The Life of Laelia Goehr

Laelia Goehr, née Rivlin, was born in 1908 to a well-to-do Jewish family in Kiev where she lived a comfortable life with her parents and two half-brothers in the latter years of Tsarist Russia. From an early age she showed musical talent and studied piano at the Conservatoire in Kiev. She first performed in public in 1920 when she was twelve years old, playing Grieg’s ‘Butterflies’. In the same concert Vladimir Horowitz, her senior by five years, played his final recital before embarking on his spectacular career as a concert pianist.

However, by this time Laelia’s life, and that of all Russians, had already changed out of all recognition. In 1917, when she was nine, the Russian Revolution took place and the Bolsheviks came to power. The wealthy were under immediate suspicion, as were Jews in a country where antisemitism was rife. Her father left Russia in 1919 for Warsaw and subsequently Berlin with the idea of establishing a new life and bringing his wife and children to join him once he was settled. Her mother stayed in Russia with Laelia to wait for the return of one of Laelia’s half-brothers who had joined the Bolshevik army and had temporarily disappeared.

It was not easy to leave Russia in the chaos and violence which followed the Revolution and it was another two years before Laelia and her mother were able to escape. They reached Warsaw by train and foot, where they met up with her father who had passports for them all, and the family made their way to Berlin, along with many other exiled Russian Jews during this period.

In Berlin, at the age of 14, Laelia was sent to a girls’ boarding school where she met Rosa Goldstein, another talented pianist and fellow exile from Russia whose family came from Bialystok. They became firm friends and soon started playing American popular music together by sneaking into a practice room at the school, where there were two pianos. Both girls were accomplished and adventurous musicians who enjoyed improvising. This was strictly forbidden to classical music students who were taught to regard classical and popular music as quite separate.

Laelia continued her classical music education at the Hochschule fűr Musik, studying with the famed piano teacher Leonid Kreutzer, initially on an informal basis since she was too young to meet the age requirement for matriculation of 16. Rosa joined her at the Hochschule on the same basis but while Rosa abandoned her formal musical education, Laelia enrolled as a full student aged 16, graduating in 1929.

By this time Laelia and Rosa had already embarked on a cabaret career in a duo called the Stone Sisters, playing and singing American popular songs, ragtime and dance music. It came about as a result of a visit by Laelia and Rosa to see the Schwarz Sisters at the Cabaret of the Comedians which was founded in 1924 by the actor, humorist and impressario, Kurt Robitschek. Watching the Schwarz sisters gave them the idea that they could do it too, and even better. They soon put together their own act.

The Stone Sisters
(Laelia and Peggy)

At a performance they did for free at a Russian Ball in Berlin they were heard by a violinist who played in the band at Kurt Robitschek’s club. He was so impressed with their talent that he arranged for them to play to Robitschek who saw great promise in their performance. He took them up, offering advice on how to sharpen up their act and develop their repertoire. He also recommended a change of names and they became ‘Lil and Peggy Stone’ or ‘The Stone Sisters’ (Stone being the English form of the second half of Rosa’s surname). They were sent to Zurich for a month to kickstart their career at The Mascotte club before returning to Berlin to join Robitschek’s Comedians’ Cabaret. In putting together their programme they had the help of Bronislaw Kaper who some years later became a well-known composer of film music in Hollywood. Their careers soon blossomed, bringing regular work in the many cabaret spots in Berlin and beyond in some of the major cities of Europe. The Stone Sisters made the most of their youth and talent, and the trajectory of their careers mirrored the vibrant cultural mood of Weimar Germany with its accent on youth, impatience with convention, and experimentation across all the arts.

However, their career as a duo was to be short-lived. In the summer of 1930 Laelia met the man she was to marry. It was in keeping with the Zeitgeist that Laelia should have met her future husband at a party thrown by film-maker Billy Wilder, who was Peggy’s boyfriend at the time and would later move to Hollywood and make many classic films such as ‘Some Like it Hot’ and ‘The Apartment’. It was there that Laelia met one of the guests, Walter Goehr, a former student of Arnold Schoenberg. With his multi-faceted musicianship, which straddled the roles of composer, conductor, and arranger in classical as well as popular genres, Goehr too was in a position to take advantage of the fluid culture of the Weimar years.

At the time of Laelia and Walter’s impending marriage the Stone Sisters had several prestigious engagements lined up in Riga, London, the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and in Brussels. Laelia went to Riga but this was the last of her performances as part of the duo. In the meantime Walter found another partner for Peggy which enabled the duo to continue in a new form.

Laelia with a group of theatre friends from Berlin. She is under the umbrella. — Laelia with a group of theatre friends from Berlin. She is under the umbrella.

In 1930 Laelia and Walter were married and, in the summer of 1932, their son, Alexander, was born. However, for the second time in her young life Laelia’s prospects were transformed by a political earthquake, this time by the rise to power of the Nazis. Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933 meant the end of the Weimar Republic and the end of Walter’s employment. Long before the passage of specific laws against Jews, their rights and opportunities for employment were under attack. Walter had been employed as composer and conductor at Erwin Piscator’s theatre company where Laelia also played. Then the theatre went to the wall and Piscator appeared as a Communist on the Nazi blacklist. Walter was also branded as a leftist. He belonged to no party and had never defined himself as political, but his sympathies belonged on the left.

Walter had also worked as a free-lance composer for Berlin Radio until it was taken over by the Nazis and as a Jew he could no longer find work. Now the Goehrs had no income and no future. All but destitute, the Goehr family were saved by a phone call from London offering Walter the post of musical director of the Gramophone Company, later EMI, and Laelia was facing her second experience of exile.*

In Berlin during the 1920s Laelia had taken photographs of her colleagues at the Hochschule fűr Musik and her many friends. It was in London that she took it up seriously. When the war came she began voluntary work with the YMCA. Their project ‘Snapshots from Home’ was a free service in which amateur photographers took photographs of the families of servicemen abroad, which were then sent to the soldiers, as part of a programme to keep families in touch with each other. The programme had been started during the First World War and was wound up in 1946.

As she became much more interested in the medium she started informal studies with the well-known photographer, Bill Brandt. It was through Brandt and Mechthild Nawiasky, the picture editor on Lilliput and later The Observer’s first picture editor, that she started to contribute photographs to these and other publications, including The Leader and The Jewish Chronicle. In the 1940s she moved away from news photography towards subjects of particular interest to her, including flowers, nudes, musicians, and animals. In 1951 Laelia visited Palestine/Israel, photographing political leaders and intellectuals as well as a project on the recent immigration to Israel of the Yemeni Jews.

Laelia made many friends in the UK, mainly Jewish refugees, including the actor Walter Rilla, the designer and illustrator George Him, and the artist Josef Herman, to whom she was close. From the 1960s onwards she published a number of books, the first two being photographs of animals. Faces: Portraits of Dogs, a collaboration with the writer Vita Sackville-West, was first published in 1961 and reissued in 2019, and Suki: A little Tiger, with text by Elspeth Huxley, appeared in 1964. In 1965 Laelia photographed the composer Igor Stravinsky during rehearsals at the Royal Festival Hall, London on his last visit to the UK. Her photographs were later exhibited in a number of cities including Los Angeles in an exhibition to celebrate the centenary of Stravinsky’s birth (1968) and at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1982) where the accompanying catalogue was published as Stravinsky Rehearses Stravinsky. The musical theme was continued in Musicians in Camera, published in 1987 with text by music critic John Amis and a foreword by Sir Yehudi Menuhin. It featured many of the leading musicians and composers of the day including Stravinsky, Britten, Tippett, Walton, Stockhausen, Casals, Oistrakh, Jacqueline Du Pré, Isaac Stern and many others.

The published record of Laelia Goehr’s work is thus substantial. There remains, however, an extensive archive of unpublished photographs which, taken together with the published record, constitutes an arresting visual record.

A note on Laelia’s Cameras
In Berlin Laelia used a Box Brownie camera and by the 1940s she was using one of the most popular cameras of the time, the Twin Lens Rolleiflex which had come into circulation in 1928. In her later years she used a 35mm Pentax Camera, often adding a telephoto lens, as, for example, with the photographs of the musicians. She always developed and printed her own photographs. In her first home in the UK, she set up a small studio in the bathroom where she developed and printed her photographs. There she would lock herself away with a radio with her enlarger perched on a wooden board on the bath. When she moved to Hampstead Heath, London in 1955 she had a small darkroom where she continued to produce all her own work.

She only worked only in the medium of black and white and never did any colour photography. By the 1980s she was just taking photographs of her family. She died in 2002 at the age of 94.

* For information about Laelia’s time in Berlin and particularly the formation of the ‘Stone Sisters’ I have drawn on Regine Beyer, Abendkleid und Filzstiefel: Die Jazzpianistin und Diseuse Peggy Stone (Belin: Aviva Verlag, 2010).