Edith Lorand on Parlophon

Edith Lorand on Parlophon.

You will find this, and many more postcards in the book: Jews in Old Postcards and Prints.

Edith Lorand (1898 or 1899–1960) was born into a cosmopolitan and musical Jewish family in Budapest. Alongside her career as a classical violinist Lorand also ran a salon orchestra that performed popular waltzes and operatic tunes. One paper described her in 1930 as “a beautiful, slim young woman in a richly embroidered white Hungarian costume”, adding that “no female conductor … has hitherto attempted to be both conductor and soloist”. Following a performance at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1935, Time Magazine described her as “the only woman conductor who has ever kept a troupe of men completely submissive”. Her long-standing recording contract with the Lindström AG (who owned the Parlophon label and had marketed her as “the female Johann Strauß”) was not extended when the Nazis came to power in 1933, her engagements rapidly dried up, and she returned from Berlin, where she had lived since 1920, to Hungary before fleeing to the USA in 1937. There she toured as Edith Lorand and her Hungarian Orchestra and Edith Lorand & Her Viennese Orchestra.