The incredible story of Kathleen Parlow Part II

The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Part II

Kathleen Parlow was one of the most outstanding violinists at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1912, she was signed by the Columbia Record Company in New York, and her first records for the U.S. label were brought out alongside those of the legendary Eugene Ysaÿe.

Listen to her fascinating story and how she took the world by storm. From her devastating looks to the intrigue her priceless instrument created. You will hear rare recordings of this prodigious player as we retell her life and try to understand why such an incredible talent has been so forgotten today.

Brought to you by Biddulph recordings

Transcript

  Welcome to the Historical String Recordings podcast, a show that gives you a chance to hear rare and early recordings of great masters and their stories. My name is Linda Lespets and my co host is Eric Wan.

This is part two of the story of the remarkably talented violinist Kathleen Parlow. In part one, we met a prodigious talent. She was the first foreigner to study in the Russian Conservatorium in St. Petersburg with the famous teacher Auer, and her most ardent admirer had given her an extraordinary gift of a Guarneri del Gesù violin. But just how far can talent, hard work, and good looks get this young woman in the beginning of the 20th century? Keep listening to find out.

So now it's 1909 and Kathleen has her career taking off. She has her teacher with connections, she has her violins, and the concert that she did in the National Theatre, the one where Einar saw her for the first time, the one with Johan Halvorsen conducting, well Kathleen and Johan hit it off. And now, a year later Johan Halvorsen has finished his violin concerto, and he's been working so long and hard on it, like it's his baby and, he actually dedicates this concerto to Kathleen Parlow, and asks her to premiere it with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Modenspa outside The Hague in the Netherlands in the summer of 1909.

Then Johan Halversen writes this concerto, which is sort of athletic and sort of gymnastic to play. And he finishes it and dedicates it to her to Kathleen Parlow. And she plays this very tricky piece which kind of shows his faith in her virtuosic talents. Well, one of her first recordings was the Moto Perpetuo by Paganini and Auer says it's one of the most difficult pieces in terms of bowing technique ever written, he says in one of his books. The reason why is one has to keep a very controlled bow, crossing strings all over the place, and play it very rapidly. Now Kathleen Parlow's recording of the Paganini Moto Perpetuo, which was made in her first recording session for HMV, is really astounding. It's the fastest version ever made. I think it's even faster than the Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin. Clean as a whistle, but she also phrases it so beautifully. So she doesn't just play it technically very fast. She really shapes, you know, it's all regular sixteenth notes or semiquavers, and yet she shapes the line beautifully and really gives a direction. So when you hear this, you realize she's more than just a virtuoso performer. She's somebody with real musicianship. She's an astounding player.

And this concerto, it's quite interesting. It's, it's tricky and it's a piece that really shows off a virtuoso. So it's, it’s quite a good one for Kathleen. And at the same time, he gives it a Norwegian twist. It's cleverly composed and a virtuoso such as Kathleen was perfect for playing this piece. There are references to Norwegian folk music. In the last movement, we can hear pieces that were traditionally played on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. So it's a violin that has sympathetic strings that run under the fingerboard, and it gives it quite like a like a haunting sound, a very kind of Scandinavian sound. So there are bits in this concerto that are from traditional music played on that violin. Then there's, there's this fun bit which makes a reference to a traditional Norwegian dance called the Halling Dance. And the Halling Dance is danced, it's danced by men at weddings or parties, and there's really no other way to describe it than breakdancing and it's like the ancestor of breakdancing. So what happens is the men, they show off their prowess to the ladies by doing this really cool sort of these acrobatics and the music for this hailing dance itself is quite tricky and you have to play it with like a rhythm to get the crowd moving and to give the dancer like the impetus to do his tricks and the men, they wear these like traditional costumes of like high waisted breeches and red waistcoats with long puffy sleeves and this little black hat. It's a bit like Mr. Darcy meets Run DMC. You've got this man in this traditional dress doing this breakdancing, basically. And then they do they do backflips. They do that thing where you hold your foot and you jump through it with your other foot. They do like the caterpillar move. Even like spitting around on their heads. And what happens is they'll be, they'll be dancing to this music often played with, you know, the epinette and they'll be spinning around and then intermittently after spinning around, they'll do, you know, the backflip and the headspin or the, the caterpillar. And it's, I don't know how they do it. It's, they must be very dizzy. Anyway, it's incredible. And then sort of the climax of the dance is that there's a woman also, you know, dressed traditionally, and she's got this pole, this long pole. And on the end of the pole is a hat. And the idea is you have to kick the hat off, but the pole is three meters high. So she's standing on like a ladder with the pole. And so the dancer, he'll do this kind of flying kick in the air. Either you can, you kick it off or you miss it. So in Johan Halvorsen’s concerto at the end, there's this high harmonic and that you either have to hit on the G string. And like in the dance, you know, you're hitting that hat off. And so you're always there. You're always wondering if the soloist can pull it off. Can they, can they hit that high harmonic? And it's, it's the same sort of the equivalent of the spinning high kick from the dance. So, and if you were Norwegian, You would get this, I think, from the, from the music and you'd hear it. You hear that you do hear it in the music.

So Kathleen Parlow, she plays this Halversen concerto and she plays it three times that year, and when she plays the piece in the National Theatre in September, there's sort of, there are mixed reviews with the critics saying that the piece was too unconventional. It's a little bit different and here's where Halvorsen, he like, he kicks up a stink a bit. This, because this concerto is like his baby and he's really protective and he's like, you know, he's quite fragile. He's, he's worked so much on this thing and people are just saying, you know, nasty things. They don't understand the work that went into it. Yeah, you write a concerto. So people, they flocked to hear Kathleen play Johan Halversen's concerto at the theatre. And it was full to bursting on several nights in a row. And if you consider on the same night in Oslo in another hall, Fritz Kreisler was playing and here you have Kathleen Parlow and people are just like cramming in to see her and Halvorsen's concerto. She was a huge name in her time. Only after a few performances and the negative critiques, Johan Halvorsen, he cancelled all the future performances of the work and, and when he retired, he burnt the manuscripts and asked for all the copies to be destroyed as well, it really, he was really hurt. Well, it was to be lost forever, except So a hundred years later, a copy of the concerto was serendipitously found in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, when one of the employees was looking through, not music, but personal documents of Kathleen's and it had been filed in there by mistake. And because it was with her personal files, it hadn't really, like her letters and things, it had been overlooked. So they found it and they resurrected it and they've re performed this concerto that had been lost for a hundred years. And that's another role as a musician. You're also not managing, but you also have to deal with composers that could have quite be quite touchy and everything like a musician has to have, have on their plate.

Well, I think being a musician, not only do you have to have an incredible skill level, you have to have an engaging personality. You have to be able to transmit a personality through the music itself. And you have to have incredible social grace to navigate charming not only your audience, but charming the people who create the concerts, the sponsors, the people who bankroll them. I think it's an incredibly difficult task. Because the skill level playing the violin is so difficult. That in itself would take up most people's energy. But on top of that, also have to be ingratiating and charming. I think it's an incredibly difficult life. Yeah, must be exhausting. And she does get exhausted. She'll have Breakdowns through, like her first one is when she's about 22. She has like almost like a nervous breakdown. And so it's kind of, she runs hot for a long time and then crashes. And it might be like, you're saying like all these different things they have to, all the balls that they have in the air that they're juggling to keep it going. Kathleen Parlow, she's still in her teens. She's still a teenager. She has incredible success. She's performing in Germany and the Netherlands. And later that same year, she returns to Canada where she makes an extensive tour. She makes her debut in New York and Philadelphia. I mean, she's just like, she's just all over. I mean, America's a big place and she's just all over the place. And then in 1909, at the age of 19, she gets a recording contract with the gramophone company known as his master's voice. And that's the one with the dog listening into a recording trumpet. And she was offered a 10 percent artist's royalty figure.

So is that good? Getting 10 percent royalties?

Yes. A 10 percent royalty at that time. is really quite unheard of. I believe the gramophone company gave that to their superstars. Louisa Tetrazzini, for example, was the great coloratura soprano of the day, and she received 10 percent of the sales royalty. So for Kathleen Parlow to be receiving that percentage really attests to her status.

Yeah. And like you were saying before, it was, it's like amazing that we've forgotten about her.

Oh, it's kind of astounding. She was an absolute star.

The concert halls and one newspaper wrote an article and I quote one of the articles, the young woman could not mistake the furor she created. She was, so she was described as the greatest woman violinist in the world and the girl of the golden bow and Of course the obsession with her willowy figure and pale complexion and feminine wilds continues Which is sort of I mean even the case today I suppose will people will go into describing a woman and what she's wearing what she looks like a bit more than a guy, this thing that's just pervaded and then there was Einar Bjornsson, always there in the background. The communications between them, himself and Kathleen, was sort of constant. He was always visiting and in her diary she was, you know, just abbreviating his name because it was so his feelings for the young woman were extreme and the money he borrowed from his father, he would never be able to repay. So he was sort of indebted his whole life because of this.

It must have been a little bit awkward explaining to his wife as well where the money has gone. Yeah, it's a big chunk of her dowry. I mean, even if he did tell her, maybe, you know, I don't know, maybe he didn't tell her. Maybe she, it was possible for him to do that. I'm not sure how the laws in Norway work. If, you know, sometimes in some countries, once you marry, your, your money becomes your husband's.

Basically, after the successful gramophone company recordings, she was really launched her career. She travelled all over. She travelled to, back to the United States, even though she's from Canada. She was regarded as a British artist, primarily because Canada was part of Britain, but then she made her success in the United States. And she was a very big success, so much so that the Columbia Record Company decided to offer her a recording contract. Now, there were two main companies in the United States. One of them was the Victor talking machine, which is essentially, that later became RCA Victor when it was bought by the Radio Corporation of America. But it originally started as the Victor talking machine. They had many, many big artists. They had people like Fritz Kreisler and Mischa Elman, and they also engaged a female violinist by the name of Maude Powell, who was an American born violinist. And so the Columbia Record Company decided that they should have their own roster of great instrumentalists, particularly violinists.

And so they signed up Eugene Ysaie, the great Belgian violinist, but at the same time they also signed up And I think, in a sense, that was to somehow put themselves in competition with the Victor Company. These two major record companies in the United States. So you had the Victor Company with Mischa Elman and Fritz Kreisler and their female star, Maude Powell. And then you have Columbia answering back with Eugenie Ysaie and their female star, Kathleen Parlow.

Yeah. So you have like we were saying, like all the relationships that you have to keep juggling as a musician. And I think what Kathleen Parlow had on top of that was this. This complicated relationship with Einar, her, her patron, who was, who it was, it's all a bit ambiguous what was going on there, but she also had that in the equation.

So it's not surprising that she had multiple breakdowns like she would just go for it and then, and crash. And she plays, I think Kreisler's tambourine chinois. And was that because there was sort of this, like this kind of fascination with the Orient at that time in the, in like the 1910s, 1920s?

Well, the origin of tambourine chinois, apparently according to Kreisler, but Kreisler always spun tall tales. He said that he was in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco when the idea, the musical ideas of tambourine chinois came to, to being. So, but Kreisler always. You know, invented stories all the time. I mean, the thing is, it's a very playful, it's a very you know, fun piece of music. It's very bustling. So, hence, that's why probably Fritz Kreisler is associated with a busy Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, because it's very, very bustling in its character. But the middle section of Tamborine Chinois It's Act Viennese, so it's funny, because the middle section, when you hear it, it doesn't sound like anything to do with the Orient, or if anything, it sounds like the cafe, coffeehouses of Vienna.

Yeah, it'd probably be cancelled anyway today. Well, if they heard that story, it certainly would.

Then, she actually only does her first tour in America when she's 20. Kathleen, she continues with her endless touring and concert. Her money management was never great, although, you know, she's still, she's still earning quite a lot of money, and her mother and herself had, they had enough to live on, but never enough to be completely hassle free. And not that she wanted it, it seemed like she was sort of addicted to this life of the stage, and she once said when she was older that she thought maybe she had to get a job teaching, but she just couldn't do it. She played more than 375 concerts between 1908 and 1915 and, and you can believe it to get an idea.

So she's 19 year old's touring schedule. Here are the countries she played in in 1909. And you have to remember the concerts are nonstop every night, almost in different cities, but here are just, here are just some of the countries she travelled to in this year, in 1909. Germany, England, Poland, Netherlands, then she goes back to England, Ireland, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Norway, Wales, England again, Ireland again, England, Scotland, Poland. Man, I gave it, it was just, you know, huge. And in her diaries we can see that she’s, like, she's just a young woman, like, about town when she's in London, she takes trips to the theatre, and she talks about going to see Madame Butterfly, and she goes shopping, and she goes to tea with people she has like, appointments at the dressmaker for fittings for new dresses, and, and all of this is in between lessons, and rehearsals, and concerts. And her diary is just jam, she has these day books and they're just jam packed. Then Auer when he comes to London, her diary, it's like she has lessons with him. And you can see she's sort of excited, she's like hours arriving and then she'll see him and then she'll often have lunch with him and lessons and sometimes the lessons are at eight o'clock at night or, or 10am on a Saturday or at the middle of the night on a Monday. And she'll skip from him to rehearsals with her pianist from Carlton Keith. And she's lots of tea. She's going to tea a lot with a lot of different people. She's still only 19 here. So her popularity, it's like, it's far reaching and she's not just playing like classical music. She'll also play just popular pieces of the day. There's Kreisler's Tambourine Chinoise. And then she'll play, there's some of the recordings. They're these Irish, little Irish. Songs. So it was to appeal to the general public as well, her repertoires and her recordings. And then in 1910, she turns 20 and she has her first tour in North America. And then in 1911, the New York Herald declares her as one of the phenomena of the musical world on par with Mischa Elman. That must have been frustrating because for years she's in the same class as him and she knows him. And everyone just keeps comparing her to, she's like, Oh, she's almost as good as this guy.

But no, here they're saying she is as good as this guy. I could just, must've been a little bit frustrating. Then she makes an appearance with the Toronto Symphony in 1911 and she'll go back there many times. And in the next year, in 1912, she moved with her mother, who's still her mentor and manager and chaperone, to England, where they, they rent a house just out of Cambridge, you know, in the peaceful countryside away from the big cities. And in between her touring from here, she went, she goes to China, to the U. S., to Korea and Japan. And in Japan, she records with Nipponophone Company. She recorded quite just in a not much in a short space of time. She could have, she could have recorded more afterwards, because yeah, but she doesn't.

Then the news of the tragic sinking of the Titanic in April had Kathleen jumping on a streamliner herself to play a benefit concert in New York for the survivors of the disaster. And I've seen that booklet, and that you open the booklet, and there's like, life insurance. And then there's actually ads for another streamliner, and you're like, too soon, too soon, people don't want this. And then she plays, so on that same trip, she plays at the Met Opera. She plays Tchaikovsky's Serenade, Melancholique. And in New York, she signed up by Columbia Record, by the Columbia Record Company. And her first records for the US label are brought out alongside those of Eugene Ysaye. So she's alongside these, they all, they must've all known each other.

She was a contemporary and she just kind of slips off the radar. And as with all the recordings of the great violinists of the day, most of Paolow’s recordings on American Columbia were of popular songs and that, that would attract the general public. But the fact that most of these recordings were accompanied by an orchestra and not just piano highlights her status as a star.

So they had the, they got together an orchestra for her, so she's worthy of an orchestra. Still in 1912, Kathleen, she's 22 now and she's been traveling so much, she's, now it's happening, it's hitting her, she's exhausted and she has a kind of breakdown it'd probably be like a burnout and, which, it's amazing she's lasted this long, since, you know, age 5, 6, up to 22.

So she's both mentally and physically exhausted and her mother, acting as her agent, realizes that she needs to reduce some of her tours. She retreats to Meldreth, that's that house just outside of Cambridge that they have, that they've been renting. It's quite close to London, that little cottage that they have. They have easy access to London by train. And not only could they go easily to London, but traveling, traveling businessmen! From Norway! Could come to them! Easily. She continues with the concerts, one at Queen's Hall in London. So she has her little burnout, but then she's back again. Plays Schubert's Moment Musical around this time.

After they've rented this home for four years, they end up buying it. So she does have enough money to buy a house, so she is you know, not frittering away all her money. So this gives her some sort of stability. And it, even though it's a, it's still a very unusual existence for a young lady of the day.

So she's breaking a lot of stereotypes and this could end up being exhausting after a while. So it was nice for her to have a calm place to kick up her heels or fling off her corset. But no, she didn't, but willowy frame, she doesn't look like she's got a corset. I don't think you can play. Can you? Could you play that much? You know, you can't breathe. But, but, aren't there like old photos of, of lady violinists in corsets? I don't know how they do it. Like, you can't. Well, you had to do everything else in the corset. But you get kind of hot and sweaty and you're under the lights and it must have been exhausting. At least she was like lucky to have that pre Raphaelite fashion where she could be wearing, you know, the flowing sort of we're heading into the, the sort of the looser clothes in this era. But I think some people are still hanging on to corsets, but it's like the end of corsets and you're getting more loose clothing thankfully for her.

And according to letters Kathleen wrote to friends her and her mother, and they fell in love with the village life in Mildreth. Kathleen was able to relax and lead a normal life in between tours. And then in 1915, you have World War I hits, and her tours are less frequent. Her, her patron Einar, must have been having some lively fun. Dinner conversations with his family on opposing sides. So you've got, you know, with his, you know, fascist party, enthusiastic brother and his ex-prime minister brother in law and his theatre operating lefty brother and his Jewish wife and his Left wing satirical journalist sister, and her German husband, and then, and then his patriot father.

So Einar probably just wanted to run away to willowy Kathleen, and her stunning violin. But she remains in England for much of the war, and she does a few concerts locally. And her diary is quite blank until about 1916. And she uses, like, so she uses this time to relax. So ironically, she needed a war. To have a rest. That was the only thing slowing her down. She could, because she couldn't travel and tour. Now she's 26, but I feel like she's just, she’s lived so much already. It's incredible. So Meldreth was the happy place where she enjoyed their lovely garden and their croquet lawn and Miss Chamberlain from the Gables next door would come and play croquet and she could escape to another world, almost.

She'll go through periods of having these sort of breakdowns. I think she just pushes, there are some people like that. They'll push themselves; they just keep pushing themselves until they collapse. And I feel like she was one of, she looks like she didn't really pace herself. She just went, just hurtling into it. She just catapults herself into life and concerts and playing. In 1916, she returned to the US. She toured Norway and the Netherlands. For playing she was said to possess a sweet legato sound that made her seem to be playing with a nine foot and was admired for her effortless playing, hence her nickname, the girl with the nine foot bow.

So yeah, so she must have had this really kind of, it's hard to tell, you want to be there in the concert hall to hear her. I feel like the recordings don't do her justice.

A lot of Experiencing music and these pieces is actually going to a concert and it's the same today listening on a you know, at home, it's not the same as being in a concert hall and having that energy of the musician and the energy of the orchestra and the and the audience, it's very different dynamic. She recorded a few small pieces for Columbia records. And then that was, that was it. And we have no more recordings of her. And between 1917 and 1919, she wasn't able to tour outside England due to the war that was going on. And for the last 12 years, Einar Bjornsson had. He'd been this presence in her life, but now in the summer of 1920, he visited her one last time in London before sailing home for good.

So that. So it finishes at this time, so he was, he was married, he had children, he was also broke. Buying a horrendously expensive violin and giving it to a girl can do that to you. And Kathleen writes, Kathleen writes in her diary simply, E. B. Sailing home. Einar had to return to his family as soon as possible because he couldn't afford to divorce his wife. Elspeth Langdon, she was, she wasn't going to let him off that easily. And if he left, he would have had to repay the, the dowry, I imagine. Thank you. Thank you very much. As I said, there are just no letters of her correspondence. There's correspondence between her and everyone else, but not with them. So that still remains. But you can sort of see by circumstance what was kind of going on. And after the Great War, Kathleen Parlow, she resumed her career in full force. She gave several world tours traveling to the Middle East, to India, to China, to Korea and Japan. And she toured the States, Canada, Indonesia and the Philippines in that year and she played concerts in 56 different cities.

It was just non stop and in, and when I say 56 different cities, that's not 56, you know, concerts. That's like multiple concerts in each. City, night after night. And then in 1926, Kathleen and her mother, they leave England and they move to San Francisco. She takes a year off due to her mental health. So again, she's like, she's overdone it. The stress and basically, you know, a nervous breakdown and she's now in her mid thirties. But after having this year off, she's back onto it. She's back touring again. It's like this addiction, like you were saying, this is what, it's kind of like her, what makes her run. It's what, You know, keeps her going. But at this point she begins to slow down slightly and she starts teaching a bit. Starts teaching more and in 1929 she tours Mexico and she travels without her mother for the first time. Because her mother, Minnie, she would have been getting quite old and then Kathleen she's 39 now. So despite playing many concerts and receiving very high praise financially, she's barely kind of breaking even and she later told an interviewer that when things were very hard she and her mother had talked about her getting a job to ensure their security for the future but she just couldn't do it. And then, but then she did end up teaching at Mills College, Oakland, California. For from 1929 to 1936, but then her world tours continued and this is like, this is how she thrived, even though she would, you know, she'd crash and burn and from the exhaustion and, but then, you know, then she would go back.

She realized she had to teach to earn some money. And then she returned to Canada in 1941, where she remained until she remains there until she dies in 1963. She's offered a job at the Toronto College of Music and she begins making appearances with orchestras. She has a pianist, she has the, she creates the Parlow String Quartet, which was active for 15 years.

Even though this time was difficult financially for her, she would, she would never give up her violin. You know, she was struggling, just scraping by, but she, she would never give up her violin and so, I mean, it was a tricky situation. It was, it was a gift. Yeah. I mean, could you imagine? Like, she must've realized what Einar went through to give this to her and she can't, you know, she can't just be like, I'm going to sell it. So there's this sort of, it's like she's holding on to a bit of him really, like, by keeping it, if she, she gives that up. So she taught at the University of Toronto and on her wall was a large portrait of her teacher, Leopold Auer, whom she would always refer to as Papa Auer.

Now that she'd given up her career as a soloist, but she still remains very active in chamber music, concerto appearance. October of 1959, she was made head of the string department at the London College of Music in West Ontario, Canada. She never marries, and she dies in Oakville, Ontario, in 1963 at the age of 72.

She kept her Guarneri del Gesu until her dying day, and the instrument was sold with her estate. The Kathleen Parlow scholarship was set up with the proceeds from the sale of her violin and the money from her estate. So Kathleen Parlow was a somewhat extraordinary woman, ahead of her times in many ways, and her relationship with Einar, must have been pretty intense. And it was, there was obviously strong feelings there. And even though it's a very grey area, we don't know her love life contrasts with her, her brilliant career and her phenomenal touring and the, the energy that she had to do, it was. Exceptional she just does these brief recordings and then she does no more. And maybe, maybe that's why we've forgotten her.

Have the other, did the others go on to keep recording?

Well, they did. They certainly did. I think I'm surprised that Kathleen Parlow didn’t make more recordings. I really am. And I don't know what that's about. I can only speculate, but I think she also kind of retreated from concertizing, didn't she, in her twenties? So, I mean, you know, she did play as far afield as the, you know, she went to China, she went to Japan. She even made recordings for the Niponophone Company in the early twenties. So she was obviously still a great celebrity. But it's sort of puzzling how somebody who had all their ducks in place to make a superstar career.

You know, she had talent, she had beauty, she had interest. You know, from the public, so support from her teacher, all those elements would guarantee a superstar career. But it's so mysterious that she kind of fell off the radar. So much so that her name is completely forgotten today. Yeah, it's one of the big mysteries, but it's really quite remarkable that she was such a terrific violinist, even at the end. It wasn't that she lost her nerve or lost her playing ability. She obviously had it. So there are definitely other factors. that made her withdraw from public concertizing. And just her touring schedule is just exhausting. Like just the traveling.

Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, I mean, this is truly an example of burnout. Yeah. But, but then she would, she would have the crisis and then she'd be back on, she'd be back touring. Well, you know, she was pretty resilient. But I think just the sheer number of years, I think, must have taken its toll. I think she loved being in England, in Cambridgeshire.

I think those were some really happy years for her, to have a home and in a beautiful setting. But it really, it's a very complicated life and a life that really, one would want to try to understand in a deeper way. Yeah, and it seems a little nothing was ever very simple. Yeah, and she never, she never marries, she never has a family.

It's Yes. Her life is really And you'd imagine she'd have suitors, you know, send them off because, you know, she was a talented, beautiful woman. So she's got Misha Elman. He could, like, if you were a man, you could easily get married and then your wife would have children. But at that time, if you married, like, she had to choose between getting married and her career. You couldn't work if, like and it often, like, you weren't allowed to work.

Absolutely. Terrible. No, it's true. So she had this like, this threat, and that's all she could do. That was her life playing. And then if she married, that would be taken away from her. So she had to decide between, you know, a career and this.

It's kind of, it's a bit sad, but yeah, it's a huge choice that she made and she was married to life. Yeah. The sacrifice. One way or the other. Well, I think it's wonderful that she is being remembered through this Buddulph recordings release. And it's the first time there's ever been a recording completely devoted to her. So I'm really glad that. will be able to somehow restore her memory, just a little bit even.

Well, thank you for listening to this podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this story about the incredible Kathleen Parlow. If you liked the podcast, please rate it and review it wherever you listen to it. And I would really encourage you to keep listening to Kathleen Parlow's work. What you heard today were just excerpts from her songs.

So if you would like to listen to. The whole piece, Biddulph Recordings have released two CDs that you can listen to on Apple Music, Spotify or any other major streaming service. You can also buy the double CD of her recordings if you prefer the uncompressed version. Goodbye.

​