The letters and diaries from Helen VanWart's trip to study music at the Royal Leipzig Conservatory in 1913-1914 are collected in
Letters from Helen
A Canadian Student in Germany
on the Eve of the Great War
by Helen VanWart
Published August 2010
ISBN: 9780981024493
US$20.00 • CA$20.00 • UK£13.00
In August of 1913, a young University of New Brunswick graduate from Fredericton set out for Germany to study music at the renowned Royal Leipzig Conservatory. Helen VanWart was a vivacious, optimistic girl, eager to experience all that Europe had to offer. Her weekly letters home to her family paint a portrait of Europe’s last months of peace, a time that, for Helen, passed all too quickly in classes, lessons, and practice, practice, practice, interspersed with many concerts, operas, and trips to such places as Dresden, Switzerland, and Rome. Despite her daily hours of practice – often five or six – she kept up an active social life, and her letters bring to life her fellow-students and boarders in her Pension, and perhaps most significantly, “Mr. Lochhead”, a Canadian chemistry student about whom she is unaccustomedly reticent! The future Mrs. Lochhead, indeed, was so immersed in her music and her friends that politics rarely impinged upon her letters. As with so many others in Europe and the British Empire, the outbreak of war appears to have taken her utterly by surprise.
