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As a supplement to the documents and photographs in the book, the following concert programmes, photos, and other documents collected by Helen VanWart have been made available online.


Concert Programmes

Leipzig Germany 14 October 1913, Städtisches Kaufhaus - Frederic Lamond, Klavier-Abend.

Leipzig Germany, 18 November 1913, Städtisches Kaufhaus - Klavier Abend, Josef Pembaur

Leipzig Germany, 19 November 1913 Thomaskirche, Leipzig - Die Hohe Messe, Bach

Feurich-Saal, Leipzig, 22 November 1913 Klavier-Abend: Edwin Fischer

Leipzig Germany, Städtisches Kaufhaus, 25 November 1913 - Konzert von Emil Sauer.

Leipzig Germany, Städtisches Kaufhaus, 11 January 1914 - Kammermusic-Abend: Sevcik-Lhotsky Quartet

Leipzig, Germany, 15 February 1914, Städtisches Kaufhaus - Böhmischen Streichquartetts, with Carl Hoffmann, Josef Suk, Georg Herold and Prof. Hans Wihan with Carl Friedman and Oskar Schubert

Leipzig, Germany, 22 February 1914 - Concert by singer Tilly Cahnbley-Hinken & Max Ludwig

Helen VanWart, Fredericton Music Student (piano, voice, mandolin)
Helen VanWart, Fredericton Music Student (piano, voice, mandolin)

The letters and diaries from Helen VanWart's trip to study music at the Royal Leipzig Conservatory in 1913-1914 are collected in

Letters from Helen
A Canadian Student in Germany
on the Eve of the Great War
by Helen VanWart
Published August 2010
ISBN: 9780981024493

US$20.00 CA$20.00 UK£13.00

In August of 1913, a young University of New Brunswick graduate from Fredericton set out for Germany to study music at the renowned Royal Leipzig Conservatory. Helen VanWart was a vivacious, optimistic girl, eager to experience all that Europe had to offer. Her weekly letters home to her family paint a portrait of Europe’s last months of peace, a time that, for Helen, passed all too quickly in classes, lessons, and practice, practice, practice, interspersed with many concerts, operas, and trips to such places as Dresden, Switzerland, and Rome. Despite her daily hours of practice – often five or six – she kept up an active social life, and her letters bring to life her fellow-students and boarders in her Pension, and perhaps most significantly, “Mr. Lochhead”, a Canadian chemistry student about whom she is unaccustomedly reticent! The future Mrs. Lochhead, indeed, was so immersed in her music and her friends that politics rarely impinged upon her letters. As with so many others in Europe and the British Empire, the outbreak of war appears to have taken her utterly by surprise.

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