Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

‘Dear Little Sister Cembalo,’ the Viennese Harpsichordist Alice Ehlers

While awaiting this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood from April 28 to May 1, the Turner Classic Movie channel broadcast William Wyler’s 1939 “Wuthering Heights,” starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Cinema fans recall that in that film, during a party, Isabella Linton (Geraldine Fitzgerald) announces to Heathcliff (Olivier): “Oh, Madame Ehlers is going to play the harpsichord” (although Fitzgerald mispronounces the name “Erliss”).

A lookalike of the Polish Jewish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, with a Landowska-ish hairstyle, sits at a huge, Landowska-custom-built Pleyel harpsichord, and plays an acerbic rendition of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca. The resulting spine-tingling chills epitomize the excitement of Landowska’s approach to music, jangling the lovers’ nerves as they stare feverishly at each other in close-ups.

Director William Wyler (born Wilhelm Weiller to an Alsatian Jewish family of music lovers) cast an ideal stand-in for Landowska: Alice Ehlers. Born in 1887 to a Viennese Jewish family, in 1909 Ehlers began to study the piano with the eminent pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky and music theory with Arnold Schoenberg. From 1913 to 1918, Ehlers was a disciple of Landowska’s at Berlin’s Musikhochschule. In 1929 Ehlers starred in a musical short film in Germany, performing a 1735 piece, Le coucou (The Cuckoo) by French Jewish composer Louis-Claude Daquin.

Collaborating with Paul Hindemith on pioneering performances of Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” Ehlers toured the world, including a 1937 visit to Palestine, before settling in America in 1938. No less a record reviewer than Franz Rosenzweig praised Ehler’s authentic-sounding Bach performances circa 1929 for their “austere, nonreverberating ‘pointed’ tone.”

Although tribute is paid to Ehlers as an émigré musician in 1999’s “Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States” from the University of California Press and 2009’s “A windfall of musicians: Hitler’s émigrés and exiles in southern California” from Yale University Press, Ehlers is perhaps more renowned as a friend of the organist and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer. In a 1991 publication, “Albert Schweitzer and Alice Ehlers: A Friendship in Letters” published by the University Press of America, Schweitzer teasingly addresses Ehlers in 1932 as “dear little sister cembalo” and “Cembalinchen” (harpsichordlette).

At the end of World War II, Ehlers writes to Schweitzer from California: “When others had to suffer, I was living in safety; I have never known the fear of the Gestapo or the concentration camp.” A remarkable artist, Ehlers’ immortality may be partly Wuthering, but is in no way withering.

Watch Alice Ehlers perform in the film “Wuthering Heights” (just after 1:50).

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.