Australian Dictionary of Biography

Alice Carrard, c.1930s-40s

National Archives of Australia, K1331, 1950/CARRARD A

Alice Carrard (1897–2000), concert pianist and music teacher, was born Aliz Blau on 10 April 1897 in Budapest, daughter of Miksa (Max) Blau, leather salesman, and Irma, née Wieg, piano teacher. Her Jewish family was poor, casting doubt on her later claim that she was born in a lovely old villa in the Castle Hill district. In 1914 the family Hungarianised their surname to Bálint, and around 1920 Aliz changed her name to Alice. Her mother, who died in 1916, was her first piano teacher, and later took her daughter to István Thóman, a professor at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music (re-named in 1925 after its founder, Franz Liszt, with whom Thóman had studied). Bálint graduated from the academy with a diploma at seventeen, and continued studies with the composers and pianists Béla Bartók and Leó Weiner. After performing in Budapest and Vienna following the end of World War I, she toured as a concert pianist throughout Europe. Her older brother, Sándor, became a successful businessman and helped to finance her studies and tours.

After about a decade as a concert pianist, Bálint formed a light music group which toured in Europe and then ventured further afield to India, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), and Malaya (Malaysia), where she met Louis Carrard, a French-Swiss electrical engineer who was at the time employed at Kampar by the tin-mining company Société des Étains de Kinta. They married in 1937 and two years later their son George Sándor (Sandy) was born.

In 1941 Louis was due for six months’ home leave. As wartime conditions made it impossible to return to Europe, Alice and Sandy travelled to Perth for a holiday; they arrived in Fremantle aboard the Gorgon in May. She found Perth congenial and, in the absence of Louis who remained in Singapore, stayed on. He sent his wife’s grand piano and some of her effects but was later captured by the Japanese and interned on Bangka Island for four years. Alice received no word of his fate until after the war when he visited her and Sandy, but he chose not to stay on with them. Despite their separation they kept in touch and Louis provided financial support to Alice and Sandy.

Carrard set about performing in her new hometown, her first public recital being in the Karrakatta Club Hall in October 1941, with proceeds in aid of the Red Cross, and her programme including Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111, which she had also performed at her Vienna debut. Two weeks earlier she had played the first of many studio recitals for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In order to make ends meet, she soon advertised that she was available to accept pupils for the piano.

With the threat of invasion by the Japanese, in 1942 Carrard took refuge in the country at Kobeelya, a girl’s school near Katanning, where she taught piano. In 1945 she travelled by train to other Australian cities for six months and performed in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide. She became well known for her concerts and broadcasts, and for championing the piano music of her fellow Hungarians, especially Bartók and Weiner. On 29 March 1950 she was naturalised.

From the time of her arrival in Perth she was known as Madame Carrard and provided a sophisticated, somewhat exotic mid-European presence in what was then a small and essentially Anglo-Australian musical community. For more than five decades she was one of Perth’s leading pianists and piano teachers. She was an examiner for the Australian Music Examinations Board and an inaugural tutor when the Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts (WAAPA) opened in 1980. Several of her students went on to notable musical careers. Probably the best known was David Helfgott, who gained a controversial international reputation as the subject of the film Shine (1996), a partly fictionalised account of his life. She was not portrayed as his teacher in the film and was not consulted by its director. Helfgott’s older sister Margaret was also her student. Both were national finalists in the ABC’s annual concerto and vocal competition, David on three occasions. Among other notable students were Lynette Garland, Yasuko Toba, Katie Zhukov, and Margaret Pride, who became one of Australia’s most prominent choral conductors.

At a birthday concert in 1992 at WAAPA Carrard played Beethoven (her favourite Opus 111) and Bartók, and received a standing ovation for her ‘indomitable spirit and seemingly indestructible musicianship’ (Cohn 1992, 3). Her last public performance was in the Fremantle Town Hall at the age of ninety-nine, when it was claimed that she was the oldest piano teacher in Australia, if not the world; ‘she not only takes the liveliest interest in the local music scene but maintains a teaching schedule that is incredible’ (Cohn 1996, 33.

Carrard was appointed MBE in 1976, and received diplomas from the Liszt Academy to mark her more than fifty years as a piano teacher. She was a prominent member of the Western Australian Music Teachers’ Association, which created a prize in her name. In 1998 she was an inaugural recipient of the State Living Treasures awards. She died on 3 March 2000 at Nedlands and was cremated; her son survived her.