Gioconda De Vito

Gioconda De Vito was an Italian violinist born on July 22, 1907 (Heifetz was 6 years old.) She began formal violin lessons with an uncle, who was a professional violinist, at the age of 8. Three years later, she entered the Pesaro Conservatory. She graduated two years after that and started her career as a soloist. By age 17, she was teaching at the Conservatory in Bari. At age 25, she won an international violin competition in Vienna. She was then hired (supposedly through the influence of Mussolini) to teach at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. Since the Second World War interrupted her solo career, her London debut, which was very successful, didn’t happen until 1948. She subsequently performed frequently in the major European venues, sometimes appearing with other important artists, including Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, Rafael Kubelik, and Furtwangler. She also twice played for the Pope (Pius XII). De Vito was one of several famous female violinists of the early Twentieth Century who were quickly forgotten by the general public – Ginette Neveu and Janine Andrade were two others. In 1961, she retired from playing and virtually from the violin itself. She was then only 54 years old. Although she toured Europe and other countries (Australia, Russia, India, Israel), she never played in the U.S. A highly admired player, she was nevertheless, almost an anachronism during her career. Her repertoire was old fashioned and did not include the concertos of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Sibelius, Elgar, Bartok, Barber, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Korngold, Glazunov, Berg, Walton, or Szymanowski. It is said that she was such a meticulous player, that she worked on the Brahms concerto for fifteen years before she played it in public. She married at age 42. Her discography is rather limited but includes the concertos and sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. De Vito died on October 24, 1994 at age 87, virtually forgotten.