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Todd Murray

Will Wyatt

Toni and Rosi

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Factual: Life Stories

29/01/2012

BBC Four - Toni and Rosi

Documentary about two piano-playing sisters from Vienna who escaped the Nazis.

Documentary about Toni and Rosi Grunschlag, piano prodigies in Vienna in the 1920s who escaped the Nazis to forge a successful career as a two-piano team in the West.

Lives lived through music, lives saved by music.

Toni and Rosi Grunschlag were piano prodigies in Vienna in the 1920s. In this documentary made over ten years, they tell their story: of the German takeover of Austria; of being pushed out of their apartment by a local Nazi - 'He came with his concubine. They had a German shepherd dog and I can tell you he was the nicest of them'; and of escaping the Nazis together, fleeing to England and then the United States, where they forged a career as a two-piano team. Neither married, so they practised, performed and lived together for 80 years. 'There were suitors', says Rosi, 'But you have to be strong.' 

In the apartment building in New York where they have lived since 1943 and in their summer home on Cape Cod they play and show how music saved them, inspired them, bound them together, and was their living. Rosi has advice for the young: 'When you have to run for your life, you leave everything behind. But your education is yours to keep. It is your transportable asset.'

It is an inspirational story of two talented, determined and funny women.

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