In August of 1913, a tender College of New Brunswick graduate set out for Germany to review song on the well known Royal Leipzig Conservatory. Helen VanWart was once a vivacious, constructive lady, desperate to revel in all that Europe had to supply. Her weekly letters house to her circle of relatives paint a portrait of Europe’s ultimate months of peace, a time that, for Helen, handed all too temporarily in categories, courses, and observe, observe, observe, interspersed with many concert events, operas, and journeys to such puts as Dresden, Switzerland, and Rome. Regardless of her day by day hours of observe – continuously 5 or 6 – she stored up an energetic social existence, and her letters convey to existence her fellow-scholars and boarders in her Pension, and possibly so much considerably, “Mr. Lochhead”, a Canadian chemistry scholar approximately whom she is unaccustomedly reticent! The long run Mrs. Lochhead, certainly, was once so immersed in her song and her pals that politics hardly impinged upon her letters. As with such a lot of others in Europe and the British Empire, the outbreak of conflict seems to have taken her completely by way of wonder. Helen’s letters live social historical past, a colourful testomony of a time now onerous to believe, the ultimate yr of “Edwardian” innocence, and a portrait of an international that, each musically and socially, had not anything backward-taking a look approximately it. The long run lay beforehand and it was once going to be golden.
