Music A Common Interest

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31785, 16 September 1968, Page 2

Music A Common Interest

Whenever Mr Claudio Arrau, the Chileanbom concert pianist now in Christchurch, walks on stage he likes to know his wife is in the audience. He is disappointed if she is not at his rehearsals. “It is not a matter of my giving him moral support—my husband does not need that—nor does he rely oo me for criticism. He wants me there so that we can talk about it later." Mrs Ruth Arrau said yesterday. Every couple should have a strong bond of common interests to enrich their marriage, she said. "In our case it is music—we could not live without it” Rehearsals are almost as interesting to her as public performances. At rehearsals she sees how a concert shapes, she said. “I seldom miss one.” A musician herself, she un-

derstands the finer points of a performance and the problems an artist has to face in his career.

Before her marriage, Mrs Arrau had a career of her own as a singer. She had given concerts and had sung in operas throughout Europe and was preparing for the lead role in “Carmen" when she and her husband decided to leave Nazi Germany “in a hurry.'* Having renounced her own musical career for her marriage and three children, Mrs Arrau later developed an absorbing interest in photography. A woman needed her own hobbies, which she should encourage her husband to share and thereby widen his sphere of interests as well, she said. Mrs Arrau specialises in portraiture and social reportage—“looking in on the not quite so privileged people and recording the way they live.”

She has done a series of pictures on Mexican Indians,

Malayan schoolchildren, life in Harlem, the negro sector of New York City, and a collection of animal portraits. Much of her work has been published in American and Mexican magazines. The series on Mexican Indians was commissioned by an artist who used the photographs as guides for murals in the foyer of a hotel in Mexico City. “But I have never exhibited and I have not done much photography at all since I have been travelling the world with my husband,” she said. “There is no time to spend in my laboratory."

Mr and Mrs Arrau share an interest in indigenous art and have collected many pieces of native craft for their homes in New York and Vermont "Before we visit a country I always read as much as I can to make myself acquainted with its culture. In Christchurch I am looking forward to visiting the Canterbury Museum to see the Maori carving.”