Hedi Stadlen - London

London

Following end of the war in 1945, Hedi Keuneman returned to Europe to meet her mother – as a Communist, she was barred from entering the United States (where her father had died in 1942). In London in 1946 she met an old friend from Vienna, Peter Stadlen a distinguished concert pianist who had premiered the Webern Opus 27 Variations. She chose not to return to Sri Lanka, and divorced Pieter. While Hedi Stadlen never rejoined the Communist Party, she never renounced her socialist convictions.

She subsequently married Stadlen, with whom she lived in Hampstead. In 1956, a hand injury obliged Stadlen to turn to music criticism chiefly for the Daily Telegraph, and academic study. Hedi collaborated with him, possibly influenced by her musical heritage, as grandniece of Johann Strauss. They produced conclusive evidence that extensive sections of Anton Schindler's Beethoven conversation books were forgeries. She also played a crucial role in Stadlen's study of Beethoven's intentions with his metronome markings.

On Stadlen's death on 20 January 1996, Hedi lied about her age and joined the charity Volunteer Reading Help, and for six years helped disadvantaged children in a North London primary school to strengthen their reading. She also worked with Annette Morreau on a biography of the Viennese cellist Emmanuel Feuermann.

In 2002 she returned to Cambridge to receive the degree denied to her over five decades previously. At the same ceremony her son, Nick picked up his M.A. and her grandson, Matthew, was awarded his B.A.

Hedi Stadlen was survived by her sons Nicholas, a High Court judge (who holds the record for the longest speech in British legal history – 119 days), and Godfrey, a senior civil servant in the Home Office.