Elizabeth Berger

Elizabeth Berger (née Cox) was born in Hobart in 1931. As a child she learned both flute and piano. By the time she completed secondary school the piano had become her passion and she attained her Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Melbourne in 1953. Upon returning to Hobart she began making regular appearances on ABC Radio as a guest pianist with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and established her professional studio as a piano teacher.

In 1961 she travelled to Austria to further her studies at the Conservatorium of Vienna. She was the inaugural Treasurer of the Tasmanian Music Teachers Association in 1959, and was so respected and appreciated during her fifty years as a teacher that she was awarded Honorary membership in 2009. Her devotion was such that she continued teaching piano to a few select students beyond her retirement, right up to her death at age 89. Elizabeth was highly regarded for the passion and love that filled her teaching.

Elizabeth’s first composition ‘Cradle Song’ written for piano and flute, is a short lullaby penned in the 1950s, and dedicated to her father (the Hon. William Ellis Cox). During the 1980s she composed a unique and original Catholic Mass in three variations, one of which is set in the Phrygian Mode. By 2012 she had composed a suite of four short pieces for piano in homage to locations around Tasmania that held meaning for her: Sisters Beach on the north west coast, the Tarn Shelf at Mt Field, Salamanca Market and the majestic Hazards Mountains at Coles Bay.

Elizabeth described music as the expression of beauty through sound. She saw the ultimate source of its beauty in the Divine and believed it was a privilege to share in its creation.