The First World War
Returning from Ostend to Leipzig in August 1914, her English tours were impossible to fulfil, but she sang from Hamburg to Vienna and Budapest and returned triumphantly to America in 1915, and that winter sang in Denmark and Norway. In August 1916 she sang to German troops on the Western Front at Laon, through efforts of her brother the singer Reinhold Gerhardt, a pupil of Karl Scheidemantel. Meanwhile in late 1916 she returned to the USA to give the east coast tour with Karl Muck, and in April 1917 was singing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. As America entered the war she was shipped back to Germany with many other artists. She visited the Front again in summer 1918 with Wilhelm Backhaus (in uniform) as accompanist and concert partner. She continued to tour, from Norway to Hungary, through the chaos following the armistice, and was in Munich when Kurt Eisner was assassinated.
Read more about this topic: Elena Gerhardt
Famous quotes containing the words world war, world and/or war:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)