Ladislaja Harnoncourt, nee Grafin von Meran, Freiin von Brandhoven was a member of the Austrian Harnoncourt family.
13 Facts About Ladislaja Harnoncourt
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt raised seven children, two of them from her husband's first marriage, including the conductor and pioneer of historically informed performance, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and the priest and patron of the arts Philipp Harnoncourt.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt was the great-granddaughter of the Habsburg Archduke Johann, the 13th child of Emperor Leopold II, a descendant of various Holy Roman Emperors and other European royalty.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt's grandfather was Franz, Count of Meran, who bought Schloss Stainz, a former monastery in Styria, where she was born.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt's father was his son, Johann Stephan von Meran, and her mother Ladislaja Maria Karoline Franziska Therese Grafin von Lamberg.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt was engaged to a Hungarian baron, who died.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt then decided to remain single and work as a nurse.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt's future husband, Eberhard Harnoncourt, born Graf de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt, was an Austrian engineer working in Berlin.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt was a widower with two small children, Alice and Renatus.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt thought of Ladislaja as a possible mother for his children, and asked permission from her mother to meet her.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt travelled to Austria for the meeting in October 1928, and they were married on 29 December that year in the bishop's chapel in Graz.
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Nikolaus Ladislaja Harnoncourt wrote a memoir of the family from the 13th century to the early 1950s, which his wife Alice published after his death.
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Ladislaja Harnoncourt died in Graz at the age of 97.