Friderica Derra de Moroda who died in Salzburg five years ago, on 19 June 1978, devoted her life entirely to dance. As a dancer, choreographer, ballet teacher and especially as dance scholar and bibliophile, she was renowned among dance scholars all over the world. Her Dance Archives, representing more than fifty years of intensive and systematic collecting, form the most impressive testimony to her life's work. Friderica Derra de Moroda was born on 2 June 1897 in Pozsony, (which Germans know as Pressburg and which is now Bratislava, part of CSSR). Her father, Simeon Julius Derra de Moroda, was Greek and her mother, Olga, was Hungarian; both were critics and writers. At a very early age Friderica Derra de Moroda left her homeland with her mother to live with her older sister who was a celebrated operetta singer in Munich. The young Friderica had her first ballet training in the children's ballet class of the Munich Court Opera; her teacher was the Opera's ballet mistress Flora Jungmann. She continued her dance studies in Riga with Jakobleff. At the early age of fourteen she began a career as a recital dancer, performing national and character dances as well as her own dance compositions in the style of Isadora Duncan, with whom she is actually compared in some contemporary reviews: We were reminded of Isadora Duncan at her very best, attending the performance of a young lady, the fifteen-year-old Fritzi von Derra, who presented her 'dance games' in the Kinstlerhaus [Berlin] ... (From a Berlin newspaper, 1912.) In 1912 Friderica Derra de Moroda made her debut in Vienna, then she toured Germany, the Baltic Countries and Russia. In St Petersburg she danced before Grand Duke Nicholas who congratulated her: You have modernised what is, in the eyes of the Russian Public, a classical performance and have not only succeeded in lending additional charm to its rhythmic evolutions