Lili can’t quite explain it

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33241, 2 June 1973, Page 16

Lili can’t quite explain it

(By

KEN COATES

There is something about the bright-eyed, vital person that is the outward Lili Kraus that even she cannot fully explain. Constant world travel, demanding concert appearances, recording, master classes, music festivals, and piano-competition judging—where does she get all her vitality?

“From up there—the dear Lord,” she said in an interview in Christchurch yesterday.

“There is no rational explanation. I am fully booked for the next three years; there is not one date free. “I cannot see why I do it other than I think the very reason of my being is that the Lord put me by the scruff of my neck into the world to do just this.” For Lili Kraus her playing goes beyond mere pleasure and the beauty of music. “There is a spiritual communication between audiences and myself, and the music and the Lord,” she says. She is intensely human—and a woman ... “I had no idea I was going to be photographed. Let me put on some

lipstick—it makes no difference, but it helps the illu-l sion.”

I first heard Lili Kraus play when she visited Waitaki Boys’ High School just after the war. We were enthralled, and I began to tell her . . . “you were not bom yet when I first played,” she laughed.

Bom in Hungary, Lili Kraus entered the Conservatoire in Vienna in 1926 where at 20 she became a professor of piano. Before World War II she toured Britain, Europe, and many other countries. Taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942 when on a world tour,

she spent nearly three years in prison camps in Java. “Only by the Lord’s mercy did we survive,” she recalled. Before the war she and her husband came to know the late Sir Walter Nash. “My husband translated all the books of H. G. Wells, with whom he had a life-long friendship,” Miss Kraus said.

“Mr Nash also used to visit Wells, and when Austria was annexed we met him in London again,” she said. “It was obvious we could not become Hitlerites so Mr Nash said, ‘why not come to New Zealand—we need people like you as we need bread, air, water, and salt’." Eventually, Lili Kraus came, and travelled constantly between Australia and New Zealand — playing and building up her repertoire in the years after the war. Many visits She began the second phase of her international career in >1948. This is her sixth or seventh return visit, and she says she still loves New Zealand. “Every artist says at

( every place it is lovely, but iin my case for New Zealand it happens to be true.”

She is the artist-in-resi-dence at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, most of her concerts are in the United States, and she has 650 acres in the Appalachians and a “gorgeous house.” But she says: “I am ever

and again beset to apply for American citizenship, but I tell them I never will. I am a New Zealand citizen.” For Lili Kraus New Zealand has a “terrific appeal” —the people, the landscape, everything.” On her present visit—she gives a recital in the Town Hall tonight—she feels what she terms, “a really new breath of life. What causes it I cannot tell—partly a change of Government; partly an upsurge that does not have rational reasons, but something that just happens in the evolution of a people." She was very tired, and some musicians half her age would probably have refused to see the press—or anyone —but part of this remarkable woman’s secret of life lies in her warmth and generosity, one suspects. “I am so sleepy I’m nearly out of my eyes with tiredness,” she confided. “I went to bed around 2 o’clock after the concert —you cannot eat before—and I was up again at 6.30 this morning." “It is terribly taxing, of course,” she smiled. “You could say it is the triumph of mind over matter, but it is much more than that. As long as I am given this kind of strength I will lead this kind of life.”