cd „velvet touch“

 

The CD „velvet touch”, which contains recordings of music by Catharina Pratten (1824 – 1895) played on guitars owned by her, appeared simultaneously with the book.




Catharina Pratten

(Madame Sidney Pratten)


Catharina Josepha Pelzer, as she was originally called, was born in 1824 in Mülheim at the Rhine. Her father, who presented her as a child prodigy, brought her to London when she was just five years old, and only one year later she performed there in the King’s Theatre.


During the following years she established herself internationally as a guitar child prodigy. At the age of 17 she started a career as London’s leading guitar teacher. Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, was later among her most prominent pupils.


She began to compose, and at the age of 30 she married the well-known flute-player Robert Sidney Pratten. From this moment she called herself Madame Sidney Pratten. The death of her husband only 14 years later seemed for some time to have ended her concert and teaching activities. Three years after that, when she was in the forty-seventh year of her life, she began again to appear on stage, playing Mauro Giuliani’s third Concerto among other music, and again 10 years later she played together with the guitar virtuoso and composer Francesco Tárrego in London.


She gave her last concert at the age of 69 in London’s Steinway Hall.

Catharina Pratten died in 1895, aged 70. Her works comprise ca. 200 compositions and three guitar methods. Her grave in the Brompton Cemetery in London, which her friends and pupils erected, exists to this day.