String Pioneers: The d’Arányi Sisters Marshalled the Transition Between the 19th and 20th Centuries

By Miranda Wilson | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings

The Hungarian-British violinists Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri—known to their circle as “the d’Arányi sisters,” and to critics as the “Valkyries of the Violin”—were two of the most eminent soloists of the early 20th century. Together, they formed a violin duo unmatched before or since. Both were powerful advocates of new music, and their artistry inspired compositions that include Béla Bartók’s two violin sonatas, Gustav Holst’s double violin concerto, Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane, Ethel Smyth’s concerto for violin and horn, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Concerto Accademico.

Adila (1886–1962) and Jelly (1893–1966) d’Arányi were born into a noble but cash-strapped family in Budapest, Hungary. Their father, a chief of police, was connected by an aunt’s marriage to the great violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), a close friend of Schumann and Brahms and one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century. The sisters seemed destined to follow in Joachim’s footsteps: at a young age, they attended the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest and were celebrated as child prodigies. Like her lesser-known sister, Hortense, Jelly intended to become a pianist, but when Adila’s violin teacher, Wilhelm Grünfeld (1855–1921), caught sight of her hands, he exclaimed that she must switch to violin. Adila and Jelly both studied with Grünfeld and later with Jenő Hubay (1858–1937), a student of Joachim. When Joachim himself heard the teenage Adila, he invited her to live and study with him in his family home in Berlin. The lessons lasted until Joachim died a year later, but this was enough to launch Adila’s career as a soloist and heir to Joachim’s pedagogical lineage.

Together with Jelly and their mother, Adila made her first trip to Britain in 1908. A connection with the eminent British pianist-musicologist Donald Tovey (1875–1940) was a helpful “in” for getting engagements in Britain and Europe, and the family relationship with Joachim also went a long way. One Viennese critic wrote of the sisters: “Adila is already a young lady who knows what is going on and who is therefore standing on the podium with a certain dignity . . . Jelly, a passionately forward storming girl whose violin playing represents a continuous outburst of temperament . . . Well, they have inherited their violin talent and musical sense from their famous relative. Both sisters play eminently musically, feel well-founded, avoid every little trick, have a warm, round tone, master the whole passage technique, and show a dexterity in bowing that is rarely observed.” While Jelly’s fiery playing would ultimately earn her the bigger career, Adila’s “classical,” Joachim-influenced style also won high praise. After the First World War broke out, the sisters elected to stay in Britain permanently. Adila married a barrister, Alexander Fachiri, and Jelly, who never married, moved in with them. The sisters, inseparable in music and in life, became fixtures of the British concert scene.

The 1920s were something of a golden age for the recording industry, and the d’Arányi sisters, now in the prime of their careers, made many high-quality 78 rpm recordings. Joachim had made recordings in his seventies, but the faint, scratching audio makes it hard for the listener to ascertain the scope of his sound and musicianship. Not so the d’Arányi sisters’ recordings, which give us a fascinating window into the Joachim tradition. Jelly’s vivid performances of Joachim’s arrangements of Brahms’ Hungarian folk dances—which inspired Ravel to compose Tzigane—are immortalized in recordings with pianist Coenraad Valentijn Bos. Here, we can hear her robust tone, spectacular control of virtuoso bow strokes, and a marvelously flexible approach to rubato. Adila’s solo recordings, by contrast, show a kind of intense seriousness. Her 1927 recording of Beethoven’s Op. 96 sonata with Donald Tovey reveals their perfect entente as a chamber ensemble. Even the limitations of the century-old technology can’t conceal their incandescent blend of tone qualities and limpidly lyrical approach to Beethoven’s voice-leading.

If the d’Arányis’ solo playing styles were individualistic, their duo performances show such cohesion that it’s hard to tell them apart. Violin duets, as opposed to string quartets and piano trios, were not seen as a particularly important chamber music, but the d’Arányi sisters brought the medium to new prominence. Their signature repertoire included the Duet, Op. 39, No. 1, by Louis Spohr, a onetime acquaintance of Joachim’s—meaning that their 1927 recording of the work may therefore be the closest we can get to the composer’s intentions. Another favorite was Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, BWV 1043, which they recorded in 1926 under conductor Stanley Chapple. 

Though the technology of the time wasn’t quite up to capturing the full sound of the orchestra, Jelly and Adila’s playing is perfectly matched, their intonation exquisite, in a dialogue of true equals. Both use the flying staccato stroke for passages where present-day players might play détaché or spiccato. Jelly told a biographer in later life that the sisters had inherited this use of flying spiccato from Joachim and Hubay, and that she considered it both “thrilling” and “perilous,” even rebuking players who played it safe by not daring to “throw their bow about.” 

Present-day ears may be surprised by their use of portamento in Baroque repertoire, but by the standards of the time, it’s actually fairly sparing. In a 1950 essay for Music & Letters, Fachiri explained that she considered excessive same-finger portamento as “an offense to any ear familiar with classical style,” recalling that Hubay and Joachim “rebuked” her for the habit. She wasn’t a fan of the mid-century trend for “unremitting, nauseating vibrato,” but neither sister was a reactionary stuck in the past. Responding to criticisms that recorded music was ruining modern violin playing, Fachiri retorted, “I do not blame the gramophone or radio for the poor quality of so many of today’s violinists. If a truly musical spirit exists in a performer it will emerge to triumph . . . The principal thing for the young player to aim at is an understanding of the phrases—penetration of the moods of the music in hand—a grasp of the significance of the composer’s message.”

The sisters’ commitment to finding messages from composers took a strange turn in the 1930s, when they made news headlines with the claim that they had contacted the ghost of Robert Schumann via a Ouija board. Also present at the seances was a Swedish diplomat named Erik Palmstierna, who documented the outlandish tale in Horizons of Immortality (1938). According to Palmstierna, Schumann ordered the d’Arányis to retrieve the manuscript of his “lost” violin concerto from a Berlin library and premiere the work. Following this ghostly visitation, Jelly embarked on a fruitless quest to track down the score. Palmstierna approached archivists in Berlin, but found himself up against a hostile Nazi bureaucracy who wanted it for themselves, and ultimately Jelly had to content herself with being the third performer of the work, after Georg Kulenkampff and Yehudi Menuhin.

It was a good story, but stretched credulity. The media were quick to point out inconsistencies, such as the d’Arányis’ pretense that they had never heard of a Schumann violin concerto. Surely, critics reasoned, Joachim would have informed his own family that he himself had suppressed the manuscript on the grounds that he and Clara Schumann thought it a lesser work. Moreover, Joachim had already described the piece at length to his 1901 biographer, Andreas Moser. The manuscript was therefore neither lost nor unknown. The squabble over the concerto dismayed the Schumanns’ sole surviving child, Eugenie, who tried unsuccessfully to maintain her mother’s embargo on the work.

Even if Jelly didn’t get to premiere the Schumann, some good came out of the episode: a major concerto received a much-deserved revival, and the publicity brought new life to her faltering career. However, ill health put a stop to her high-profile concertizing for good by the 1940s, after a head injury compromised her ability to play in tune. After Adila’s husband died, the sisters went to live together in Florence, where they continued to give concerts together. They were inseparable until the last, when Adila died in Jelly’s arms. The loss was a devastating blow from which Jelly’s friends feared she would not recover, but she lasted another three and a half years. She still gave the occasional concert, now with Adila’s daughter, Adrienne, in her place.

The d’Arányi sisters represent a crucial link in the history of violin performance, bridging performance practices of the 19th century with the beginnings of the modern recording era. Their achievements as pioneering female soloists in the concert hall are matched by their achievements in the recording studio. As we rediscover their recordings today, we don’t just hear historical curiosities, but timeless examples of the highest levels of musicianship. The Valkyries of the Violin may be gone from the stage, but their commitment to artistry endures in their recorded legacy.