Sex Shouldn't Matter

One night last week, under a bright quarter moon, Manhattan music fans gathered for the season's first outdoor concert at Lewisohn Stadium. A stocky, apple-cheeked woman, violin in hand, marched to the center of the stage, nodded confidently to the conductor.

She had a little trouble at first: besides the roar of planes and auto traffic that plagues all stadium concerts, she got too close to the mike, which turned her tone into a shrill whine. But midway through Tchaikovsky's Concerto in D, audience and critics alike knew they were listening to as powerful and fiery fiddling as they had heard all season. They let famed Violinist Erica Morini know it.

In the past, most critics have reached into the most convenient pigeonhole to describe Erica Morini: "The greatest woman violinist . . ." Others could excuse her sex but not forget it: "A great violinist--regardless of sex." But now, after 20 years of hearing her play, most were willing to take Erica as she wants to be taken--as a fiddler.

Single Minds. Erica Morini by now is used to the pigeonhole, but not resigned to it. One of the first times she played in public, for Austria's Emperor Karl, the Emperor was agreeably surprised--not because she was a girl, but because she was only eight. He gave her a doll. The first time she was tagged as a "woman violinist," she says, was in the U.S. Now, at 40, Erica says, "I hate that label. It's obvious I'm a woman, but what does that have to do with it?" She is well aware that few women have made their mark in the arts, and that they are mostly singers (Schumann-Heink), dancers (Pavlova) or novelists (Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot). There have been women composers like Cecile Chaminade, but no Bachs or Beethovens; painters like Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe, but no Rembrandts or Michelangelos; poets like Sappho and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but no Dantes; a few top women pianists* and virtually no memorable violinists.

But says Erica, "It's not a matter of talent, not at all. There are just as many women born with great talents for music as men. But most women haven't the singleminded drive and determination it takes to be a great artist. They're interested in too many other things. They won't make the sacrifice."

False Notes. Erica is interested in other things too: her jeweler-husband, her cooking. But ever since she used to hide in her father's classroom in Vienna as a tot of three and cry "false" when a student struck a sour note, music has always come first. Now a confirmed classicist, she says that contemporary music "is not music for me--I like to play a tune."

Erica has no children of her own, but likes to play for kids when she can. She cherishes the reaction of a six-year-old who told her after a concert: "I loved your music, it makes me so nice sleepy."

*One of them: Robert Schumann's wife Clara Weick, who could hold her own against such competition as Franz Liszt's.

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