While a schoolgirl, Anne McCaffrey enjoyed one year of piano lessons purchased by her aunt. Later she studied voice for nine years, performed in the first music circus in 1949, once directed a play, and worked for a record label, Liberty Music Shop. DuPont transferred her husband temporarily to Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1962/63, where Anne resumed vocal training but suffered a crisis when she was informed that a flaw in her voice would limit her in that avocation. Regarding that experience, including some emotional trauma, her fictional character Killashandra Ree is partly autobiographical.