Tilly Fleischmann

Maria Theresa Mathilda ''Tilly'' Fleischmann (2 April 1882 – 17 October 1967) was an Irish pianist, organist, pedagogue and writer of German descent.

Life

Fleischmann was born Maria Theresa Mathilda Swertz on 2 April 1882 in Cork, Ireland, the second of nine children born to her German parents, Hans Conrad Swertz, a music teacher from Camperbruch, today Kamp-Lintfort and Walburga Rössler of Dachau. She was educated at St Angela's College in Cork; she studied the piano at the Cork Municipal School of Music and the organ with her father, who was organist and choirmaster in the Catholic Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne.

In September 1901 her father sent her to study in Munich at the Royal Academy of Music (Königliche Akademie der Tonkunst). Women had been admitted to the Academy since 1890, but until 1918 were taught separately. Tilly studied the organ with Josef Becht, and the piano with Bernhard Stavenhagen, Liszt's last pupil. When he left the Academy in 1904, she studied with Berthold Kellermann, also a pupil and close associate of Liszt. She graduated in June 1905 with best grades, having taken her final organ examinations in June 1904. From the second semester of her studies, she was invited to perform at all the public Academy concerts; in her final semester she played the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Academy Orchestra conducted by Felix Mottl.

In September 1905 she married Aloys Fleischmann of Dachau, who had also studied music at the Academy in Munich, taking composition with Josef Rheinberger, and was now organist in the parish church of his native town. A year after her marriage, she was called back to Cork: her father had left Ireland to take up a post in Philadelphia; all eight brothers and sisters were still either at school or college, and she was the only one in a position to earn her living. She persuaded her husband to come to Cork with her to support the family; he was appointed to her father's former post at the cathedral.

The Fleischmanns had not intended to settle in Ireland for good. In 1909 they decided that Tilly should spend some months in Munich, studying with her former professor, giving a concert and establishing contacts in the hope of their being able to return. She became pregnant three months before her departure, but they decided to carry out the plan nonetheless. Their only son Aloys was born in Munich on 13 April 1910; in July she returned to Cork with the baby. They gradually adapted to life in the city, finding many good friends among people interested in the arts; she gave recitals and taught the piano; her husband gave choral recitals in the city and composed for both his secular and church choirs.

When World War I began in 1914, Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. Since the 1890s, interest in the old Gaelic culture had grown, giving rise in the following decades to a political movement seeking independence from Britain. The Fleischmanns had friends among Anglo-Irish musicians, and were also friends with republicans such as Terence MacSwiney and his sisters, Tomás Mac Curtain and family, Daniel Corkery, William Stockley and his German wife Germaine, née Kolb, and many others involved in the Gaelic language and arts movement and later in the struggle for independence. In 1916 Aloys Fleischmann was interned as a civilian prisoner of war, at first in Oldcastle, County Meath, and from May 1918 on the Isle of Man. In 1919 he was deported to Germany, and was not permitted to return to Ireland until the autumn of 1920. During that time his wife served as acting cathedral organist and choir director. She also conducted the cathedral choir at the consecration of the Honan Chapel in University College Cork in 1916. As well as doing her husband's work, she continued her teaching, though student numbers had diminished considerably due to anti-German sentiment in the city.

From 1906 until the 1950s Tilly Fleischmann regularly gave recitals in Cork, and occasionally in Dublin. Among them was a Franz Liszt evening in Cork in 1911 to celebrate the centenary of the composer's birth, and one in the Dublin Abbey Theatre in 1923; she gave a Chopin recital in Cork and in Dublin in 1924, at which her husband accompanied the Scottish opera singer, Rita Wallace, who sang Chopin songs. Tilly Fleischmann played with the Brodsky Quartet in Cork the same year. She was probably the first musician in Ireland to perform Arnold Bax, having first heard of him in 1917. In 1926 she and Rita Wallace gave a programme of modern compositions, which included a piece for piano by Bax. Fleischmann proposed that Bax be invited to adjudicate at the Feis Maitiú (Music and Drama Festival) in Cork in 1929 – from then until the end of his life Bax came to stay with the Fleischmanns every year, except during the war.

In 1930 Tilly Fleischmann and the soprano Frances Allsom gave a recital in the Aberdeen Hall Dublin of works by Bax, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Scriabin, Debussy, and Fleischmann. The University Art Society invited her to perform with the Kutcher String Quartet in 1932 and in 1939, and to accompany the celebrated German Lieder-singer, Elisabeth Schumann in 1934. After the establishment of Irish radio in 1926, Fleischmann gave a series of broadcasts from the Cork station, a number from Dublin, and in 1929 was the first Irish pianist to broadcast on the BBC
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