From Music to Painting

Standing between her accompanist and an audience, ready to sing a program of twenty or more German Lieder, the words and music firmly in memory was for Traudis Kennedy as demanding as making the first brush stroke on a pristine canvas. The courage she had gradually acquired through her life, a life whose early years were spent in the old Hanseatic port of Rostock on the Baltic and where she later studied music at the ancient University of Rostock. Her life was disrupted next by the war:  the loss of the family home to one of the first area fire-bombing raids on the 24th of April 1942, the near destruction of a temporary home by another air raid: next for the last three months of the War, being drafted into the Luftwaffe, and subsequent challenges during the Russian occupation.

Kennedy gave many lieder concerts throughout Belgium, Germany, and at Wigmore Hall in London. She met and married Edwin Kennedy in Wiesbaden and lived in various cities in Germany and other countries during his diplomatic assignments including Tehran and Yaounde, Cameroon where it was impossible for her to find a suitable piano and accompanist. One day she turned to her husband and said quite simply, “Now, I am going to paint”, which she did for the next thirty years until her death in 2013.