Ginette Neveu

Neveu gave her last concert in Paris on 20 October 1949. On 28 October, she was on board an Air France flight from Paris to New York when it crashed on a mountain after two failed attempts to make a landing at the Santa Maria Airport in the Azores. All 48 people on board the flight died, including Ginette, her brother Jean Neveu, and the French former boxing champion Marcel Cerdan. From her violin, a Guadagnini, only the scroll has been found.

Neveu's international career was interrupted by World War II, during which she gave few concerts, nearly all in France. Many invitations to play in Germany were turned down. She was finally able to make her London debut in 1946. She recorded Sibelius's Violin Concerto at Abbey Road Studios in the same year.

In 1935, aged 15, Neveu achieved worldwide celebrity status when she won the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. Unable to afford the cost of travel to Warsaw, the family was helped by Flesch, who paid for the trip. In the preliminary round (of 180 competitors) Neveu was placed first, 26 points ahead of David Oistrakh, and in the final again she came in first. She was 15, Oistrakh 27 at the time. Henri Temianka was placed third. Neveu was immediately signed to an extensive touring contract which over the next two years saw her give solo performances at the leading concert halls of Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United States and Canada.

Ginette Neveu (11 August 1919 – 28 October 1949) was a French classical violinist. She was killed in a plane crash at the age of 30.

Neveu was born on 11 August 1919 in Paris into a musical family. Her brother Jean-Paul became a classical pianist (and her eventual accompanist) and the composer and organist Charles-Marie Widor was their great-uncle. Neveu's mother was her first teacher.