Cecilia Hansen

Cecilia Hansen was a Russian and German violinist and music teacher. She was born on 16 February 1897 in the stanitsa of Kamenskaya in the Don Host Oblast. Her father, of Danish origin, taught music, and her sister Frida played the piano well. Cecilia was first drawn to the piano, but at the age of three and a half she turned to the violin. Recognizing her unusual talent, her father took her to Saint Petersburg when she was ten so that she could study at the conservatory with Leopold Auer.

Her concert debut took place in 1910, and she won several first prizes in competitions while performing Beethoven concertos. In 1914 she received a substantial grant of 1,200 rubles from the Anton Rubinstein Foundation. Plans for broader touring, however, were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.

In 1916 she met the pianist Boris Zakharov, and the same year they married and set out on their first joint tour of Scandinavia. Their daughter Tatyana was born in 1917. Until their final departure abroad in 1921, the Zakharovs lived in Saint Petersburg, where they became close to many notable cultural figures, including the painter Ilya Repin. They took part in gatherings at Repin's estate, the Penaty, and in 1922 Repin painted a portrait of Hansen.

After leaving Soviet Russia in 1921, Hansen gave concerts in Finland and Germany, and later in the United States, including appearances in San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago. In the late 1920s, while the couple were on tour in Shanghai, Boris Zakharov informed her that he would remain in China. Hansen then returned to the West, while Zakharov stayed in Shanghai to teach piano.

Hansen continued to live in Europe and took part in the concert program for the Day of Russian Culture in 1930. That same year in Paris she gave demonstration and charity concerts on I. I. Makhonin's "electromagnetic" violin. In 1931 she met the German jurist and philosopher Hermann Friedmann and married him. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the family had to flee to France because of Friedmann's Jewish background. In 1934 she gave a concert in Paris for the benefit of the Russian Conservatory.

In 1950 Friedmann was invited to teach philosophy at Heidelberg University in Germany. Hansen also worked there as a teacher and became a professor at the Hochschule für Musik. After her husband's death, she moved to London, where she lived with her daughter until the end of her life. She died in London on 24 July 1989 and was buried there.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.