Eva Clare

Clare, Eva
Eva Clare. Pianist, teacher, b Neepawa, Man, 1884, d Winnipeg 29 Mar 1961. She studied piano in Winnipeg, for five years in Berlin with Madame Varet-Stepanoff and Josef Lhévinne, and during World War I in New York with Ernest Hutcheson and Howard Brockway. She taught in Regina, and her Eva Clare Studio Club, founded there in 1915, has survived as the Orpheus Club of Regina and provided material for her book Musical Appreciation and the Studio Club (New York 1924). She settled in Winnipeg in 1918. In 1922, at a concert in Winnipeg by the Minneapolis SO, she was soloist in the Grieg Concerto. The Canadian Annual Review (1927-8) reported that 'Eva Clare, pianist, won the highest praise from European critics when playing at Prague, Munich, Vienna and Budapest in December 1927 and January 1928'. From 1918 until her retirement Clare was a force in Manitoba as teacher and reformer. A prime mover in the MRMTA, she was its first president and was honoured with a life membership in 1955. With Leonard Heaton and Gladys Egbert she assembled the first graded books for WBM piano examinations. In 1933 in Winnipeg - as earlier in Regina - she formed a studio club from her private pupils and friends, and this club too developed into a permanent organization, the Wednesday Morning Musicales. In 1937 she became music director at the University of Manitoba and on her retirement in 1949 director emeritus. The recital hall of the University of Manitoba music building is named in her memory. Among her many pupils were Beth Cooil, Phyllis Holtby, Anna Moncrieff Hovey, Barbara Pentland, Helga and Snjolaug Sigurdson, Frank Thorolfson, and Moira Wilson.

Author Ronald Gibson