My friend Eva Mayer Schay, who has died aged 91, was a violinist with the English National Opera for 30 years. Her family had fled Germany in the 1930s and Eva grew up in South Africa, arriving in Britain in the 50s to escape apartheid.
Eva was born in Cologne to Alfred Schay, an accountant and tax consultant, and his wife, Hermine (nee Wertheimer); two years later her father was hounded out of Germany as a non-Aryan and the family moved to Mallorca, where Eva remembered an idyllic childhood with her mother running a B&B. The idyll came to a brutal end with the Spanish civil war, when they were shipped back to Germany and thence to Milan. They were pitifully poor and fearful for their future. Thanks to family connections in South Africa, in 1936 they settled in Johannesburg, where Alfred managed to find employment.
On starting school in 1939, Eva had her first encounter with music when a friend played the piano; she was enthralled. By 1940 she knew that she that wanted to play the violin and was fortunate enough to receive lessons from the virtuoso Herman Abramowitz. When, on Eva’s 14th birthday, her father died, her mother managed to take over the family accountancy practice. Eva attended Barnato Park high school and joined a children’s orchestra. She went on to study music at Witwatersrand University, graduating in 1952, all the while perfecting her violin playing.
Eva was awarded a scholarship by her university and in 1952 moved to London to study violin and chamber music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She returned to South Africa in 1956 and played with the South African Broadcasting Corporation and for Durban’s Civic Orchestra, but her repugnance for apartheid led to her leaving in 1961; she returned to England, followed by her mother. She initially worked for the Northern Sinfonia, based in Newcastle. She then moved to Golders Green with her mother.
In 1967 she married Henry Mayer, a mental health social worker, and in 1968 Eva started playing for the English National Opera. Over the next three decades she played in mainland Europe, the US and Russia, as well as in London.
Eva retired in 1998. She did some travelling and was an avid reader, always having a large pile of books by her armchair. She was a regular attender at the Jewish mindfulness meditation group at Alyth synagogue and a longtime member of the Study Society, pursuing meditation, poetry and a range of philosophical interests.
Her relationship with Henry was passionate but tempestuous. He died in 2006. Eva wrote frankly about their marriage and his depression in her autobiography, Of Exile and Music (2014).
She is survived by her stepson, Simon, and a step-granddaughter, Kate.
