his death, the manuscript was sold by his son to the Prussian State Library in Berlin. Joachim had stated in his will that the Concerto should be neither played nor published until 100 years after Schumann’s death.

At a further séance, when Joachim’s great-nieces received contact from their illustrious ancestor, he told them the piece was in the Hochschule Museum in Berlin. They wrote to the museum but received no reply. Schumann's ghost later communicated to them that the man to whom they had written was on holiday! 

Another psychic message urged them to write to Baron Palmstierna, then in Sweden, and ask him to seek the work in Berlin on his return. At the Hochschule, the Baron was shown a folder labelled 'Schumann' but it contained only works by other composers. A visitor, however, overheard his enquiries and advised him to visit the archives in the Prussian State Library. There, a reluctant official showed the Baron a file which contained the concerto with Joachim’s name on the label. Although the manuscript seen by Palmstierna was marked ‘unfinished’, Schumann’s ghost was adamant at subsequent séances that the work was complete, 'though it might need some arranging'.

Thrilled at the discovery, Jelly d’Arányi claimed the right of first performance on the basis of the psychic interventions that she said had guided her to it. But the Nazi government intervened - they were on the look out for a new German violin concerto to replace the Mendelssohn which, because of the composer’s Jewish roots, now no longer officially existed. Rejecting the 100-year no-play rule slapped on the Concerto by Joachim, they insisted that a German must give the first a performance. The violinist Georg Kulenkampff played it in front of Goebbels on 26 November 1937 with the Berlin Philharmonic, and recorded it soon after the première. The young Yehudi Menuhin gave the second performance – in a violin and piano version – at Carnegie Hall on 6 December 1937 and Jelly d'Aranyi had to be satisfied with giving the first London performance.