“Patricia was a soulful artist, mature and poised,” Mr. Maazel wrote from Europe in a recent e-mail message. “One didn’t think of her as a child prodigy.”

If the young Ms. Travers was “reticent and somewhat withdrawn,” as Mr. Maazel recalled, onstage she came alive with a fire that drew praise from most critics. Writing in 1939, when she was 11, the journal Violins and Violinists rhapsodized, “We feel sure that the prophecy that Patricia Travers is to become known as one of the great women violinists will be fully realized.”

But with such prophecies comes great pressure, and many prodigies eventually undergo a psychological crisis. “It hits at adolescence,” said Professor Winner, the author of “Gifted Children: Myths and Realities” (Basic Books, 1996). “That’s when they say: ‘Who am I doing this for? My parents or me?’ ”

At that point, prodigies often stop playing. Ms. Travers, however, appeared to make it through her teenage years. She became a specialist in modern American music at a time when few performers gave it much thought. She recorded work by Ives, Roger Sessions and Norman Dello Joio. In 1947, at Carnegie Hall, she gave the premiere of “Incantation and Dance,” written for her by the Hawaiian-born composer Dai-Keong Lee.

But when she was in her early 20s, her notices, once glowing, grew more measured. In 1951 The Christian Science Monitor reviewed a performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto by Ms. Travers, then 23, with the Boston Symphony:

“Miss Travers at present appears to be in an intermediate position between two extremes,” the review said. “On the one hand her foundational studies are well in the past; she is obviously a professional who is competing very well among her peers. On the other hand she is not yet either a brilliant technician nor a compelling interpreter.”

The Boston engagement appeared to have been her last with a major orchestra. “She gradually dropped from sight,” Mr. Maazel recalled. “Don’t know why. Probably, as happens in most early-career artists, she just lost motivation and perhaps went in quest of the proverbial lost childhood.”