Geraldine Mucha

Geraldine Thomson Mucha (5 July 1917 – 12 October 2012) was a Scottish composer. She was born in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. She married the Czech writer Jiří Mucha, son of the painter Alphonse Mucha, and in 1945 moved to Prague. She lived there for the greater part of the next sixty years. Early life and education Geraldine Mucha was born in London on 5 July 1917. She was the only child of Marcus Thomson (sometimes spelled Thomsen) who came from Glasgow, and of Maisie Evans, a New Zealander. Marcus Thomson studied at the Royal Academy of Music (R.A.M.) in London between 1902 and 1906 and became a successful baritone singer. In 1920 he was appointed as a singing professor at the R.A.M. where he remained on the staff until the 1950s. Maisie Evans studied music in Leipzig and during the First World War appeared in a leading role in the long running musical success Chu Chin Chow (His Majesty’s Theatre, London, 1916) and later on in Nigel Playfair’s famous production of The Beggar’s Opera (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1920). Mucha herself showed an interest in music from a very early age and her father, impressed by her improvisations at the piano, taught her to re