Brainy Girls

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies

The women below all revealed their remarkable abilities as young girls.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (May 16, 1718 – January 9, 1799) was an Italian linguist, mathematician, and philosopher. Agnesi (pronounced ‘Anyesi’) is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus. She was an honorary member of the faculty at the University of Bologna. According to Dirk Jan Struik, Agnesi is “the first important woman mathematician since Hypatia (fifth century A.D.)”.

Her father, Pietro, was a wealthy man of business and a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna who desired to elevate his family into the Milanese nobility.

Having been born in Milan, Maria was recognized as a child prodigy very early; she could speak both French and Italian at five years of age. By her eleventh birthday she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Latin, and was referred to as the “Walking Polyglot”. She even educated her younger brothers. When she was 9 years old, she composed and delivered an hour-long speech in Latin to an academic gathering. The subject was women’s right to be educated. When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a circle of the most learned men in Bologna, before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. Records of these meetings are given in Charles de Brosses’ Lettres sur l’Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father had published in 1738. These displays, being probably not altogether congenial to Maria (who wanted to retire) ceased by her twentieth year because she strongly desired to enter a convent at that time. Although her father refused to grant this wish, he agreed to let her live from that time on in an almost conventual semi-retirement, avoiding all interactions with society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. During that time, Maria studied both differential and integral calculus. Pietro Agnesi also married twice more after Maria’s mother died, so that Maria Agnesi ended up the eldest of 21 children. In addition to her performances and lessons, her responsibility was to teach her siblings. This task kept her from her own goal of entering a convent. Scholars thought she was dazzingly beautiful and hers was recognized as one of the richest noble families in Milan.

Patricia Travers

Patricia Travers (December 5, 1927 – February 9, 2010) was an American violin child prodigy and actress who withdrew from public performances at age 23. She lived in Clifton, New Jersey, her entire life.

Contents [hide] 1 Career 2 Instruments 3 Later life 4 References 5 External links

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[edit] Career

Travers began violin lessons at age four which led to her first public performance at age six in the Falls Village, Connecticut, summer music festival, Music Mountain.^[1] She later performed on CBS radio ‘Ford Sunday Hour’ show when she was nine.^[2]

She soloed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Efrem Kurtz at Lewisohn Stadium at age ten where she played “Symphonie Espagnole”^[3] In 1940, she played the Mendelssohn Concerto with the National Orchestral Association at Carnegie Hall under Leon Barzin.^[4]

She appeared in the 1941 film There’s Magic in Music with Irra Petina, Diana Lynn, and Allan Jones. In addition to a speaking role, she played Anton Rubinstein‘s Romance in E flat in the film. She was part of a cultural exchange program after WWII which had her touring Germany.^[2]

Dai-keong Lee wrote Incantation and Dance for Travers which she performed in a 1947 recital at Carnegie Hall.^[1][5]

Lorin Maazel conducted several performances with her as part of the Pittsburgh Symphony.^[1] She also performed Brahm’s Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra several times in 1951.^[6]

One of her final works was a recorded performance for Columbia Records of Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano by the American composer Charles Ives, the first complete recording of that work.^[1]

[edit] Instruments

She owned the 1732 ‘Tom Taylor’ Stradivarius from 1945 to 1954, which was later owned by Joshua Bell^[7]. She also used a 1733 Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù violin.^[8]

[edit] Later life

There are no published explanations of why she stopped public performances. She lived quietly in her childhood home and managed several commercial rental properties that her father had built.^[6]

She is buried in St Joseph cemetery in Millbrook, New York.^[2]

At 11, the violinist Patricia Travers made her first solo appearance with the New York Philharmonic, playing Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole” with “a purity of tone, breadth of line and immersion in her task,” as a critic for The New York Times wrote in 1939.

At 13, she appeared in “There’s Magic in Music,” a Hollywood comedy set in a music camp. Released in 1941 and starring Allan Jones, the film features Patricia, chosen by audition from hundreds of child performers, playing with passionate intensity.

In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives’s Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence.

Not long afterward, she disappeared.

Between the ages of 10 and 23, Ms. Travers appeared with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York, London and Berlin Philharmonics and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. She performed on national radio broadcasts, gave premieres of music written expressly for her and made several well-received records.

Then … nothing, a six-decade-long silence that lasted from the early 1950s until Ms. Travers’s death on Feb. 9 at 82. Her death, of cancer, in a Montclair, N.J., nursing home, was confirmed by her lawyer, John Sullivan. Ms. Travers, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors.

Ms. Travers disappeared by hiding in plain sight, living quietly with her parents in the house in Clifton, N.J., in which she had grown up. She remained there till well past middle age, through the death of her father in the 1980s and her mother in 1995. Afterward, she moved to a condominium nearby.

By all accounts, Ms. Travers rarely spoke of her career. As her obituary last month in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., reported, neighbors knew her only as the reserved owner and manager of a commercial property in Clifton she had inherited from her parents.

Why Ms. Travers gave up the violin will never be fully known. But it is possible to make an educated guess, based on old newspaper accounts of her career (reading between the lines), and on the work of contemporary psychologists who study gifted children.

As psychologists have found, a prodigy’s life is defined by a particular narrative arc — one that often ends, as Ms. Travers’s did, with early promise unfulfilled.

“Prodigies are much less likely to go on to become major famous creative geniuses than they are to become unheard-of and drop out,” Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “What it takes to become a prodigy is very different from what it takes to become a major creative adult.” She added, “Most do not make that leap.”

An only child, Patricia Travers was born in Clifton on Dec. 5, 1927. (The year is often given erroneously as 1928; it was common then for prodigies to be billed as younger than they really were.) Her father, Samuel, was a lawyer, semiprofessional singer and accomplished violin maker. Her mother, the former Veronica Quinlan, is described in some accounts as having been an amateur pianist.

Patricia began violin lessons at 3 1/2, eventually studying with the violinists Jacques Gordon and Hans Letz. At 6, she gave her first public concert, at Music Mountain, the summer chamber music festival in Falls Village, Conn. At 10, she performed on national radio with the Detroit Symphony under John Barbirolli.

At 11, Patricia was already playing a violin made by Guarneri del Gesù; before she was out of her teens, she also had a Stradivarius.

One of the few people alive who performed with Ms. Travers then is Lorin Maazel, who stepped down last year as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Mr. Maazel, who turned 80 on Saturday, led the Pittsburgh Symphony several times as a child conductor, with Ms. Travers as the child soloist.

“Patricia was a soulful artist, mature and poised,” Mr. Maazel wrote from Europe in a recent e-mail message. “One didn’t think of her as a child prodigy.”

If the young Ms. Travers was “reticent and somewhat withdrawn,” as Mr. Maazel recalled, onstage she came alive with a fire that drew praise from most critics. Writing in 1939, when she was 11, the journal Violins and Violinists rhapsodized, “We feel sure that the prophecy that Patricia Travers is to become known as one of the great women violinists will be fully realized.”

But with such prophecies comes great pressure, and many prodigies eventually undergo a psychological crisis. “It hits at adolescence,” said Professor Winner, the author of “Gifted Children: Myths and Realities” (Basic Books, 1996). “That’s when they say: ‘Who am I doing this for? My parents or me?’ ”

At that point, prodigies often stop playing. Ms. Travers, however, appeared to make it through her teenage years. She became a specialist in modern American music at a time when few performers gave it much thought. She recorded work by Ives, Roger Sessions and Norman Dello Joio. In 1947, at Carnegie Hall, she gave the premiere of “Incantation and Dance,” written for her by the Hawaiian-born composer Dai-Keong Lee.

But when she was in her early 20s, her notices, once glowing, grew more measured. In 1951 The Christian Science Monitor reviewed a performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto by Ms. Travers, then 23, with the Boston Symphony:

“Miss Travers at present appears to be in an intermediate position between two extremes,” the review said. “On the one hand her foundational studies are well in the past; she is obviously a professional who is competing very well among her peers. On the other hand she is not yet either a brilliant technician nor a compelling interpreter.”

The Boston engagement appeared to have been her last with a major orchestra. “She gradually dropped from sight,” Mr. Maazel recalled. “Don’t know why. Probably, as happens in most early-career artists, she just lost motivation and perhaps went in quest of the proverbial lost childhood.”

Ms. Travers’s Strad and Guarneri passed to other hands long ago. At her death, she had just one violin left — not a valuable one, her lawyer, Mr. Sullivan, remembered her saying.

The only person for whom Ms. Travers seems to have played as she grew older, he said, was her mother.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 14, 2010
An obituary last Sunday about the violinist Patricia Travers misspelled in some editions the name of the maker of one of the instruments she played as a child prodigy. He was Guarneri del Gesù, not Guarnari del Gesù.