Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté

Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté (; in Moscow, Russia – 2 December 1974 in Stuttgart, Germany) was a Russian-born Canadian composer, virtuoso pianist, and violinist. Biography Early life She was born as Sofia (Sonia) Fri e dman-Kochevskaya in Moscow, where her mother worked as a governess in the Tolstoy household. She began to learn piano in 1904 and wrote her first piano compositions in 1905. She studied at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1908 to 1913, where her teachers included Alfred Brun and Guillaume Rémy for violin, S. Chenée for piano, and Vincent d’Indy and Camille Chevillard for composition. She made her début in 1910, and her first composition, an Etude de Concert, was published in Paris that year. She moved to Berlin in 1914, where she studied violin with Bronisław Huberman; by 1919 she had undertaken several concert tours of Western Europe, on which she performed her own works. Career In 1920, she married the painter Walter Gramatté in Berlin, and from 1924 to 1926 lived in Spain, where Pablo Casals was her mentor. During this time she wrote her first piano concerto. She toured with Edwin Fischer in Germany in 1925. Following her husband’s death in 1929, she toured the